When I saw the New York Times had invited National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to write a guest column entitled “Trump Can Win on Character,” my eyes almost rolled off the edge of the Earth. After reading it, I’m a little more sympathetic. After all, Lowry isn’t writing for us, he’s writing for an audience of one. He’s giving advice to Donald Trump about how he can effectively improve his messaging. What better way to get his attention than to argue he can win on character?
As for the Times’ decision to print this piece, Lowry actually provides pretty good advice. The trick is that he’s not arguing that Trump can convince the American people he has better character than Kamala Harris. When Lowry talks about character in the piece, he doesn’t mean things like honesty, marital fidelity, or not committing sexual assaults or leading political coups. He’s talking about the character you need in a president. If that sounds absurd, I’ll let Lowry speak for himself:
Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?
Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.
It’s nice that Lowry acknowledges that it’s a political plus to be trustworthy. And I can’t really argue that his somewhat cynical take about how presidential elections are won and lost is wrong. So, the job for Trump then is to convince voters he cares about them more than Harris does, and that he’s a strong leader while Harris is a weak one.
Again, I think that’s right. And Lowry identifies a path toward doing that that is not about rank insults and demeaning nicknames. Trump should focus on Harris’s 2019-2020 campaign for president which was a pretty spectacular failure in which she went very far to the left on the issues in a desperate and fruitless effort to avoid getting outflanked.
Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.
She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.
The idea is to tie everything into her being weak compared to Trump. In theory, this would just bolster the ingrained bias that men are more natural leaders than women, but it’s not gender-dependent. As Lowry points out, Dubya Bush effectively used the flip-flopping charge to make John Kerry look weak. Harris has flip-flopped on several issues, like fracking, since her 2020 campaign. The point is, strength provides dependability, which is an element of trustworthiness.
The other prong is winning the argument about who cares about the average voter. Lowry uses the example of Barack Obama successfully convincing voters that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat who couldn’t be trusted to look out for the average American. Here’s how Lowry would use the same strategy to go after Harris:
She didn’t do more as Vice President to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.
Here the argument is that Harris is out of touch with ordinary Americans, either because she’s from Berkeley or ensconced in power or because her ethnic background is unique. She’s not one of you, so she doesn’t care about you. It’s not all that different for the successful argument against Romney.
I really have two thoughts about Lowry’s piece. The first is that Trump would improve his chances if he followed Lowry’s advice, but it’s not so simple. Trump uses the feedback he gets from his social media posts and his MAGA rallies to hone his messaging, and he discovered long ago that meanness and cruelty are his most effective tools for attracting fervent support. Thoughtfulness, even if he were capable of it, lands with a thud with his base. He occasionally offers something substantive, and he always abandons it immediately when it doesn’t get likes and applause. What I’m saying is that there’s not much use offering advice to someone who is incapable of following it. I think the fatal problem is that there’s no way for Trump to feel the effectiveness of a pitch to moderate or undecided voters because they don’t give him a response. An ordinary politician would look for a response in the polling data, but that takes patience. Trump has no patience.
The second thought I have is to wonder why Lowry is trying to help Trump. His publication, the National Review, was fervently anti-Trump in 2015-2016. Did this prediction come true:
Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
As for strength, here’s what Lowry wrote in 2016:
For someone who wants to project strength, he has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear triad — which is to say, almost nothing.
Is there anything that’s happened since to make Lowry reconsider that judgment?
No? Well how about this for January 6th prescience?
His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.
And here is Lowry’s conclusion:
If the [Republican Party] cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.
Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.
It’s pretty clear that by attempting to assist Trump now, Lowry is flip-flopping. And it’s a bigger more substantial flip-flop than Kerry on Iraq War funding or Harris on fracking and single-payer health care. And this isn’t a case where you change your position because you realize your previous analysis was wrong. Lowry has been proven correct about Trump’s crude and heedless populism and his trashing of the “the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP.” He was right about Trump’s susceptibility to flattery and inability to stand up to Putin. He even knew that he’d put “winning” over “ordered liberty” and the “limits of government power.”
But, you know what?
It turns out that the National Review cares about likes and applause just as much as Trump does. They have revenue to raise, and opposing the Republican nominee for president won’t raise it. They can get on board or they can look for new jobs, because the National Review will cease to exist before it endorses a Democrat.
