How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable
“I’m a free-trader,” he says, “but you can only be a free-trader when something’s fair.”
It’s stuff like this that has conservative pundits from places like the National Review bent out of shape. Where, they ask, is the M-F’ing love? What about those conservative principles we’ve spent decades telling you flyover-country hicks you’re supposed to have?
“Trump has also promised to use tariffs to punish companies,” wrote David McIntosh in the Review‘s much-publicized, but not-effective-at-all “Conservatives Against Trump” 22-pundit jihad. “These are not the ideas of a small-government conservative … They are, instead, the ramblings of a liberal wanna-be strongman.”
What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.
Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.
But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.
“We’ve got to do something to bring jobs back,” says one Trump supporter in Plymouth, when asked why tariffs are suddenly a good idea.

Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she’s fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.
“We need someone who is just going to look at what’s best for us,” she says.
I mention that Trump’s plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt’s idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn’t like that idea then.
Why not?
“I didn’t like him,” she says.
Trump, though, she likes. And so do a lot of people. No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.
Back in Manchester, an American Legion hall half-full of bored-looking Republicans nurses beers and knocks billiard balls around, awaiting Iowa winner Ted Cruz. The eely Texan is presumably Trump’s most serious threat and would later nudge past Trump in one national poll (dismissed by Trump as conducted by people who “don’t like me”).
But New Hampshire is a struggle for Cruz. The high point in his entire New England run has been his penchant for reciting scenes from The Princess Bride, including the entire Billy Crystal “your friend here is only mostly dead” speech for local station WMUR. The one human thing about Cruz seems to be that his movie impersonations are troublingly solid, a consistent B-plus to A-minus.
How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable, Page 9 of 13