A Warning

“There is a tweet for everything.” That’s a frequent eye-roll comment from the president’s critics. They like to show how Trump takes one position and then, a few years or even days later, tweets out the 180-degree-opposite opinion. It’s now a common refrain for people inside his administration, too, who both marvel at and curse the president’s uncanny inability to stick to his guns.

A cottage industry has cropped up around the phenomenon of his shifting views. One online entrepreneur created a small business out of it. President Flip Flops. The webstore literally sells sandals with a Trump tweet on the left shoe contradicted by a Trump tweet on the right shoe, including gems such as: his claim that the Electoral College was a “disaster for a democracy”; followed by an online post hailing the Electoral College as “actually genius” after he won the election. His tweet citing an “extremely credible source” with rumors about Barack Obama; followed by a warning to his followers: “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’… If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.” Or his message urging the Obama administration, “DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA” because it would be “VERY FOOLISH”; followed by a tweet praising “our great military” for doing “so well in the Syria attack,” which he ordered.

The inconsistencies remind me of something a pollster friend once told me. She explained what she called “the fact-problem test.” It was a simple way to determine whether a candidate’s “views” were resonating with voters, creating a strong and trusted brand. Ronald Reagan was a high scorer. For instance, you could give a 1980s voter a fake political scenario about any major topic and then ask, “What would Reagan’s position be on this matter? X, Y, or Z?” The voter would respond without hesitating. “Z.” Reagan communicated his views clearly and acted decisively, so people knew where he stood.

Imagine voters receiving the same fact-problem test for Donald Trump. “What would Trump’s position be on this matter? X, Y, or Z?” Fill in whatever scenario you want. Let’s say the issue was health care, abortion, trade with China, or guns. I pity the voter who would give a confident answer. Because Trump has flip-flopped on all of them.

He repeatedly called for a “full repeal” of Obamacare as president, and ripped Republicans in Congress for failing to deliver; later, after hanging them out to dry, he said he didn’t want a full repeal. He wanted to keep parts of it. He has long said he is “pro-choice,” but later while running for president, that he was so deeply “pro-life” that he believed “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Trump said China’s government should be labeled a “currency manipulator” and held accountable; then later, “They’re not currency manipulators”; and then later, they were “historic” (!) currency manipulators. He ranted that “gun control legislation is not the answer!”; then toyed with the idea of supporting it as president; then got lectured by the National Rifle Association and backed away; then tweeted after shootings in Ohio and Texas about “serious discussions” with Congress on gun control legislation; then backed off his pronouncements again. By the time you read this, the president may have flip-flopped on these issues several more times.

The brilliant Abigail Adams, one of our earliest First Ladies and a leader in her own right, once said, “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” Donald Trump’s problem is he never lands on a final position. His points of view are in constant conflict and liable to change for no reason whatsoever, and certainly not from thoughtful deliberation.

No president in recent history has come into the Oval Office with such a mishmash of ideas and opinions than its current occupant. Ideologically, the Trump White House is like an Etch A Sketch. Every morning the president wakes up, shakes it, and draws something. It might be the same sketch as yesterday. Sometimes it’s totally different or impossible to figure out. Nonetheless, he will call a top lieutenant to talk about his drawing, and the entire day will feel like a séance, with officials huddling to divine the mysterious squiggly lines and pretending they represent something meaningful.

Should we care if a president doesn’t really stand for anything with consistency? One who is so easily influenced by whomever he happens to speak to last—a cable show host, a member of Congress he likes, his daughter? A president’s views on public issues are everything. The opinions he expresses inform the actions of his administration, congressional priorities, and most important of all, public support and trust. How can any of us be comfortable with a president having “fake views,” which change by the moment?

This chapter is addressed to Republicans in particular. The GOP purports to be the party of principles, so you should be alarmed that our figurehead’s philosophy is not “stick to ideals”—but to throw them at the wall and “see what sticks.” If his flip-flopping is any indication, he prioritizes convenience, not conviction. Add this to the list of absurdities inside the Trump administration, a list that’s so long it makes the side effects on prescription drug commercials sound appealing by comparison.

In fairness to the president, there’s a lot of bullshit in government. People change direction with the political winds all the time to make sure they’re on the “right side” of an issue. They don’t want to be out of step with the public, or their base, or their party. That’s politics. Sometimes it’s actually admirable when a leader considers new information and adjusts preconceived views. That is not Donald Trump. He changes his views without explanation yet somehow convinces diehard Republicans that he possesses a fixed set of beliefs and an ideology, when he does not. He has fooled them into thinking he is a conservative, when he is not. They expect he will be unfailingly loyal to their causes, when he will not.

