Why I Like Donald Trump

I come to praise Donald Trump, not to disparage him. So be it if I burn a few bridges of the very few I seem to have left. Nor will this defence of former President Trump be directed at those who would vote for an embalmed mummy (or worse, Joe Biden, or worse again, Kamala Harris) before they voted for Donald Trump. Such voters see a world very different to the one I see and nothing I or anyone else says will make a whit of difference to how they vote.

No. I want to reply to all those conservatives who make clear that in fact they will hold their noses and will vote for Trump, but only because the choice is so woeful and the Democrat so bad. These are people who always like to preface any such admission by first saying that Mr. Trump “is simply not a suitable person for the office of President”; “he’s not got the right character”; “he’s a vastly flawed human being”; those sort of “take with one hand before you give with the other” genuflections. And I don’t just mean supposed conservative commentators here. I am even more explicitly responding to top conservative politicians of this ilk – which outside the U.S. is near on all of them. Your Boris Johnsons, John Howards, Tony Abbotts, a couple in New Zealand and Canada, the list goes on and on.

So let me just try to explain to all of them what so many Right-of-centre voters like me really like about Donald Trump. Why he’s not a least-bad choice in today’s world but rather a better one than almost all of them.

First off, he bends over backwards to try to do what he promised to do. He offers real, not phoney, opposition. Actual not artificial. Look at Trump’s first term and marvel at that fact (because he was being bogusly impeached and having the whole Russia collusion scam thrown at him the whole time). Trump promised to appoint interpretively conservative top judges and boy did he do that. (I defy anyone to name another conservative politician who would have stood by Bret Kavanagh in the face of the grossly implausible ‘Me Too’ charges going back decades to when he was in high school. Not a one of the ones who disparage Trump’s character right now would have been as brave.) Trump tried to repeal Obamacare but a Republican blocked that – John McCain, a man these Trump condemners would say had “the right stuff” and was, you know, “suitable”. Trump’s efforts as regards the border and building the border wall were infinitely better than Joe Biden’s deliberate dismantling of any and all constraints but let’s remember that it was the House of Representatives under Republican Speaker Paul Ryan who made funding the wall near impossible. Do any of the genuflectors disparage Mr. Ryan’s character?

This quality of doing what you can to keep all your promises is very, very difficult as a Right-of-centre politician where the legacy media leans 90% plus for the Lefty Dems (and yes, there are lots of data to support that). You have to have a hide as thick as an elephant’s. Trump tried to do what he promised. By contrast Boris got elected and then opted to embrace the woke world of Net Zero climate change idiocies. What does that say about his character? In Australia, Mr. Morrison took one position on Net Zero to the election and then embraced the opposite. Add to that Morrison’s total cluelessness when it comes to the presumption of innocence (ScoMo’s actions indicated he was against it) and to the value of free speech (“never created a single job” says the man who destroyed our economy opting to mimic the Chinese politburo’s response to the Covid virus). Remind me please. Conservatives believe actions matter far more than words and Trump’s actions during lockdowns were nowhere near as good as Governor Ron DeSantis’s. But they were orders of magnitude better than Morrison’s and even Boris’s (no vaccine mandates from Trump and Trump actually tried to stand up to the public health lockdown thugs in a way that embarrasses the supposedly liberal Boris in comparison).

I mentioned above that Trump fought hard to appoint interpretively conservative judges. Tony Abbott – and no one defended Mr. Abbott against the defenestrating Malcolm Turnbull more vigorously than I did, but if you’re going to disparage other politicians then you have to face facts – meanwhile appointed the wife of the retiring High Court judge to fill his place and she has turned out to be overtly on the activist side of the court. Mr. Abbott also threw in the towel on his explicit pledge to try to repeal the s.18C hate speech laws. He didn’t put repeal to the Senate and make them block it. He just threw in the towel (and in doing so lost a lot of support from his core voters). But it’s Mr. Trump who refuses to cave in to the establishment, wet, ‘moderate’ wing of the Republican party who has the character deficiencies?

Let me also remind readers that Mr. Trump is overtly attacking the entire ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ behemoth that deals in identity politics. Boris never managed to do more than hoist a white flag and Australia’s state Liberal leaders are weaker still. And I don’t hear Mr. Dutton willing to fight on any culture war issues. Whose actions show more character I ask? Can you imagine Mr. Trump praising our woeful e-Safety commissioner in the way that Mr. Dutton ridiculously did? (Again, I think Peter Dutton is the best conservative leader going in today’s Liberal Party but I would take a Trump any day of the week. And a Trump-like person would be further ahead in the polls too. Just look at Canada’s Pierre Poilievre who fights these culture war battles and is way up in the polls in a more Left-wing country.)

So, yes, I do think Donald Trump is pretty much exactly what today’s political landscape calls for in a conservative political leader. Sure, he’s crass and boorish and likes ketchup. But he fights and doesn’t capitulate. He tries to keep his electoral promises, all of them. He is brave (where Boris was flat out cowardly). His crude combativeness, his brushing aside of nuance, his joy in the battle are precisely what are needed in today’s fight against a radical, open borders, weaponising-the-justice-system Left-wing establishment. On Covid Trump was a lot less thuggish than Boris or Morrison or most all of the Right-of-centre Cabinet Ministers in the U.K. and here. Here’s the test. Would you prefer a ‘decent’ Rishi Sunak who capitulated in full to the Tony Blair worldview or a ‘flawed’ Trump? No sane person should expect to agree with a candidate on everything. I don’t agree with Trump on everything. But I agree with loads of his positions. And most of all I like his character. Let me repeat – he fights and is brave. He stands up to the bureaucracy – and will do so a lot more should he win in 2024.

The holier-than-thou and (let’s keep being blunt) snobby conservative commentariat and ex-politicians’ fraternity might like to look in the mirror, and at their own records in office, and then let shame and humility temper their “oh, but Trump doesn’t really have the right character for office” bleatings that have more to do with being acceptable in polite society than with what is known in the philosophy of science as ‘the facts’.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.