Very often conservative support for President Donald Trump starts with an apology.  It goes something like the following.

I know he writes mean tweets and makes nasty insults, calls people names like a jr. higher.  He is badly flawed, foul, immoral, a lawbreaker, braggadocios, self-centered, divisive, petty, a liar, a con man, a flip flopper, a criminal, authoritarian, and banal.  But, I still voted for him because, you know, I look at performance.

People who start with an apology, I believe, think they’re warding off the expected angry reaction.  Or, they won’t be associated with the worst character traits of Trump, readying themselves to hear them.  I’m writing to say that it won’t do you any good to apologize for Trump.  Embrace him.  Accept his 2016 victory and his presidency.

None of the other 16 candidates would have defeated Hillary Clinton.  Trump did almost everything he said he would do.  He stuck his thumb in the eye of the corrupt media.  He battled and fought for conservatives against the greatest political opposition in my lifetime and maybe all of American history.

In 1836, Sir Henry Taylor wrote the classic book, The Statesman, the first modern book devoted to that subject.  He wrote:

[A] statesman has already, in the commonwealth of his own nature, given to the nobler functions the higher place; and as a minister; therefore, he is one whom his country may be satisfied to trust, and its best men be glad to serve. He, on the other hand, who sees in the party he forms only the pedestal of his own statue, or the plinth of a column to be erected to his honour, may, by inferior means and lower service, accomplish his purposes, such as they are; but he must be content with vulgar admiration, and lay out of account the respect of those who will reserve that tribute from what is merely powerful, and render it only to what is great.  “He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men,” says Lord Bacon, “hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.”

Professor at Notre Dame, Michael Zuckert, wrote in 2020, Lincoln and Democratic Statesmanship:

Our ideas of statesmanship are fraught with seeming contradictions: The democratic statesman is true to the peoples (sic) wishes and views—but also capable of standing against popular opinion when necessary. The statesman rises above conflicts and seeks compromise between parties—but also stands firmly for what is right.

And I quote all that material about statesmen and statesmanship to get to my subject of President Donald Trump.  I’m not going to say whether I think he is one or not.  As you scan through the annals of the history of government, who was a statesman and did it matter?  Was Julius Caesar one?  What about William the Conqueror?  Was King George III?  What kind of statesmen presided over the Roman Coliseum?

If you go to scripture, you can look at all the various leaders of nations in order to surmise the statesman.  Old Testament Israel looks like a recent Marine Corps slogan, “A Few Good Men.”  Very few.  A statue of General George Patton sits outside the library at West Point some say because he didn’t spend much time in there.  Even Patton wouldn’t survive the present environment of the United States.

Today some propose settling for nothing short of Burkean conservativism in the trajectory of Russell Kirk.  They yearn for William F. Buckley at the National Review.   Jonah Goldberg just today, as I write this post, attacked Trump again.  These conservatives, including many professing Christians, now take on the chief identification of Anti-Trump.  In his piece, Goldberg insulted Trump voters, showing again, as he and others have again and again, got Trump wrong.  This is seen all over his post in the LA Times, which doesn’t publish true conservatives, where he wrote:

One of the paradoxes of charismatic leadership is that the leader’s illegitimacy — in legal, rational or traditional terms — can have the effect of strengthening their hold on their followers. This dynamic has been at the heart of Trump’s distortion of the right. If the man cannot measure up to the traditional, moral, rational or legal yardsticks that conservatives once ascribed to leadership, then it is the yardstick’s fault for not measuring up to the man.

That’s right.  Through his charisma, Trump has a cult-like, worshipful loyalty on his voters, who are called followers.  All of these 74 million voters, which was more than any presidential candidate had ever received in any presidential election, could not see the fraud that Trump was like the enlightened Goldbergian human being.  Goldberg said concerning the Founder of Turning Point USA, “Charlie Kirk, a pliant priest in Trump’s personality cult.”  On the other hand, the public intellectuals (if that is possible), who voted for and defend Trump, call Goldberg the subject of Trump derangement syndrome.  Douglas Wilson wrote last week:

Whatever I might think, the brains behind the progressive left have decided to take a header into the maelstrom of “doing whatever they can to advance the narrative and person and prospects of Donald J. Trump.” This is what a derangement syndrome can do to you. It turns the quivering brains of high-powered political operatives into a soupy kind of jelly, with green mold on the surface.

I see the jelly with the green mold coming out of Goldberg’s ears.

To speak of Trump without apology, consider why you voted for him, support him, and would vote for him again as president, even though you’re a Christian.  You don’t have to use the Russia hoax, even the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with all the conservative justices Trump appointed.  Trump believes that something in the United States is of higher value than other nations worth protecting by securing the borders.  Borders conserve something on the inside that is better than what is on the outside.  That simple, basic conservative idea separated  Trump from his competitors like the wall he aspired to build.

A long time ago the United States left the possibility of a Russell Kirk conservative.  We are in much more desperate times.  We have to look to principles much more basic than those outlined by Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli.  The Brexit vote in England recognized this too.  What I’m describing, Jonah Goldberg calls “instrumentalism.”  He wrote in another essay:

The least objectionable of them justified their decision in the name of instrumentalism—“Trump’s flawed, but we can use him.”

This isn’t using Trump until we can get somebody better.  That’s still an argument for 2024.  No, Trump is where we’re at.  Maybe we will get somebody better, but that’s also the reasoning behind what led to Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump isn’t an instrument.  He espouses necessary, rudimentary principles.  His don’t go far enough.  They don’t do as much as I would do.  But they go further than what we would get from anyone else, such as names like Dole, McCain, and Romney.  Even throw in George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Gerald Ford.  Trump truly raised the bar over these men.

I want to argue just a little.  You say, Trump is authoritarian.  He’s a fascist.  By far.  By far, the greatest threat of fascism is the progressive left, like Ronald Reagan said:

America stands on four main values: Faith in God, Freedom of Speech, Family and Economic Freedom. If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.

Trump in his presidency practiced the separation of powers.  He picked federalist Supreme Court justices, who did more to decentralize the federal government than in decades.  Trump supported that.  You’re just swallowing a lie when you say he’s a fascist or an authoritarian.  He gave freedom to become energy independent, turning loose the American people.

Maybe you say he’s a want-to-be dictator because of January 6, 2020.  Nothing like that came close to happening on January 6, nothing even nearly as bad as what did occur in Seattle, Portland, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota in the previous summer.  The Russia hoax disenfranchised Trump voters.  Illegal ballot harvesting did too.  The perpetrators walk free.  Does anyone think that we live under a fair justice system today?  Where is the abuse of power?  Who has attempted to criminalize parents who speak up in school board meetings?

I don’t apologize for President Donald Trump any more than I do for the minutemen on the Lexington Green.