Trump defenders are bound to disagree. Some have proclaimed him the greatest president since Reagan, while others striving for the preposterous have called him the best since Lincoln. He encourages the comparison. “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party,” he tweeted in July 2018. “That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. There must be something wrong, please recheck that poll!” This is the same man who proudly declared on the White House lawn, “I am the Chosen One,” gesturing knowingly toward the heavens in front of a gaggle of reporters. He said he was teasing, but he wasn’t. Such is the self-perception of Donald J. Trump.

Supporters cite a host of conservative victories under Trump, from judicial appointments to regulatory changes. Admittedly, on those points they have a case. He has advanced a number of conservative goals in ways thought unimaginable before his election. Consider the Supreme Court, which has a stronger conservative bench, or the burdensome red tape that has been slashed on his watch, to the relief of American businesses. Add to it the changes to our insane tax code, which have put more money in Americans’ pockets.

Alas, these successes often had little to do with the president’s leadership. The credit usually belongs to Republicans in Congress or top aides to the president, who have persuaded him to stick with the program. When he goes wobbly on issues, GOP leaders stage late-night or unplanned interventions, usually by phone.

I remember the morning he woke up and tweeted about the “controversial” vote set to take place in Congress on renewing the National Security Agency’s foreign wiretapping authorities. The president railed against the spy powers. He declared they were used “to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign.” We were blindsided. Up until that moment, the administration had been enthusiastically supporting the bipartisan legislation. The president’s flippant remarks threw the future of the bill—and crucial national-security tools—into doubt. Livid Republican leaders phoned the White House to explain the legislation. The president clearly didn’t understand, they said. The NSA’s spy tools were used to go after bad guys, not to monitor domestic political campaigns. Internally, there was a full-court press to get Trump to walk back his earlier comments. Two hours later, he did, tweeting favorably about the bill: “We need it! Get smart!”

Without these interventions, many times Donald Trump would have wandered into the political wilderness far from the Republican camp. It can take a while to get him to come around, his fear of disappointing “the base” most consistently keeps him in check. In the above case, the president definitely didn’t want the GOP to see him as weak on national security, which is why he reversed himself. This should be only a temporary comfort to worried Republicans. Because the base will not matter to Trump if he is reelected in 2020.

The Grand Old Party

Like the rest of the country, members of the Republican Congress didn’t take Donald Trump seriously at first. But as he gained steam, they went from agitated to petrified. No one was more concerned than House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan once pledged to transform the GOP from a party of “opposition” under eight years of President Obama to a party of “proposition,” as he put it, churning out conservative ideas for fixing America. He spent months crafting new policy proposals—from fighting poverty to fixing health care—that he hoped would be embraced by the Republican nominee in 2016. Then Donald Trump showed up.

With the New York businessman on a glide-path to clinching the nomination, the Speaker adjusted course. He was unsure whether the candidate was a real conservative. Would Trump support Republican policies, or sell them all down the river once he was elected? His record showed he was more of a political opportunist than anything. Ryan called a closed-door meeting of his colleagues. They had to box in Donald Trump with their soon-to-be-published GOP agenda. Every elected Republican needed to promote it, he said, which would send a clear message to the candidate: If you win the election, this is the party you will be leading and this is what it stands for. Don’t buck us. As one attendee later retold the story, Ryan looked at his colleagues across the table and said with total assurance: “This is the Trump inoculation plan.”

The “Grand Old Party” got its nickname just after the Civil War, an honorific meant to acknowledge its role in saving the Union and ending slavery. The party was founded on the idea that government’s role in society should be limited and the freedom of the people should be maximized. The federal bureaucracy had responsibility in certain areas, they believed—trade relationships and national defense among them—but most power should devolve to states and the people themselves.

The GOP’s foundations were built on what is known as classical liberalism. Before liberal was a term associated with Democrats, it meant something very different. Classical liberalism developed over hundreds of years. In a nutshell, it posited that people should be allowed to conduct their lives however they wanted, as long as they didn’t violate someone else’s liberty. Government existed for the sole purpose of preserving freedom and protecting people from each other. Anything beyond that was government overreach. It became a central belief of classical liberals that individuals are far better positioned to make their own decisions than government is for them; the more control they have over their lives, the more prosperous their societies will be.

Whatever else came to be associated with the GOP, these beliefs were at its core. It is the party’s heritage. That was the idea, anyway. Like any group, the Republican Party has evolved. Sometimes it has been more “populist,” reacting to the whims of the people and supporting a broader sphere of government action in society, and other times more “libertarian,” veering closer to a strict interpretation of its founding principles of limited government.

