2024 and the New Coalition of the Sane

The cliché about politics making for strange bedfellows may seem too tired to trot out, but The Babylon Bee reenergized it this week with their headline, “‘Maybe We Took A Wrong Turn Somewhere,’ Thinks Party Whose Candidate Just Got Endorsed By Dick Cheney And Vladimir Putin.” It’s almost as strange and funny as the fact that Republicans now have Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in their corner.

But as funny as all this is for those who have been around for a while, what these seemingly odd endorsements give us is a knowledge about how things are shaking out in this political realignment. For those in the GOP, some of the changes will not be welcomed. In the main, however, these are salutary for the party and for the nation as a whole.

Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, along with his daughter Liz’s and that of other notorious Never Trumper writers and activists such as Bill Kristol and David French, is the logical endpoint of a movement that may have made sense at one point but failed to deal with the reality in front of it.

The Never Trump movement, which began almost a decade ago when Donald Trump rode down that escalator and into the national political spotlight, had its logic to many conservatives at the time. Plenty of people on the right (including this writer) had a hard time imagining how a Trump presidency was possible, much less how it could produce anything of a conservative nature. He was, after all, a New York Democrat! He had been friends with the Clintons! And yet, when he won so narrowly, a wave of relief washed over even those of us who doubted his bona fides. We avoided a Hillary presidency!

Despite the predictions of a liberal Trump presidency, Trump’s time in office was a golden era. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, which had famously dedicated an entire issue to opposing his candidacy, told the story of how Trump’s first year of presidency had brought about a remarkable economy in which “the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years.” With regard to the border, “illegal immigration has declined according to some metrics by over 60 percent. It is now at the lowest levels in the 21st century — even before the ending of chain migration and enacting of new border-security initiatives.” And on foreign policy, Trump’s handling of Iran, North Korea, and Russia had been successful in a “Variously called ‘principled realism’ or a new ‘Jacksonianism,’ the Trump doctrine has now replaced the ‘strategic patience’ and ‘lead from behind’ recessionals of the prior administration and not emulated the neoconservative nation-building of the George W. Bush administration.”

That was just his first year. At the end of 2018, Steve Cortes could write at Real Clear Politics of many more achievements, including the movement of the U. S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (which had been promised for decades by U. S. presidents), the destruction of the ISIS Caliphate, the ending of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, a renegotiation of NAFTA as the USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada) trade deal, record-low minority unemployment, and wages rising for the middle and lower classes. “Incomes in general soared in 2018,” Cortes wrote, “with average hourly earnings finally eclipsing 3 percent growth for the first time since before the Great Recession. The news is even better for blue-collar workers, who now realize wage growth above that of white-collar workers for the first time in nearly a decade.”

Though hampered by opposition within the deep state and from Democrat and even Republican lawmakers, Trump’s record in that first term, even with the missteps that are inevitable in even the best administrations, was remarkable. Dan O’Donnell, writing at the conservative MacIver Institute website, declared after Trump left office in 2021 that, “on policy, Donald Trump was perhaps the most consequential conservative in recent history.” On traditional measures of deregulation, O’Donnell observed, while Obama had added 16,000 pages to the Federal Register, Trump had removed 25,000 pages. With regard to our greatest challenge, “Trump emerged victorious over China and forced the Chinese to agree to major concessions in a Phase One Trade Agreement that forced Beijing to better police the theft of American intellectual property and purchase an additional $200 billion of American exports.” Trump’s “rejection of military adventurism in the region was rewarded with almost unprecedented peace,” which allowed the U. S. to focus on that porous southern border. And we haven’t even mentioned the conservative judges (which some Never Trumpers tried to pretend were his only accomplishment): three on the Supreme Court and hundreds more in lower federal courts.

And yet, no matter how much Trump had done, many establishment Republicans and members of the Never Trump faction never came around to supporting the man O’Donnell labels “the most effective and consequential conservative since Ronald Reagan,” whose “long list of accomplishments” proves such a claim’s truth.

What O’Donnell understood was what figures such as the Cheneys, Kristol, French, and other “Republicans for Harris” such as Adam Kinzinger never got. Or, more likely, they got it and could never forgive Trump for it.

Namely: Trump, though not a movement conservative, made good on conservative policy promises that establishment Republicans had not managed to achieve. He also corrected the tragic and destructive mistakes they had made in advocating and acting for our nation to spend blood, toil, and treasure in wars that weakened America and put the Republican Party in bad odor.

In short, Trump showed them up, and they never forgave him. Because of this, they are willing to keep up the charade that Trump is a greater danger to the country than Harris despite the Democrats’ refusal to enforce our immigration laws, their weaponization of the justice system, their pressure on social media and other companies to censor speech that doesn’t benefit their party, their toleration of dangerous pro-Hamas radicals on campuses, their dangerous embrace of Iran, their radical gender ideology, and their economic mismanagement—among other things.

This is why, just as in the 1980s when many Democrats became Reagan Democrats, we are now seeing RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Alan Dershowitz, and many other Democrats switching over to Trump’s side. They understand that the Democratic Party is now the party that favors military adventurism and the military industrial complex. They understand that it’s now the party that opposes free speech and has for some time. After all, the White House announced last year that it was working with the socialist government in Brazil on censorship. They understand that, however much they were not pleased and found Trump easy to criticize on Covid, the Democrats were much worse. They understand that the chaos coming in from the border is avoidable—because it was avoided. They understand that our economy is hamstrung. They understand that Kamala Harris’s policies are, at best, imitations of Trump’s and, at worst, insane. They will tax unrealized investment gains? What fresh economic hell is this?

These Democrats coming in to replace Dick, Liz, Bill, and the rest understand that though they may not have liked Trump’s tweets or his sometimes abrasive personality when he was in office, things were much better for Americans. And they are willing to support him even though he has been reviled for over a decade. That’s because they, unlike those Never Trumpers, are actually looking at the world as it is and not their own sore egos.

Ironically in this realignment, those Democrats crossing over are in perfect agreement with one figure who is supporting Harris. Though his own adventurism had advanced unchecked under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin did stop it when Donald Trump was president…before getting rolling again under Joe Biden. That Putin was smirking when he endorsed Kamala Harris this week was not a sign that he really wanted Donald Trump to win. It was a sign that he understood the joke. Though the Democrats have claimed he loves Trump, he really does prefer the weakness he faced under the Biden Administration, which would doubtless be continued and even increased under a Harris Administration.

The Republican base is largely solid. A 2023 Pew poll showed that nearly as many Republicans think Trump has been the best president of the last forty years (37%) as think Reagan was (41%). Interestingly, Hispanic Republicans are more likely (41%) than white Republicans (37%) to cite Trump. The decisive question for November is how to motivate voters beyond this core.

Republicans are going to need those Trump Democrats if they are going to win decisively this year. The loss of the Cheneys isn’t much of a loss. Their influence has been baleful in foreign policy matters. The gain of RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, and Alan Dershowitz is a perfectly fair trade. People on the right don’t have to agree with them on everything to see that they have something to offer in terms of challenges to big pharma, our foreign policy establishment, and the increasingly weaponized justice system. Hopefully, these figures will inspire others to consider seriously the consequences for the country of continuing with Biden-Harris policies or rejecting them in favor of Trump’s. We should welcome these new arrivals to a coalition of the sane.

We are in a time of realignment. It is not going to be completely comfortable. But it offers Americans new opportunities to see how some of the people on our side have not been so good for us—and how some of the people on crossing over from other side might well be very good for us.  

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.