Stranger Days: The Neocons Are Lining Up Behind Trump
Sven R. Larson
Donald Trump continues to score victories in Republican caucuses and primary elections. After his convincing wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, he went on to beat his remaining opponent Nikki Haley by a 60-40 margin in South Carolina.
This victory in the ‘Palmetto state’ is his most impressive to date. It was an open primary, which means that voters with other party affiliations than Republican were allowed to vote in it. Since Nikki Haley’s very raison-d’être as a candidate is that she is not Trump, it was predictable that she would rally big numbers of Democrats and independents behind her.
To the extent that she did, it was nowhere near enough to rock Trump: while almost 300,000 people voted for her, the former president got 452,000 votes.
His victory is all the more impressive given that Haley lost in the state where she was twice elected governor. If there was one place where she should have won, it was South Carolina. Apparently, voters of all party affiliations were generally unimpressed with her tenure as the state’s chief executive officer.
There is a good reason for this. Haley won her first gubernatorial election in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014, but she never served out her second term. She resigned in 2017 when then-President Trump offered her the job as ambassador to the United Nations.
It was a prominent strategic blunder on her part and in retrospect, one has to wonder if Trump’s decision to offer her the job was an equally prominent strategic victory—a smart tactical political move. Haley was touted as a potential presidential candidate already during her time as governor; her second term would have ended in January 2019, exactly a year before the 2020 presidential primaries.
By offering her the ambassador job, Trump neutered her as a 2020 candidate, but he also weakened her in her current campaign. Americans do not like quitters, especially not in such important jobs as president or governor. When Haley made the decision to resign as governor, she branded herself as a quitter.
It did not exactly help her that she quit the job as UN ambassador before her tenure there was complete.
Her ‘quitter’ brand has worked against her with Republican voters—not as much in other states, but certainly in South Carolina. Since her home state is solidly Republican, her loss there was embarrassing. But it is entirely her own doing. I lived in South Carolina when Nikki Haley was an up-and-coming member of the state legislature (representing my district, in fact) and back then she was energetic, made a strong principled impression, and started off in the legislature as a driven conservative.
Over time, she has lost that spirit. Part of it is the usual effect of the political grinds: to get things done, politicians need to compromise a lot with their values and principles. However, Haley’s problem is bigger than that: she has no noteworthy accomplishments to show from her time as governor, and her time at the United Nations was equally pale.
There is a reason for this: Nikki Haley is in over her head. She has been in over her head since she became governor. As much as Haley is a capable politician and probably would make a good top administrator of the federal government, she does not have the leadership skills needed for a job of the president’s magnitude. Her chances would have been better if she had declined the ambassador job; at least then she would not have had ‘quitter’ attached to her name.
On March 2nd, Trump will coast to a convincing victory in the Michigan caucus. He will probably win with the same impressive prowess in the same-day caucuses in Idaho and Missouri. As for Michigan, which has an odd system with both a primary (won by Trump on February 27th) and a caucus, the two most recent polls have Trump leading Haley massively before the March 2nd caucus. His margin is 52 and 60 points, respectively
Another day of major losses will not do Haley any good. In fact, things are already so bad for her that one of her most prominent sponsors, a political campaign organization called Americans for Prosperity Action, has decided to stop donating to her.
The AFP Action is an influential right-of-center outfit. They command sizable financial resources and have a big ‘body count’ influence, with on-the-ground volunteers who do extensive voter outreach work on-site. When AFP Action abandons a candidate, it is a serious signal to other major sponsors to do the same.
Every which way one looks at the Republican primary, Nikki Haley seems to be done for as a presidential candidate. After the Idaho, Michigan, and Missouri caucuses on March 2nd, there is March 5th—’Super Tuesday’—with 13 primaries and two caucuses (three if we count the territory of American Samoa). Even if Haley does as well in these 15 states as she did in South Carolina, the case for her presidential bid will be so weak that it would be shocking if she does not drop out on March 6th.
And yet—I have a suspicion that she won’t drop out. Haley is a neoconservative, which means three things:
- She is a big-government ‘conservative’: she has no problem with a government that spends a significant portion of GDP, so long as there is a conservative slant to how the entitlement programs of the welfare state are organized;
- She wants a significant defense budget and global American military activism; and
- She does not place much value on the Christian heritage that America was founded on.
Over the past couple of years, the neocons—effectively a ‘party within the Republican party—have been scheming and hatching plans to make sure that Trump is not the party’s candidate in 2024. They have done so based largely on a deeply rooted sense of being entitled to the party leadership and, in some ways, a feeling of revenge for losing that leadership to a man they considered a buffoon back in 2016.