When Donald Trump came onto the GOP scene, party leaders were concerned about whether he supported, or even understood, the conservative movement. With good reason. Over the last three decades, Trump has changed his political party registration five times. He has been a member of the Independence Party, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a registered independent, and then decided he was a Republican again. I doubt during any of these switches that he did much “studying up” on the philosophical identity of each group.

GOP members had a right to be circumspect. In 2004, Trump confessed to CNN, “In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat.” In 2007, he praised Hillary Clinton and said, “Hillary’s always surrounded herself with very good people,” adding, “I think Hillary would do a good job [as president].” Incredibly, as a Republican presidential candidate in 2015, Trump again repeated that he identified “as a Democrat” on key issues like the economy. In the years up to that point, he donated to the biggest Democrats at all levels of government—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Anthony Weiner, John Kerry, and Harry Reid. He gave money to Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe, and Eliot Spitzer. It was only after he started to get serious about running for president as a “Republican” that he gave money primarily to Republican candidates.

Trump is not the only president in the modern era to have switched sides. Ronald Reagan famously changed from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, but the change was driven by principle, and the change stuck. He didn’t sway back and forth, again and again. It would be tough for anyone to claim Donald Trump flipped parties on “principle” like Reagan.

Some have sought to dig into Trump’s ideological evolution, figuring out what changed or who inspired him to become a Republican. I’ll spare them the needless waste of effort. Donald Trump became a conservative when it became politically convenient for him. I have no doubt he would have become the raucous rising star of the Democratic Party, too, if that looked like a shorter path to the Oval Office. Either way, he did with his belief system what he did with any Trump product. He outsourced it for low-cost manufacturing to someone else, then slapped his name on it. A handful of hired minions gave him the bare-bones requirements of a “conservative” platform. And he covered it with gaudy gold plating to make it his own.

This realization—of a wolf in elephant’s clothing—dawned on Republican commentators one by one during the 2016 primaries. The most prominent defenders of the conservative faith warned the rest of the GOP that Trump was an apostate. David McIntosh, the head of the conservative Club for Growth, said the candidate was not a “free-market conservative.” Rush Limbaugh blasted Trump’s support for bloated entitlement programs, engaging in a rhetorical back-and-forth with himself on the air, “Can somebody point to me the conservative on the ballot? What do you mean, Rush? Are you admitting Trump is not a conservative? Damn right I am!” The late columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism—a return to less and smaller government.”

I had my own misgivings like any of them. I watched as Trump spent more time mocking other candidates than he did on substance. The debates became little more than schoolyard brawls when he jumped in. When he did talk about what he stood for, it was often anathema to GOP principles, from his views on socialized medicine to a large federal role in education. I was especially concerned and surprised by Trump’s views on the economy, which were far more “interventionist” than the policies the Republican Party had been promoting in recent years.

Donald Trump was not coming off as a conservative, because he wasn’t. That’s why Republicans tried to erect ideological “roadblocks” to his nomination by pointing out the candidate’s sharp deviations from the GOP platform. Those roadblocks did little to stop a man who wasn’t driving on the same road. He won primary after primary. Speaker Ryan went forward with his backup option, releasing a platform designed to lock the nominee into accepting Republican orthodoxy. Trump largely ignored that, too, and plowed on toward Election Day victory. The Republicans’ “inoculation plan” failed. Indeed, it never stood a chance.

The Wolf in Elephant’s Clothing

With the full powers of the Executive Office of the President, Donald Trump has turned the GOP into a mess of contradictions. He confounds party leaders daily with errant statements and conflicting positions. But his actions on the topics nearest and dearest to the GOP—the size of government, national defense, and economic policy—are what is most noteworthy. On balance, the president’s handling of those issues has been a net negative for the party and the country.

Big, Beautiful Government

For all President Trump’s talk these days about Democrats trying to make America socialist, the reality is that he is the king of big government. The federal bureaucracy is just as large, centralized, careless with spending, and intrusive under Donald Trump as it was when Barack Obama was in office. In many cases, it’s bigger. This is an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters. Rather than hew to traditional conservative beliefs about a limited federal role, Trump has allowed government to balloon. He’s especially vexed when we inform him the government will never be large enough or powerful enough to execute his spontaneous propositions.

The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left. Credit for the remarkable downward trend goes to congressional Republicans, who forced a standoff with the White House in 2011. They demanded a budget deal that would bring the deficit under control. The result was the Budget Control Act, a law that slashed federal spending, put strict annual limits on future expenditures, and placed a cap on the government’s “credit card.” It was considered the conservative “Tea Party” movement’s crowning achievement.

