Has President Trump Ended or Extended the Conservative Era?
Everyone seems to be giving their two cents about Donald Trump’s performance as president. Not surprisingly, where they come from politically pretty much determines their conclusions, including disagreements between conservatism’s competing factions.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s provocatively titled “Trump’s Second Term Has Ended the Conservative Era” pretty much expresses his Right-leaning moderate orientation. Yet, the “conservative era” was in fact a factional alliance initially led by fusionist conservative Ronald Reagan but followed by two Republican factional neoconservative presidents who wanted to be more kinder, gentler, and compassionate than he. They were finally successful in undermining his reforms, culminating in the latter one’s Great Recession market controls.
Douthat cannot be blamed for the Times’s title, and his text actually concedes that Trump brought “certain aspects of the conservative era to completion”: Roe v. Wade, “the big judicial and political swing against affirmative action,” the triumph of “unitary executive theories of presidential power,” and only failed to promote Reaganite “foreign policy idealism and socially conservative moralism.” Whether these actually describe President Reagan’s conservativism, which withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon, waged full-scale war only against little Grenada, and won the Cold War “without firing a shot,” is questionable.
President Trump has not ended a conservative era of governance since it ended long before.
President Trump has not ended a conservative era of governance since it ended long before. Indeed, a Gallup Poll and others have found that satisfaction with national government performance has generally been at low levels ever since Reagan. Today, only 25 percent of Independents support how Trump has handled his job as president, but 84 percent of Republicans do support Trump today. As for self-identified conservatives, they have indeed come to favor Trump, with 73 percent supporting him in his first term and 80 percent favoring him today.
As far as agreement on policy, two domestic policy areas are identified by a sophisticated Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll as ones where President Trump has been most involved in creating change, and where half of Americans believe he is focusing on the wrong priorities. Those policies are on immigration and the economy, and are a good place to discover whether President Trump has ended a conservative political era.
Immigration
Immigration has been President Trump’s most uniquely important policy issue from the beginning, promising to reduce illegal immigration. In his second term, he has basically shut down the border, to the approval of most of today’s conservatives and a majority of the population. And that has seemed to come at the expense of President Reagan’s very different and more positive view, supporting the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, which legalized three million undocumented immigrants and promoted amnesty for long-term, socially assimilated immigrants.
Conservatives today now support strong border control of immigration, including 59 percent of Republicans supporting the use of force if necessary to obtain it, and only 39 percent of them are concerned that enforcing it might be abused. Polls show that 34 percent of Trump’s Hispanic voters now find his policies are becoming harmful to them. But a plurality of 42 percent still maintained that they were helpful for Hispanics. Indeed, 69 percent of Trump’s 2024 Hispanic voters actually supported his immigration policies. While half of Americans now think deportation enforcement has gone “too far,” there is still overall support for border enforcement.
If Trump has changed conservative views on immigration, it is not clear whether this was an ideological change from earlier conservative ideals or it was a reaction to changed circumstances. President Reagan’s IRCA was composed of three legs, the first two of which were “tougher border enforcement” and “penalties for employers who hired unauthorized immigrants.” Moreover, Reagan’s support took place prior to decades of open borders under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Rather than ending supposed conservative support for open border enforcement, it looks more like conditions worsened rather than that principles changed.
Market Economy and Limited Government
A free market economy has certainly been a central part of conservative doctrine ever since its early days following World War II, opposing excessive government regulation and supporting free choices for business and social policy generally. Has this changed since Donald Trump?
First of all, not all factions on the Right agree on the principles of free markets, including the powerful neoconservative one that nominated two of the three Republican presidents of the era. Some consensus among the factions existed to support free markets to some degree, and Reagan, of course, let the market freely find its balance and produced years of economic success right up to the Great Recession. But President George W. Bush then adopted the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to control markets by funding failing banks and institutions and supporting near zero interest rates.
How about President Trump? At year’s end, after two weeks of government shutdown without official data, an across-the-front-page Wall Street Journal headline screamed “Unemployment Rises Despite Job Gains.” Things did not look good. But surprisingly, the losses were from government jobs eliminated by the Trump administration. Overall, federal government payrolls dropped 162,000 in October and then another 6,000 in November, the 10th straight monthly decline, for a total drop of 271,000 bureaucrats cut since January, while private employment increased. Traditional conservatives could not ask for more.
But there was more. While government agency budgets were being cut, private sector energy policy had simply been revolutionized, not only cutting suffocating regulations but also deregulating government controls back to near free market ideals. Government ESG and environmental restrictions have been lifted, too. Inefficient Environmental Protection Agency regulations were reduced dramatically, with more reliance on state and local enforcement. The Department of Education was significantly downsized, closing DEI offices and programs and phasing out inefficient loan programs, transferring non-educational units to other agencies, and overall cutting some 2,000 employees. (RELATED: EPA Proposes to Drive ‘A Dagger Into the Heart of the Climate Change Religion’)
Trump’s executive orders from the very beginning instituted a political administration over a bureaucratic one to manage the government. A Trump executive order even proposed ending collective bargaining, including at the Departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Only police and firefighters were directly exempted.
Trump’s domestic economic policy reforms, however, have been overshadowed by opposition to his tariff policies, properly considered anti-free market to one degree or another. But in fact, Trump has used excessive initial threats to bargain back to relatively reasonable tariff levels. He began properly accusing the world of having often taken advantage of the U.S., and the end result ultimately was higher tariffs for American importers. But tariffs were lowered internationally, especially with Britain, Japan, South Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Trump, in fact, bargained for reasonable 15 percent baseline tariffs for most European exports to the U.S., with most U.S. exports to the E.U. being duty-free. He still threatens further tariffs, but Trump generally ends up reasonable, at least he mostly has so far.
Overall, President Trump has cut government regulation and freed markets in a way not seen since Reagan. His record in cutting government regulation, personnel, and programs has been historic and is there for all to see in Time magazine. At the same time, private sector jobs have increased by 121,000, and more potential employees have moved into the active workforce. Retail sales have increased by 3.5 percent or more. Consumer prices did increase somewhat, as did interest rates, but by small percentages and were offset to a degree by cutting previous government subsidies, such as for electric automobiles.
Ronald Reagan would no doubt be impressed, if not fully in agreement with it all.
Certainly, many traditional conservatives have been upset with the Trump record on tariffs, immigration, and otherwise. But his overall record has been impressive. One need not fall in love with President Trump to understand that he knows that old mainstream Reagan conservatism is still an active constituency and that it still has important answers to today’s problems. And he knows he needs its political support.
It may be simple pragmatism, but like it or not, we freedom and tradition conservatives are in the same boat with President Trump and his faction for the next three years. The policy results will be better for the nation if our faction is involved critically but positively with it than if ours adopts some shunning alternative. And we can still keep working for even better days to come.
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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.