The neoconservatives’ claim to power is not a new phenomenon in American politics. They became increasingly influential in the Republican party in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was not until the Reagan era that they became the dominant force of the party. The first-generation neocons, which consisted of William F Buckley, Irving Kristol, Norm Podhoretz, and Daniel Bell, defined their ideology not in contrast to socialism, but in contrast to the traditional national conservatism—sometimes referred to as ‘Goldwater conservatism’ after Senator Barry Goldwater.
By winning the ideological fight within the Republican party, the first-generation neocons could influence the party’s politics a great deal. President Bush Jr. and his vice president Dick Cheney, who were in office from 2001 to 2009, represented the height of neoconservative influence over policy, politics, and power. After them, Bill Kristol—an editor and publisher like his father Irving—and Vice President Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney carried the ideological and political neocon torch into the 2010s and the 2020s.
The neocons were not happy about losing the 2008 and 2012 elections to Obama. However, to be fair: it is difficult to determine in exactly what way the Obama administration was not neoconservative in its domestic and foreign policies. The real defeat for the neocons came with Trump’s victory in the 2016 primaries. He resoundingly defeated such prominent neocons as Jeb Bush—George Bush Jr.’s brother and former governor of Florida—and John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio. This upset the neocons more than their combined disappointment over losing to Obama twice. Not only had they lost access to the presidency, but their influence over their own party had been diminished.
After a fumbling opposition to Trump in 2020, the neocons were locked and loaded for a grand comeback in 2024. They entered four candidates into the Republican primaries, and convinced the party to organize a series of debates long before the primaries began. These very early debates, which have no precedent in American political history, were supposed to help the neocons divide and conquer the Republican party to the point where they had only one candidate to put up against Trump.
That candidate was supposed to do well. It did not turn out that way, but the fact that the candidate was Nikki Haley is not the reason. The neocons, who look down their noses at their voters much in the same way as the Left does, deeply underestimated the grassroots support that Trump has. Ever since the debates last fall, they have watched in disbelief as Republican voters rally around the former president, making him stronger and more inevitable for every new legal battle he finds himself facing.
With that said, nobody should take the neocons for being politically naive. They are anything but naive. In case one of their candidates cannot beat Trump in the primaries, their Plan B is to wait out Trump’s legal battles. At some point, the thinking goes, he will encounter an insurmountable obstacle in his fight against the legal challenges that now face him.
That did not happen in New York. Although he has been found guilty of misrepresenting the value of his property in negotiations with banks (values that the banks never complained about), and although the court forces Trump to pay $454 million in fines, it does not stop him from running for president.
If Trump does encounter such an obstacle, the neocons need to have an active candidate ready to fill the gap. It is for this reason that Nikki Haley is still in the race.
At the same time, the neocon camp is no longer nearly as unified as it used to be. They have experienced notable defections recently:
- Jeb Bush recently came to Trump’s defense after the fraud verdict in New York;
- Lindsay Graham, a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative U.S. Senator from South Carolina—Nikki Haley’s home state— spoke at Trump’s victory rally after he had won the primary in the senator’s home state;
- Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority Leader, has endorsed Trump and suggested that Haley should drop out of the race.
Would all of these big-name neocons line up behind Trump if there was even a small chance that he would be prohibited from running for president? Would McConnell announce his intent to mend fences with Trump now that he has announced his exit from the Senate come November?
No, they would not. They would be sitting behind the scenes, waiting for the blade to fall on Trump’s neck, ready to jump in with full force to fill the void with their candidate. Bush, Graham, and McConnell have enormous financial resources at their disposal; with ideologues like Bill Kristol and policy experts like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, they should be unstoppable once Trump is neutralized.
The fact that the neocons no longer exhibit a fervent anti-Trump front indicates that they know something we don’t: they have good reasons to believe that Trump will in fact emerge as the Republican candidate in 2024.
This impression is reinforced by the fact that Liz Cheney, for the longest time a highly likely presidential candidate in this election, has not declared her candidacy. Technically, she can still do it, but the longer she waits, the more marginalized she will be right from the start. If you are a serious presidential candidate, it is bad optics and—more importantly—bad strategy to wait this long.
In addition to having good reasons to believe that Trump will weather the legal storm he is now facing, the neocons have probably also grown concerned about the corruption allegations against President Biden. So long as the neocons hate Trump more than they love America, they can align themselves with a corrupt Democrat president just to keep Trump out of the White House. But when that same president is allegedly standing in corruption up to his chin, the neocons begin asking themselves if their hatred for Trump is helping further an existential erosion of America’s governing institutions.
Either that, or they live by the old aphorism: you have to get behind someone in order to stab him in the back.
This would be a good time for other neocons to come out in support of Trump. Personally, I do not want him to have another term: he is too backward-looking for my taste, and I fear that he is so consumed with revenge on his political enemies that he will not be an effective president. However, in the small range of choices available—Biden or likely replacement Gavin Newsome, or Trump—the former president stands out as the least harmful option. If he would get past the past, so to speak, he could become a good president again.
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