Donald Trump was not interested in penny-pinching. He may try to project the image of a man working to save taxpayer dollars, and it’s true that he can be talked out of stupid ideas if they cost too much. But that’s not because he’s trying to save money so it can go back to the American people. He still wants to spend the money, just on things in which he’s personally interested, such as bombs or border security. Trump recoils at people who are “cheap.” Today he is sparing no expense on the management of the executive branch, spending so freely it makes the money-burning days of the Trump Organization look like the five-dollar tables at a Vegas casino. As a result, the budget deficit has increased every single year since Donald Trump took office, returning to dangerous levels. The president is on track to spend a trillion dollars above what the government takes in annually.

Just look at 2019. The president proposed a record-breaking $4.7 trillion budget. That’s how much he suggested the federal government spend in a single year. Since Trump took office, the US debt—much of which we owe to other countries that we borrow from—has grown by the trillions, to another all-time high of $22 trillion total. To pay off our debts today, according to one estimate, each taxpayer in the United States would need to fork over an average of $400,000. This should set off fiscal tornado sirens across America. We cannot keep borrowing money we can’t pay back, otherwise our children will owe a steep and terrible price.

The president also decided to throw the old spending limits out the window. He didn’t want to be holding a credit card that would easily max out. So in a deal cut with Nancy Pelosi, he effectively scrapped the conservatives’ treasured Budget Control Act and increased spending limits by more than $300 billion annually, adding another $2 trillion to America’s debt over the next decade. It’s difficult to capture the significance of this reversal. If President Obama had hatched a similar plan with a GOP House Speaker, Republicans would have been livid.

Conservatives should view this as complete and utter betrayal. Trump promised to do the opposite on federal spending. During the presidential campaign, he said he would eliminate America’s debt during his time in office. That’s right—eliminate it. How he was going to repay trillions in debt during such a short window was never fully explained. But that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t true. He said it to appease worried conservatives and to assure them that he was “one of them,” a budget hawk who wanted to cut spending. More “fake views.” Astoundingly, instead of a mutiny against President Trump, GOP congressmen whistled past the graveyard as they went to cast their votes on his disastrous budget deal, proving yet again that Trump has a Darth Vader chokehold on weak-willed Republicans.

Donald Trump has America back on the road to bankruptcy, an area where he has unparalleled expertise for a president of the United States. The small band of fiscal conservatives who remain in the Trump administration warned the president about the eventual dangers of his out-of-control spending addiction. In one such meeting, Trump reportedly said, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” I never heard him say those words, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. That’s how he thinks. What does he care if the federal government goes belly-up? By then it won’t be his problem.

Trump also promised on the campaign trail to slash the bloated federal workforce. That, too, appears to have been a head fake. The number of government employees hasn’t shrunk much at all under Donald Trump. In fact, as of the second half of 2019, the federal workforce was on the rise again, to its largest levels since the end of the Obama administration. The president hasn’t made the issue a priority in his engagement with Congress, despite countless opportunities to bring it up in budget negotiations.

Trump has worked hard in the meantime to make the executive branch even more active, not less. While he’s cut regulations, he’s also issued a flurry of executive orders to bypass Congress and its elected representatives. Trump attacked Obama for doing the same, calling it “a basic disaster” and undemocratic. “We have a president that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place,” he said. “Why is Barack Obama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” That was before Trump himself took office. Now he issues orders at a rate rivaling his Democratic predecessors. In his first three years, Bill Clinton issued 90 executive orders. In that same time period, Barack Obama issued 110. Donald Trump issued 120 before his third year was over.

The Trump administration is not a rewarding place for a fiscal conservative to work. Our attempts to get the president to care have mostly failed. Saving money is usually boring to him. When he gets interested in ending what he determines are wasteful programs—which for him are very specific initiatives like environmental projects he’s been told about or dollars sent to a country he’s angry with—he doesn’t understand why the initiatives cannot be stopped with a finger snap. People remind him again that it requires consistent attention and time. He has to work with Congress. But that’s too much effort. A few of us held out hope that as another election rolled around he’d get more interested in reducing spending and runaway agency budgets in order to satisfy conservatives. Instead he made a quick deal with Speaker Pelosi because it was easier and it gave him more cash. The callous trade was a tombstone placed atop our budget-balancing daydreams.

For a man who loves “big” things, Trump wanted his government the same way. This should not be a surprise.

