I was recently chatting with a good friend, a fellow conservative, when the conversation turned to politics and our current president. “He is admittedly uncouth,” my friend said. “But he’s a strong leader fighting for his conservative agenda.”
I asked my friend to tell me more about what she saw as our president’s conservative agenda. “Well, you know,” she said. “He wants to rein in big government and decrease the deficit. And he wants to make America Christian again.”
We discussed these issues, point by point, starting with big government. As a moderate conservative, I agree that the federal government has gotten too big — too bureaucratic and unwieldy. But both my friend and I agreed that principled conservatives and progressives alike must reject the Machiavellian notion that the ends justify the means. How something is done must be as important as what is done, and the cost to human lives must always receive primary consideration.
With my friend, I believe that we should scale back unnecessary government programs, conduct thorough audits, and eliminate fraud and waste. But we must do it judiciously and lawfully. Unfortunately, the cuts to programs and agencies since January of this year were too often precipitous, inhumane and, in some cases, unconstitutional.
As just one example, in February, 90% of USAID’s contracts for humanitarian and development aid throughout the world were suddenly terminated. Thousands of USAID workers in Washington were fired and given just 15 minutes to clear out their desks. Leading researchers predict that these cuts could lead to more than 14 million deaths globally in the next five years, including 4.5 million children under the age of five. This is indefensible. How can we possibly justify the deaths of 4.5 million children? How else might this have been handled?
In addition, this action was also almost certainly unconstitutional. USAID was started in 1961 by an executive order by President Kennedy. But in 1998, it was established as an independent agency by an act of Congress (the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act). This means that only Congress, not the president, has the authority to shut it down.
In a constitutional republic, if changes need to be made, they must be made lawfully. Period. This is something that conservatives understand in their very bones.
My friend and I then moved on to the deficit. It didn’t take long for us both to agree that the current president has failed spectacularly in this regard. (In fairness, so did Obama and Biden.) According to the Bipartisan Policy Center (and this is corroborated by virtually every other independent, nonpartisan study), Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill “will cost $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, and more than $4 trillion when accounting for additional interest owed on the national debt.”
Pushing through this bill was not the move of a true conservative.
Finally, we talked about the idea of making America Christian again. “Are you sure this is really a conservative agenda item?” I asked my friend. She insisted that it was. “It’s what our Founding Fathers intended,” she said.
I used to believe this as well. But, in fact, it’s not what our Founding Fathers intended at all. To the contrary, they went to great lengths to protect against the dominance of any single religion in our country. Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence mention Christianity at all. Nor do the Federalist Papers. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly prohibits any religious test for office and the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of any state religion and guarantees the free expression of religion for all.
In 2018, the current speaker of the House, Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA), outlined what he called the “7 Core Principles of Conservatism”:
- Individual freedom
- Limited government
- Rule of Law
- Peace through strength
- Fiscal responsibility
- Free markets
- Human dignity
As an interesting exercise, my friend and I measured the actions of our current president against these seven principles — a challenge I’d like to extend to all my fellow conservatives. We agreed that the president seems genuinely committed to #2, #4 and #6. But his attacks on individual freedoms, his lack of fiscal responsibility and his utter disregard for human dignity disqualify him in our minds from being a true conservative. And his disdain for the rule of law (including the provisions and principles of the Constitution) should disqualify him from being president.
Upholding the rule of law and honoring the Constitution are foundational to American conservatism. Anyone who does not and yet claims to be conservative is masquerading as something he is not. And it behooves us all to be honest enough with ourselves to consider the possibility that we have been deceived. It’s not too late.