Trump Swears, Elites Panic—Voters Don’t Care

“We get a lot of bullsh*t thrown at us by Putin,” said Donald Trump the other day. This was news—not because Trump criticized Vladimir Putin, but because the American president used a vulgar word in public. 

Actually, it’s not news. Earlier, in expressing anger over the Iranians and the Israelis violating the cease-fire he had negotiated, Trump said both sides “don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” 

Past presidents have used profanity privately, but Trump breaks precedent by doing it in public. Richard Nixon, for example, was not above profane invective in the Oval Office. But until Trump, it was normal for presidents to honor the dignity of the office by not talking trash in public. 

Who can deny that this is a degeneration of standards? Certainly no conservative. But does it really matter anymore? In the grand scheme of things, probably not. 

Why? It’s true that many MAGA stalwarts would forgive Trump anything, such is their devotion. In the 2016 campaign, Trump said at a rally, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He was right, and everybody knew he was right. Trump was talking about his own cult of personality. 

Again, why doesn’t Trump’s absence of moral character relative to customary standards not matter so much to his supporters? Why do other populist politicians who break norms not lose the faith of their supporters?

In both Europe and the United States, populist politicians frequently endure accusations from mainstream political leaders, leaders of institutions, and intellectuals, calling them and their supporters corrupt and immoral.

To take a fresh example: in The Atlantic, a leading liberal U.S. magazine, the respected columnist David Brooks published yet another of his lamentations about Trump and the decline of character among his supporters. This time, though, he explained it using the work of the recently deceased moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Brooks says his account “tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.”

MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that the Enlightenment’s attempt to build morality on Reason alone failed. 

Nietzsche was the first great thinker to understand the implications of God’s death in the minds of modern men. It is no surprise that, out of the vacuum left by atheism grew the totalitarian ideologies of fascism, Nazism, and Communism. People cannot live for long without something to give them a sense of meaning, identity, purpose, and community. 

Brooks accepts all this. And he accepts that secular liberalism, allied to consumer capitalism, has greatly undermined any idea of a shared moral order by sacralizing the choosing individual. Further, Brooks concedes that if Trump were a man of the Left, progressives would cheer for him too. 

“Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition,” writes Brooks.

“So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent,” he continues. “He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create.”

Brooks is not entirely wrong here. What he misses, though, is the role institutional elites played in wrecking public confidence in their moral character and leadership.

In early 2016, Tucker Carlson published a powerful essay in Politico, titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.” Carlson, who was not really a Trump supporter at that point, addressed his argument to the Republican Party establishment. His basic argument was summed up in a headline within the essay: “He Exists Because You Failed”.

How did the GOP establishment fail? The country grew worse off under their leadership, in measurable ways—on immigration, on the Iraq War, on financial corruption in high places. 

Carlson adds that people respond to Trump because he was the first politician at his level to speak blunt truths. It was thrilling to hear him say politically incorrect things that most people believed to be true, but that nobody in the party establishments would dare to say. Trump didn’t care what people thought of him. The same bluntness led him to denounce the Iraq War in a 2016 GOP debate (the audience booed him) and to be honest about the problems of mass migration. 

When Trump first showed up on the political scene, a number of Evangelical Christian thought leaders denounced their fellow Evangelicals for supporting a man of such low character. Carlson wasn’t surprised. Evangelicals aren’t looking for a saint but a bodyguard against attacks on their freedoms.

Finally, Carlson observed that “Washington really is corrupt.” The same is true of the American establishment in general, as became crystal-clear as the Great Awokening spread like wildfire through institutions. Elites fell into line behind wokeness like good sheep. 

Even so-called “business Republicans” in corporate suites accepted the racism of DEI, and the madness of transgender ideology. There was hardly a major corporation in American life that didn’t throw money at Black Lives Matter and send its employees to march in Pride parades.

Then came COVID. We know now the kinds of lies and coercion that the health authorities and scientific institutions engaged in during that crisis. We did not know it then. COVID turned many Americans against the establishment, even with Trump in office. 

So: when compared to the moral and intellectual corruption of all the Good And The Great, of the authorities and the experts, is there any wonder that people prefer the kind of flaws in Donald Trump to the flaws of the elite class that hates him? 

This week, the Trump administration pulled the nomination of a Navy admiral to head the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Why? That admiral had permitted drag shows on board the aircraft carrier he commanded. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not comment, but the idea seems to be that a commanding officer who lacked the judgment to realize this kind of thing is absurd is not to be trusted with greater authority.

This is the kind of thing Trump supporters voted for. 

I have never seen the David Brookses of the world deal openly and in depth with the moral failures of their class. Maybe they don’t see themselves as having failed, or at least had no important failures. Brooks, who is a friend, is a thoughtful and intelligent man. He is not wrong to mourn the loss of the older moral world. But Donald Trump didn’t make that happen. Donald Trump found the ruins of that world in the gutter and built his career on it.

In Europe, Viktor Orbán is the favorite whipping boy of the Brussels elites. When I travel in Europe, when I speak with people who aren’t populists, and they find that I live in Hungary, they demand to know how anybody can support a monster like Orbán. Don’t you care about his rule of law violations, his busting of democratic norms? 

Well. Leaving aside the virtues of Orbán’s governance, one could easily say: Orbán exists because you failed. The people of Hungary want to be protected from the awful consequences of mass migration, which is wrecking the cities of Western Europe. They want their children to be protected from being propagandized into gender ideology by schools and the media, as children all over Western Europe are. 

The Great and the Good in Brussels and in European capitals have not done these things. In fact, they cannot conceive of a world in which their wisdom and good intentions aren’t accepted and cheered for.

David Brooks and I at least share dismay over the collapse of the moral order, in the sense that MacIntyre means. If fact, my 2017 book The Benedict Option was based on MacIntyre’s diagnosis. In it, I argued, with MacIntyre, that the old world is not coming back, and the best thing for people who wish to hold on to the old virtues to do is to form small, thick communities within which they can be lived during the turmoil to come.

It might not be the right answer, but at least it’s an answer. Like most establishment intellectuals, Brooks doesn’t have an answer. He writes:

We’re not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one hand and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.

It is pretty to think so, but it can’t be done. Or rather, you can pull this off in the salons of middle and upper middle class intellectuals, but the world beyond those cocoons has moved on. For better and for worse, the crises of our age require strong, decisive, commonsense leadership—precisely the opposite of what the establishment has produced in most Western liberal democracies.

If the price we have to pay to get that is a president or a prime minister who drops the f-bomb every now and then, so be it. The public wants protection. The elite offers platitudes. That’s why Trump wins.