Indefensible Defense

On defense and homeland security, the story appears better on the surface. The president has increased military spending (albeit at the cost of heaping piles of debt). He has focused on modernizing US forces and raising pay for our troops. And he has made securing the country and the border one of the highest priorities of his presidency.

In reality, Trump has been a disaster for the Pentagon. He refers to leaders of the military not as nonpartisan defenders of the republic, but as “his generals,” whom he can move around as he pleases, like knights on a chess board. It’s tough to listen to him talk like this. Some of these leaders have lost children in the defense of the nation. They have answered the knock at the door from men and women standing there to tell them the most heart-wrenching news a parent can hear, that their child is gone forever. Yet they are on the receiving end of orders barked by a man who cowered at the thought of military service. The patriots who are still in uniform will not come out and say it because they don’t want to openly disagree with their commander in chief, but many are appalled by Trump’s lack of decorum and his imprudent leadership of the armed forces.

Time and again, he has put our armed forces in a terrible position by trying to pull the military into political debates or using it to demonstrate his own toughness. This began before he entered office. As a candidate, Trump suggested the military and intelligence agencies embrace torture as a tactic against America’s enemies, vowing, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Analysts pointed out that such statements are used by terrorists for propaganda, helping them recruit supporters by touting America’s supposed cruelty. It feeds their narrative, putting US forces in danger overseas. Fortunately, the president was persuaded to drop the subject early in his term by the incoming team, who realized Trump’s flip-flopping would impact national defense most of all.

The damage the president has done to our security is a consequence of his terrible foreign policy choices, an area where Trump’s instincts are so backward that we will devote an entire chapter to addressing them. For now, take Iran as an example. President Trump took office eager to meet face-to-face with Iran’s leaders, who run one of the most anti-American governments in the world. “Anytime they want,” he said. No preconditions. This is something a US president has never done, for good reason. Iran’s government has the blood of American soldiers on its hands. They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Giving them an audience with the leader of the free world would put them on equal footing and be priceless media fodder for their use back home. It would also demonstrate to Iranian dissidents that America was embracing the brutal regime, not opposing it. Donald Trump didn’t understand or care about any of that, and military leaders’ stomachs churned at the president’s offer.

Then Trump’s views began to change. He witnessed Iran’s hostile behavior and recognized appeasement wasn’t the best course of action. His internal pendulum swung hard in the other direction. After Iran shot down an American surveillance drone in June 2019, the president wanted a super-muscular response. Pentagon officials warned against escalation with Tehran, but Trump reportedly called for a military strike anyway. When warplanes were in the air ten minutes out from the target, he apparently decided to call it off, caving to the advice of skeptics including Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Only a few weeks later, the pendulum swung again. He was back to suggesting to aides that he might sit down with Iran’s leaders in a face-to-face meeting, which many of us believed would be a colossal mistake. Trump teased the possibility of a G7 meeting in France.

When Trump’s flip-flopping is about something like new army uniforms (“very expensive,” he once lamented, but on the other hand, “beautiful”), it is exhausting. When it’s about air strikes, it’s terrifying. The president’s impetuousness poses a danger to our military, the full extent of which will not be known for years. He is more than a minor headache for the Pentagon. He is a blinding migraine. Those who have served at the highest levels of the Pentagon, who have sat with Trump in moments of decision, know all too well. On a weekly basis, they shield men and women in uniform from the knowledge, as best they can, of just how undisciplined the commander in chief is above them and how he treats the US military like it’s part of a big game of Battleship. Our warriors risk everything to venture into the darkest corners of the world to hunt those who would do us harm. They deserve better for their inviolable code of duty than a man lacking a basic moral compass.

It’s scary how we, his appointees, have become accustomed to this. I once walked out of a meeting with the president, and a visibly shaken briefer, who was new to the Trump circus, pulled me aside.

“Are you kidding me?” he remarked. Moments earlier Trump expressed a spur-of-the-moment reversal about a military mission. He wanted to go another direction, and his change of heart was followed by a presidential order to act, straightaway.

“What should we do?” the briefer asked nervously. “He wants us to scrap everything the agency was planning.”

“Relax,” I assured him. “We aren’t going to do anything. I swear he’ll change his mind tomorrow.”

I was wrong. The president changed his mind later that afternoon.

Then there is homeland security. For conservatives, this is a subset of “defense” and the government’s overall obligation to protect its citizens. For President Trump, it is a centerpiece of his agenda. He ran on the promise to bring the border under control and to support agents on the frontlines. Of all the random issues he brings up unprompted in meetings and events, the award for biggest Trump non sequitur goes to “The Wall.”

