An important fact has been completely misconstrued by the media over the past four years. Trump didn’t start a Trump movement, he started a conservative movement.
The media sees the supporters of Donald Trump as nothing more than cultish followers, nipping at the heel of their supreme overlord. That’s why they had to call him a fascist and a dictator, because they can’t believe that people would support him without being brainwashed.
But the truth is much different from their reality. The truth begins before the day Donald Trump came down the escalator. It didn’t begin during the Obama years either.
The truth is conservatives have been disillusioned since Ronald Reagan left office. Following Reagan, George H. W. Bush did some good things, but spent more time focusing on the world and missed some pretty important things happening right in his own backyard. While Reagan and Bush’s economic policies were good, the government was spending lots of money. Not entirely their fault considering the Cold War and other foreign affairs that had to be dealt with. But Bush decided to raise taxes rather than focus on spending cuts. That decision deeply injured his standing with conservatives.
Clinton was Clinton, and then George W. Bush took office in 2000. He was dealt a bad hand. No doubt about it. He had some quality goals and had the deck been stacked differently, who knows how it would have turned out for him. But by the end of his presidency, the fiscally conservative agenda had been tossed in the trash. Again, it’s hard to put a lot of blame on Bush. There’s little question he was the right leader to get us through 9/11. But still conservatives had a hard time seeing their reflection in the administration.
Then we come to the real problems. For some unknown reason, the GOP decided to run to the political center. John McCain was a good man, but he regularly compromised in areas conservatives would have liked for him to be firm. He often found himself walking to the other side. Conservatives, again, had a hard time looking at his campaign and seeing anything that would excite them. And up against Obama’s first campaign, it was no competition.
Then Obama took office, and immediately launched the Democrat party to the left, further than they’d ever gone before. Here was the perfect time for a true conservative to pick up the torch and go running. The Tea Party tried their hardest to set a new course for the GOP, but the party basically ignored them, and stuck to their guns about going center with Mitt Romney. It was never going to work. Romney, as he’s shown repeatedly in the years after his nomination, is as center cut as they come. People have a hard time seeing him as a Republican let alone a conservative. He wasn’t going to win conservatives who felt no one in the political class supported them or their causes.
Conservatives didn’t have anyone to inspire them, to lead them back into the mainstream. There was no true conservative voice in the country. As the media, more and more, refused to acknowledge that they even existed, conservatives got angrier, got more disillusioned by the whole system. Any Republican who’d been in the political realm for longer than a few years was not going to drive a resurgence to conservative politics.
Then Trump came along. Trump’s appeal came in two different fronts, campaign and administration. Trump’s campaign was primarily focused on shaking up politics, something conservatives desperately wanted. The GOP didn’t understand where its base was, and the only way for the base to get them to see was to completely buck the establishment. While Trump’s campaign messages and promises certainly veered toward conservatism, calling for stronger immigration, lower taxes, less regulation, that was not the primary thing that got him elected. Conservatives knew, after electing Trump, his administration would be a bit of a mystery as to how they would actual govern. But that wasn’t why they were voting for him. This was as much a rejection of the GOP as it was of the new Obama controlled left. Conservatives were tired of having to vote for whichever middle of the road candidate their party threw at them. “Drain the swamp” was the smartest campaign line Trump could possibly come up with. It spoke directly to the GOP who turned its back on their base.
After Trump took office, he didn’t let conservatives down. He governed as conservatively as any President ever had. He did basically everything he said he would do in his campaign, cut taxes, cut regulation, bring jobs back to America, strengthened immigration. Then, he did things conservatives could only dream of. He became the first president since Carter not to start a war. He came as close to peace in the middle east as any President ever. And most importantly when faced when the greatest opportunity for government control since World War II, he let the states control their own coronavirus response, assisting them as much as he could, while focusing on bigger needs like a vaccine. He didn’t commandeer production, instead simply working with companies who were able to help. He had every chance to take more power for himself and the federal government and he outright refused. He managed the pandemic like he has every aspect of his term. As a conservative.
Donald Trump’s eventual legacy as a President will be sparkling but he’s a catalyst for conservative movement set to take back the GOP for years to come. Trump has caused a megaphone to be placed in front of new (or newly amplified) conservative voices, like elected representatives Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz, new media outlets like The Daily Wire and The Blaze, and education driven outlets like PragerU and Turning Point USA. The new and amplified voices of Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Tucker Carlson, Dave Rubin, Allie Stuckey, and so many more have brought the conservative voice back to the forefront. None of that would have been possible without Trump. And as much as they may try to silence opposition, the left can only watch as more and more people flock to the conservative voice. Trump didn’t start a Trump movement, he started a conservative movement.
