Something rather touching is happening on the political right. Conservatives are discovering Donald Trump.
One imagines the scene in biblical terms. A flash on the road to Damascus. A trembling hand upon the brow. The scales tumbling from the eyes. Good God! The man is a vulgarian.
Across conservative commentary, the tone is changing. Even The Spectator, hardly a redoubt of woke Bolshevism, recently declared that conservatives must “disavow” Trump.
Very good. Welcome.
But the million-dollar Trump coin question is: what was the revelation?
Which particular grotesquerie finally proved too much? What was the Epstein that broke the elephant’s back? Was it the attempt to overturn an election? The mob invading the Capitol? The gallows? The cries of “Hang Mike Pence!” while the vice-president was inside refusing Trump’s demand that he subvert the election?
Apparently not.
Perhaps it was the women. But Trump’s recorded boast that celebrity permitted him to grab women by the genitals was public knowledge before Americans elected him in 2016. He had openly bragged about walking backstage at beauty pageants while contestants were undressed. Former Miss Teen USA contestants separately alleged that he entered their changing room while girls, some of them minors, were dressing.
And here one could continue. The felony convictions. The E. Jean Carroll judgment. The fraud. The stiffed contractors. The mockery of a disabled reporter. The insults to prisoners of war. Epstein. The election lies. The classified documents. The grifts, nepotism and petty vendettas.
But why bother?
Everyone knows.
That’s the thing.
His supporters know. His enemies know. Republican senators know. Conservative editors know. Evangelical pastors know. The donors and billionaires know. The people now writing anguished essays about the tragedy of what Trump has “become” know.
There is no secret Trump waiting to be exposed. He did not emerge from behind a curtain after the election and announce that, regrettably, the constitutional conservative everyone thought they had elected was actually a casino impresario with the moral vocabulary of a lavatory wall.
He advertised the product.
So, the question is not why conservatives are turning against Trump.
It is: why now?
Because if the objection is moral, they are roughly a decade late.
The excuses were always wonderfully revealing. Hillary Clinton was haughty. Biden was old. Kamala Harris was a “DEI hire”. The Democrats were woken. Universities were annoying. Somebody somewhere had been asked for their pronouns.
And so, conservatives held their noses…For ten years. At some point holding one’s nose ceases to be an expression of distaste and becomes a circular breathing technique.
Mrs. Clinton was nobody’s Platonic ideal of democratic leadership. She possessed the peculiar gift of making even people who agreed with her feel they were being reprimanded by the deputy headmistress. But she could read a briefing paper. She understood what NATO meant. She could complete three consecutive sentences without one wandering off in search of applause.
Yes, she called some Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Apparently, this was so traumatic that the appropriate response was a decade-long experiment in elective monarchy. She had at least read the room.
Trump understood the transaction perfectly. His great political talent was never conservatism. It was, and remains, resentment. Millions did not particularly require him to govern well. They required him to make the correct people angry. Owning the libs became a substitute for possessing principles.
January 6 should have ended the experiment. Instead, it produced euphemisms. Even now the attack is sometimes dismissed as too chaotic to constitute a “real” insurrection, as though incompetence were an acquittal.
And still the outrages accumulate. Take Venezuela. One need possesses no affection whatever for Nicolás Maduro to be disturbed by American forces entering another sovereign state and carrying away its ruler, followed by Trump openly discussing taking Venezuelan oil. Previous empires at least employed clerks to invent a moral pretext. Trump simply announces the loot.
The plea of hindsight does not cut it. Hindsight is necessary when evidence emerges later. Trump arrived pre-hindsighted. You did not need to be born in Queens to recognise the type. American culture had spent more than half a century introducing him: the property huckster, snake-oil salesman, used-car dealer slapping the roof and assuring you this beauty had only ever been driven to church. The fraud was not hidden in the small print. It was written in neon letters twenty feet high above the building.
Perhaps this conservative conversion is sincere. People are entitled to change their minds. If they have finally concluded that institutions matter more than ‘owning the libs’ and that an opponent is preferable to an arsonist, welcome aboard.
But repentance requires confession.
Otherwise, one suspects something less noble: Trump is becoming a bad investment. The liabilities now exceed the assets, and people who spent years explaining why principle required them to support him are discovering that principle requires them to leave. This is not repentance. It is asset disposal.
And Britain should resist treating this as another vulgar American spectacle. Its own salesman is already on the forecourt.
Nigel Farage is not Donald Trump. Every country, after all, manufactures its demagogues to local specifications. But the grievance is there. The scapegoats are there. The perpetual hunt for traitors and elites is there. So is the remarkable ability to present oneself as tribune of the forgotten little man while remaining conspicuously attractive to wealthy patrons and powerful interests.
The FOR SALE sign has been on the lawn for years.
And this time there can be no innocence.
Britain has watched the American experiment. It has seen institutions bent, lies normalised, cronies enriched, opponents threatened and respectable conservatives discover that apparently there was no indignity they could not swallow if the alternative was allowing the other side to win.
And now, wonderfully, some of them have discovered their gag reflex.
So let the deserters desert. Let them rediscover their principles. But spare us the revelation. They knew.
Everyone knew.
And if the British right surveys the wreckage and then hands the keys to its own grinning populist because he promises to annoy the correct people, there can be no if only we had known afterwards.
This time they will have seen the wreck, interviewed the survivors, read the black box and watched the inquiry.
And then climbed aboard the next plane because they liked the pilot’s jokes.