It’s a running joke in the White House that one of the worst jobs in the administration belongs to the poor souls charged with designing the president’s border wall. Trump, of course, talks about the wall all the time with a gleam in his eye. Running for president, he vowed that he would build “a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively… And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” He admonished rival candidate Jeb Bush for talking about border fencing: “It’s not a fence, Jeb. It’s a WALL, and there’s a BIG difference.”

I have to admit, it’s knee-slappingly hilarious to watch Trump tackle this issue. In late 2015, he said his wall would “be made of hardened concrete… rebar and steel.” At one point in 2017, he proposed that the wall be solar powered to generate clean electricity. A month later, he said that “you have to be able to see through it.” The wall was no longer a concrete slab, but “a steel wall with openings.” Then the wall became “artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in 2018, the president claimed he could have “a steel wall—or it could be a steel fence—but it will be more powerful than any of the concrete walls that we’re talking about.” At the end of 2018 he said “an all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media,” only to tweet less than a week later that “We are now planning a Steel Barrier rather than concrete.” Midway through 2019, he flipped again, touting the “brand-new” “high steel and concrete Wall” that he’d already built and previewed that there was much more to come.

Officials would come out of meetings on the subject looking like they’d stepped off the Gravitron at the county fair. The president was constantly changing the design. Ten feet high or fifty feet high? Electric fence or not electric fence? He couldn’t make up his mind, officials complained. They were pulling their hair out in frustration. Trump’s shifting preference in aesthetics seemed to be matched only by his shifting explanations for the construction timeline. At various times, Trump told us construction was under way, then he said Democrats were stopping the wall from being built altogether, then that Congress needed to act, then that his critics were wrong and so much wall was being built, then that the courts were standing in the way, and then—never mind all of that about Congress and the courts—he could build it alone and “we’ll have the whole [border] sealed up” by the end of 2020.

Here’s the truth. Trump has barely built any wall, and his policies have been a thorough failure when it comes to border security. By all accounts, most of what the president has built is replacement of old fences at the border. If there are really hundreds of miles of new wall on the way, as he nervously promises voters, experts say it still won’t solve the problem. Even with a giant concrete wall (or steel fence, or concrete-steel wall-fence) across the entire border, migrants can still come to our border and file for protected status. Then they are let into the United States for years while their cases are reviewed. That is what Republicans begged Trump to address, but instead of using his political capital to fix the broken laws, he fixated on one of his favorite pastimes—a construction project. The result is that the system will remain broken well past his presidency.

In the process of bungling border security, Donald Trump has obliterated America’s reputation as a nation of immigrants. This is a deeply Republican, conservative, classical liberal conception—that the United States is a refuge for those seeking a better life. Such was the condition of the republic at the moment of its founding and ever since. The United States was molded by people who left home in faraway places, by idealistic risk takers and hard workers who fought the odds to reach a literal new world. Our republic was not rooted in “blood and soil.” It was rooted in a shared aspiration for a fresh start. However, not being a man of history, Trump never adopted this view.

A shocked aide walked out of a meeting in the Oval Office one day, came to my office, and recounted an anecdote about a conversation with the president. They’d been meeting on another topic, when Trump off-roaded onto a tangent about immigration, complaining about the number of people crossing the border.

“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” he told his listeners, briefly attempting a Hispanic accent. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

The handful of attendees in the room shifted uncomfortably in their chairs but said nothing, the aide reported. They didn’t even know what to say. This is how the president of the United States thinks and speaks about people who would give their lives (and sometimes do) to reach America. Whenever these quotes find their way to the press, a mid-level communications staffer is dispatched to say Trump was joking. I assure you he isn’t.

No matter what his supporters will tell you, no matter what some appointees will try to convince you of, Donald Trump is anti-immigrant. He might be in a meeting about missile defense, but inside he is probably thinking about his wall… about shutting down immigration to the United States… about the Mexicans. Of the latter, he said, “They’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Imagine how that makes an entire population of Mexican-Americans feel. Sadly, you hear little repudiation of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric from his homeland security officials, who appear to be living in a dazed state of Stockholm syndrome.

The president has also weighed the idea of dropping the number of foreign refugees admitted into the United States—which tend to be people fleeing persecution from poor, non-white countries—down to zero. Yes, you read that correctly: zero… zilch… nada. He already slashed the number to historic lows. In the meantime, he’s announced a host of tight restrictions on potential new immigrations, including the imposition of a wealth test. I wonder if, in all his years in New York, Trump ever saw the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which read in part: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” If he did, it didn’t mean anything to him.

