Perhaps The Best Argument For Donald Trump

I don’t like Donald Trump. If, before this campaign season, I listed my preferred Republican presidential candidates, Trump might have appeared somewhere around number 50 or so. Now that I’ve seen him campaign, I wouldn’t list him at all, no matter how long the list. But since it now appears that he may well win the nomination, I’d like to share with you an argument — itself not about Trump at all — that suggests what may be the best argument I’ve seen for supporting him if he does win the nomination.

The following is from the Preface to the paperback edition (June 2015) of F.H. Buckley, The Once And Future King (April 2014), which made a compelling — and, I’m sorry to say, probably even convincing — argument that Obama’s tenure has broken the Constitution (or perhaps revealed that it is broken), that the separation of powers does not work to cabin or even restrain presidential power, that since “Obama is effectively a sovereign” with more power than actual monarchs we would be better off with a parliamentary system, which can restrain monarchs.

James Ceaser in the Weekly Standard and George Will in the Washington Post suggest a game plan for returning to a regime of limited presidential powers. First, they say, let’s elect a Republican president. Then let him rule modestly in cooperation with Congress, as presidents did in the good old days. Future Democratic presidents, having watched how a restrained Republican president governs, will feel bound to follow suit, and they’ll promise to play nice too.

But what is there to prevent the Democrats from welshing on their promise when they return to power? Political parties exist in what Thomas Hobbes called the “state of nature,” where promises are not binding and where “he which performeth first doth but betray himself to his enemy.” A future Democratic president could take the Republicans for pasties and ignore a Republican Congress, governing just like Obama.

The grim logic of the game goes only one direction, and we should not expect presidential restraint by one party to be matched with restraint by the other party. Instead, if one party’s president rules as a king, so too must the other party’s president. The next time we have divided government with a Republican president, therefore, don’t expected him to enforce laws he thinks noxious. When your opponent brings a gun to a fight, then you should bring a gun as well. Not a banana. It’s only the threat of payback that can bring us back to a republican form of government where presidential power is limited. [Buckely was not quoting Obama, but he could have: Barack Obama, Philadelphia, June 13, 2008: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

Although Buckley was no doubt not thinking of Donald Trump when he wrote the above passage presumably  in the spring of 2015, Trump can clearly be viewed as “payback” for the abomination of Obamian overreach. Buckley goes on to say that “[t]he threat of payback just might lead Democratic presidents to pull back from exercising kinglike powers. Or not. It doesn’t seem to have deterred Obama in any way.”

Indeed the “threat” has not worked, but that future “threat” was theoretical. If, however, Trump — the “threat” made flesh — is elected and proceeds to emulate or even exceed Obama’s narcissistic, monarchical disdain of Madisonian restraints, the havoc he might wreak on our already seriously wounded system might be enough to persuade a future bi-partisan majority that perhaps the Constitution wasn’t such a bad idea after all.