For a long time, I couldn’t understand people’s infatuation with Donald Trump. At first it seemed like it would be a fad, he would blow onto the scene and die out before the new year. Now, the Primary season is here and Trump's popularity has yet to falter. When speaking to my family and friends about Trump’s popularity, I would become visibly upset and frustrated.
Unlike most Millenials or college students today, the ones who you see throwing Bernie Sanders rallies or sharing female empowerment quotes on Facebook who despise everything and anything Donald Trump, my distain for Trump is very different.
It’s not that he’s “offensive” or politically incorrect, or that he’s “disrespectful towards women” or “anti-immigrant.” It is that in my personal, honest and humble opinion, he is not a true conservative.
Now, Donald Trump could have easily had change of heart when it came to his past political positions. He was a businessman, an entrepreneur, a reality TV star, and a real estate mogul. Unlike with traditional Republican politicians, rock-hard Constitutional and/or Judeo-Christian principles are by no means fundamental for success in those areas.
Most attacks on Trump by the right revolve around his donations to numerous Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton, his pro-choice past (including not banning partial birth abortions), as well as his support for eminent domain and an assault weapons ban, which he wrote about in his book, "The American We Deserve." But anyone can change and that includes Trump.
What makes Trump different, though, is that he’s running for President. While running for President, he has made no attempt to represent himself as a true conservative, especially if you understand what conservatism really is. He may claim to be one in name, even recently comparing himself to Ronald Reagan, but we evaluate public figures by their actions and, in the case of political candidates, their policies and ideas.
Trump is not running as a constitutional conservative, but as a progressive populist. His boisterous speeches and fiery rhetoric provokes people’s anger and frustration with the government and the political class. His supporters follow him like a cult of personality. Washington is full of stupid people, but Trump is supposedly going to go in, fire all the stupid people, and fix everything himself.
Obama’s overreaching use of executive orders was bad, according to Trump. He promises to overturn all of them, but then just write better ones.
My problem with Trump, or the Trump movement, is that many of them are the same people who stood with the Tea Party just a few years ago. These are the same people who prayed for true conservatives, who believed not only in the Constitution, but the structure of government that it created. They wanted to help return our country to the one that the Founding Fathers intended.
Donald Trump is not the person we prayed for when the Tea Party movement first started. We did not pray for an administrator, an executive to fix all of our problems for us. We did not pray for a man who thrives on his own image, personality, and successes, rather than humility.
As conservatives, we are often tasked with voting against our self interests. I’m a college student. College is expensive. I have student loans and that sucks, but I understand that it is not the government’s job to give me a free education. I’m entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a car, a house, a job, or higher education.
We are all angry with the current state of our country, our foreign policy, our immigration system, and our economy. It may be in my self interest to vote for someone who says that they can fix all of it, by any means necessary.
That’s who Trump is. That is populism. People in Washington are Stupid, but Trump is smart. That is progressivism.
But that's not who I am. That’s not what the conservative movement is. That’s not how the Constitution was framed. All things considered, when evaluating the Republican presidential candidates, I am going to vote for the one whose values and beliefs are most similar to mine. I will vote for the candidate who I believe will stand on principle, the candidate who will swear to protect the Constitution. I will vote for the candidate who understands that stupid people in government are not the problem, but that the government itself is the problem.
That candidate is not Donald J Trump.