The bottom line for Republicans is this: The United States can have an open door without having “open borders,” but we cannot preserve the country we love by slamming that door in the faces of those who most aspire to join our nation.

Trading Away Principles

The president’s biggest abdication of conservative policies is in the realm of economics. Republicans have long stood for free trade, believing the open exchange of goods is a fundamental right. The United States is more prosperous than any nation in history because of it. However, Donald Trump is a dogged protectionist. He has created new barriers to trade, justified by an inverted view of economics that has been discredited for hundreds of years.

Fundamentally, Trump does not understand how trade works. When experts try to explain it to him, he either half listens or only hears what he wants to hear. What he wants to hear, of course, is that his trade wars with other countries are a brilliant move and a big success. His favorite weapon in these economic conflicts is the tariff. The president believes adding fees to incoming foreign goods “will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country.” We’ve endured years of him spewing this false notion.

Many experts know this is crazy. Why would a president deny Americans the opportunity to pay less for their products? Why would he purposefully make the goods they buy more expensive? As one economist explained, it should be in the public interest “in every country” to let the people “buy whatever they want from those who sell it cheapest… The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it.” This wasn’t a recent observation. It was the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, writing in the 1700s. His point is more relevant than ever.

To understand how far off the reservation the president has gone, you have to look at the world through his soda straw. Trump believes placing a tariff—or tax—on incoming goods will make us rich. Let’s say he imposed a 20 percent tariff on sweaters from India. In Trump’s mind, that means for every thirty-dollar sweater shipped from India, we will collect six dollars in fees, meaning the Indians basically would be paying us to buy their sweaters. Sounds good, right? It gets better. With the resulting higher price of sweaters, US companies can afford to get back into the sweater business, and they start competing with India because the fee only applies to foreign products. So they can sell them at a slightly lower cost to Americans. The result is new jobs in the US sweater industry. Win-win for America!

Not so fast. This infantile logic has been repeated for ages, despite Adam Smith’s timeless words. Here is what really happens. As soon as the tariff is placed on sweaters, the extra cost will be passed to consumers. The Indians won’t pay the six dollars, Americans will pay for it. Those same Americans will be forced to spend more money on clothing than they were before. Multiply that across the country and that’s billions and billions of dollars extra they will have to spend on sweaters, and less on other products they need. Sure, some US companies will be incentivized to start making sweaters, creating low-paying jobs. But what will go unnoticed is the impact everywhere else—the billions of dollars other companies will lose because Americans are spending it on something they shouldn’t be. Better-paying jobs will disappear elsewhere.

The economics are painfully obvious. Tariffs don’t work. They are just a massive tax on Americans, robbing them of their hard-earned money. Regrettably, no living human has been able to help the president see this reality. Believe me, many among us have tried. His convoluted view of economics is beyond repair.

The debate has created schisms within the team. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has fought behind closed doors for a level-headed approach to tariffs. He has recommended against some of the arbitrary and sudden moves made by the president. Mnuchin has also repeatedly attempted to ease panic in private industry by downplaying the trade wars, only to be rebuked by advisors at the White House for supposedly speaking out of turn. Folks such as Peter Navarro have seen their stock with Trump rise for cheerleading his actions, although they still privately admit frustration because there’s no telling whether he’ll change his mind at any given moment and raise fees further without a plan. As with any other issue, the reasonable voices are being sidelined.

Conservatives must admit this is “back-door” big government. Trump helped push a major tax-cut bill through Congress in 2017, but the consequences of his tariffs will cost the American people more than the money they saved from the legislation, according to estimates. This is a sneaky and contemptible way for the president to raise taxes without people realizing it. Trump knows this is the case. He’s already talked with aides about how he’ll spend the extra money from his tariff taxes. In a news conference, he also threw around the possibility that some of it might be spent on disaster response. Tomorrow, it might be an addition to the White House or extra border wall, who knows.

I am not making the argument that there are no circumstances which warrant limitations on, or the cessation of, trade with foreign countries. Throughout our history, there have been points in which we’ve decided it’s not in America’s interest to trade with certain nations, particularly when we are engaged in armed conflict against an aggressor. I’ve argued to fellow Trump administrational officials that governments such as China do not deserve to have access to certain US goods, which could allow them to spy on their people or gain a competitive military edge. But we must also recognize that free trade is one of our most potent weapons to lift people out of poverty and empower them to take control over their destinies, rather than allowing autocrats to dictate their future.

