Feehery: If not Trump, then who? 

It was Voltaire who said, “if God didn’t exist, it would become necessary to invent him.” 

The modern corollary would be, “if Trump didn’t exist, it would become necessary to invent him.” 

Not to say that Trump is God, because that is certainly not the case. But if not for the former president, there would be somebody else who would rise up to challenge the political establishment in such a direct fashion. 

The reason is quite simple: We can’t continue to go on for the next 75 years the way we have gone on the last 75 years.  

The global world order is ever changeable. Pax Americana couldn’t last forever. The United States couldn’t be the sole protector of the Western World. At some point, the Cold War consensus was going to shatter.  

What was the Cold War consensus?  

It was the general assumption that only America could lead the civilized world against the threats of Soviet oppression. That only America could bankroll the defense of democracies in the face of Russian and Chinese oppression. And that the United States would pay any price and bear any burden to keep open the sea lanes and trade routes — and American taxpayers would pay for it all. 

At the conclusion of the Second World War, this Cold War consensus made total sense. Great Britain had collapsed as an imperial power. Europe was in the throes of starvation because of the ravages of war. Germany and Japan were both smashed beyond recognition. Chinese Communists had been able to chase Chinese nationalists out of the mainland. The Soviet Union rose up as the singular threat to capitalism and free-market democracies.  

You would have thought that with the collapse of communism, American hegemony would end. But old habits die hard. And the Europeans, the British, the Japanese, and all of our other allies liked having the United States run point on international security. They liked the fact that America and the American taxpayer bankrolled the world’s defense. Our allies could spend a pittance on national security, and instead use that money to repair their social safety net, pay for education and health care, and otherwise rest easy that if things go bad, America would be there to bail them out.  

This relationship frayed when America invaded Iraq over false pretenses, but it didn’t rupture. The rise of China as a substantial threat was at first largely unnoticed, as too many American capitalists were making too much money investing in that huge communist marketplace. 

It took Trump to finally say “enough is enough.” 

It was Trump who first questioned publicly the need for America to pay for everything when it came to the defense of the Western World. It was Trump who finally said that China was our biggest threat and that we had to fundamentally change our trading relationship with it. It was Trump who said, “If you don’t have borders then, you don’t have a country,” challenging the establishment consensus that the cheap labor that came from illegal immigration was probably a net positive for the economy. 

The thing about Trump is he is not much of an ideological conservative. He is not actually conservative at all. And he exposed the conservative movement as the fraud that it had become, a movement of neo-conservatives who never saw a war that they didn’t like combined with a bunch of fraudsters who used direct mail to personally enrich themselves.  

Sure, Trump is a businessman, a marketer, a capitalist of a kind. But he wouldn’t know Russell Kirk from William F. Buckley. Perhaps it was fitting that Buckley’s National Review dedicated a whole magazine edition to condemning Trump with no positive result for the magazine and no negative impact on Mr. Trump himself. He was, and is, far bigger than the small band of intellectual conservatives who like to smoke cigars and debate the fine points of F.A. Hayek. 

All of this was ripe for the picking. The question today is: If not Trump, then who?  

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip
Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).