It's Time for Conservatives to Celebrate This President

Do conservatives — or non-leftists, for that matter — appreciate just how terrific Donald Trump has been as president? And how lucky we are that he won the presidency?

I don’t know the answer.

What I do know is that they ought to be deeply appreciative of him, and deeply grateful for luck or providence, and certainly for Trump himself, that he was elected president. First, it is unlikely that any other Republican would have defeated Hillary Clinton. Second, he has not only surpassed many of our expectations but also thus far governed in a manner more consistent with conservative principles than any president since Ronald Reagan, and arguably Calvin Coolidge.

I say this as one who vigorously opposed him during the Republican contest for the nomination. I said from the beginning, in print and on my radio show, that I would support Trump if he became the nominee, but I dreaded his becoming the nominee. His comments about the size of his hands, Sen. John McCain as a prisoner of war and former President George W. Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; his lack of any history as a conservative; and the seeming absence of a filter between his brain and his Twitter app made it difficult for me to imagine him as a serious president of the United States.

Nevertheless, once he was nominated, I just as vigorously supported him on the simple and — I still believe — unanswerable grounds that while no one could be certain how Trump would govern, we were all certain about how Hillary Clinton would govern — as a leftist. And I truly believed that another four years of left-wing rule would mean the end of America as it was founded to be.

That is why I found the arguments of the conservatives who were Never-Trumpers, many of whom I work with, admire and count as friends, not just unpersuasive but incomprehensible. That a conservative could prefer Clinton — which was the only upshot of a Never Trump position — to any Republican could only mean that we have an entirely different understanding of the damage the Left has done and would have done to America and the Western world if Clinton had won.

I remember Never-Trumpers calling my radio show and asking me how I could possibly believe that, if elected president, Trump would honor his commitment to nominate to the Supreme Court one of the conservatives on the list of judges from which he promised to choose.

He has honored that promise.

And given the supreme importance of the Supreme Court, isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?

He has repealed many of President Obama’s energy regulations that would have strangled the American economy. He doesn’t believe that carbon-induced warming of the planet will destroy the human race — the greatest of the innumerable hysterias the Left manufactures and then believes in.