The larger concern here at home is that, as he ratchets up his trade wars, the president could trigger a recession and wreck the economy. Deep inside he must share this concern. It’s probably one of the reasons he lashes out at agency heads and advisors who have warned him about the consequences of high tariffs. In the meantime, Trump is acting like a dictator. At one point, he tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” That’s not how a democratic system works, Mr. President. You can’t “order” American companies where to make their products. The markets have been spooked by his increasingly unhinged behavior on the matter, and top CEOs have warned the president he needs to reverse course.

It might be too late. Trump’s anti-trade actions are hurting Americans at this very moment. Estimates show the economy has already lost hundreds of thousands of jobs because of his trade war. If Trump continues down this path, the prices on everything from phones to furniture will go up further. Every industry will ultimately be impacted by the ripple effects. Farmers, manufacturers, you name it. Other countries are retaliating already with their own tariffs, which magnifies the problem. Working-class and poor Americans will be hit hardest. They are the ones who rely on low prices to run households where there is little margin for financial error. If Trump continues to live in an economic Twilight Zone, these people will be forced to work longer hours and extra jobs just to make ends meet.

Trade should not be used as a weapon of war in times of peace. It’s a war that everyone loses. It’s time for the GOP to see the light. The president’s economic policies are bad for Americans, contrary to conservative principles, and cruel—not unlike their architect.

Party’s Over

After Mitt Romney’s failure to unseat President Obama in 2012, the Republican Party had a come-to-Jesus moment. How could we have lost the election? It seemed so obvious to the GOP leadership that Barack Obama was out of touch with mainstream America. In their eyes, the election should have been a cakewalk. But Romney got walloped 332–206 in the Electoral College. It was clear that the Republicans were the ones who were out of touch. Those who know Mitt believed he would have been a capable leader, but he was unable to connect with the broader swath of the electorate that he needed.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) commissioned an election “autopsy report.” The results were stark. Released four months after voting day, the hundred-page document highlighted the party’s problems with minorities, women, and young people. It said conservative policies had strong foundations but needed to be recast for new audiences. Republicans should bring more people under the tent, the authors wrote, but instead they were ostracizing them.

“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” the document declared. “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” The report urged Republicans to focus on “broadening the base of the Party,” especially being more inclusive of “Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans”—and especially female voters, whom the party was failing to recruit. The findings were released at a press conference by RNC chairman Reince Priebus. Three years later, Reince, of course, would become Trump’s first White House chief of staff.

If you’ve been at least half-conscious during the Trump presidency, you probably know the president has followed virtually none of this advice. In fact, it seems as if he’s deliberately written a counter-playbook, flagrantly dismissing the RNC’s recommendations and alienating the populations the GOP needs to reach. On Donald Trump’s watch, the party has become less fiscally conservative, more divisive, less diverse, more anti-immigrant, and less relevant. In the meantime, he has saddled the Republican brand with uniquely noxious baggage, leaving others to manage a “big-tent” party that will eventually have few people left under its canopy.

How did this happen, you ask? Well, if there’s a theme to Trump’s life—in politics, business, or family—it’s that he’s disloyal. Republicans gave the keys to the kingdom to a man who paid hush money to shut up a porn star he’d been sleeping with while married to his third wife, who’d recently given birth to their son. Are we surprised he’s run afoul of the party’s most cherished ideals? If elected to a second term, he will cheat on naive Republicans over and over again. When asked about whether he might end the disastrous tariffs to which he has wedded himself, the president unintentionally summed up his entire political philosophy: “Yeah, sure. Why not?… Might as well. I have second thoughts about everything.” Could it get more ironic than that? It did, when Trump backtracked on the comment itself.

Conservatives dreaming that Donald Trump is our savior need to wake up. Not only is he not a conservative, he represents a long-term threat to the Republican Party and what it purports to stand for. He is redefining us to a degree that makes our platform incoherent. Those cheering him on to a second term—with foaming-at-the-mouth excitement that he is “totally owning” the Left—are unknowingly nailing coffins into the GOP, cementing an end to the party as we know it and taking us into inhospitable territory.

Let me put a finer point on it. If Republicans believe the president’s handling of their core issues is acceptable, then there is nothing left of the party but its name. Yes, there are still lone-ranger conservatives trying to advance traditional GOP causes from inside the administration, but Trump’s leadership of the party (or lack thereof) will be what’s remembered, not the cleanup job of his lieutenants.

The president’s betrayal of the conservative faith may not be problematic for some reading this book. You might be comfortable with larger bureaucracies, debt spending, or protectionist economics. That’s your prerogative. But the president has transformed the long arm of government into a wrecking ball to go after something else much more fundamental than the GOP agenda. Every American, regardless of political affiliation, should pay attention.