The conservatives turning against Donald Trump

The conservatives turning against Donald Trump

More Republicans will turn against Donald Trump and his politics of populism, a GOP senator and leading critic of the president has predicted, as the Guardian surveys the conservative landscape 200 days into the Trump presidency.

Jeff Flake of Arizona, among 17 conservative politicians, activists, officials and pundits interviewed over two months, revealed that while the president has given rightwing fringe groups a seat at the table, his alliance with his own party remains highly precarious.

“More of us will say, where does this lead, where are we and what happens when we get off this sugar high of populism?” said Flake, who believes the Republican party abandoned its core principles and struck “a Faustian bargain” by embracing Trump in last year’s election.

What can we do on trade when supply chains get sent around us? Those have long-term ramifications,” added the senator. “This is not something that we can flirt with for four years and then quickly snap back, so I do think there needs to be more pushback.”

Trump, a former Democrat with no political experience, ran as an antiestablishment candidate effectively staging a hostile takeover of the Republican party. Indeed in July 2015 former Texas governor Rick Perry declared: “Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.” Perry is now Trump’s energy secretary.

But after months of facing criticism that they are too passive, lately congressional Republicans have flexed their muscles over threats from the White House directed at Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, and Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump and Russia, as well as fresh sanctions against Moscow that Trump reluctantly was obliged to sign.

He’s not a conservative. I don’t think he has any intellectual guideposts or political ideology.
Rick Tyler, a political analyst and former Ted Cruz campaign spokesman
In addition, high-profile Republicans at various levels of government have been accused of mounting “shadow campaigns” for 2020 – including Mike Pence, the vice president, who issued a statement on Sunday denouncing a New York Times report about his alleged positioning for a post-Trump era as “disgraceful and offensive”.

Flake, whose new book Conscience of a Conservative argues that conservatism has been compromised by “nationalism, populism, xenophobia, extreme partisanship, even celebrity”, believes others will join him in breaking ranks.

“The talk of firing Jeff Sessions, the AG, is not going over well in the Senate, and I’ve been heartened to see so many of my colleagues stand up and say that’s not going to happen, because we see it as a precursor to do something else, maybe with the special counsel. And that’s not going to happen,” said Flake, who believes the Republican party abandoned its core principles and struck “a Faustian bargain” by embracing Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

“So I do think that you’re seeing more people stand up and say, ‘We’ve got to respect the institutions.’ I do think that will continue. I do sense that the Congress is reasserting itself a little more,” Flake added.

Flake acknowledged that Trump has displayed conservative instincts in his cabinet appointments, choice of Neil Gorsuch for supreme court justice and plans for regulatory and tax reform. But the senator said the president’s approach to trade is populist and his temperament unstable. “A conservative embraces our allies and recognises our enemies and the kind of chaos that has ensued in both in domestic and foreign policy is very unconservative.”

This fundamentally boils down to character, and his character is rotten.
Eliot Cohen, former counsellor to Condoleezza Rice
The senator’s views echo those of other mainstream Republicans who have long resisted Trump. Eliot Cohen, a former state department counsellor to George W Bush’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, added: “This fundamentally boils down to character, and his character is rotten. He’s a narcissist who happens to have taken control of the Republican party.

“There’s some areas where he agrees with party orthodoxy, and some where he doesn’t,” Cohen said. “But his only doctrine is: whatever is good for Donald Trump is good for the country. When he goes down – and he will go down, at some point – one of the things that will be striking is just how quickly members of Congress will turn on him.”

Trump’s awkward marriage of convenience with Republicans has been under severe stress. He alienated conservative House members by calling their healthcare bill “mean” just days after toasting it in the White House rose garden. He was unable to successfully cajole or persuade members of the Senate to pass their own version of the legislation and attacked their failure to do so on Twitter, where he often refers to Republicans as “they” rather than “we”.