After this Op-Ed page published an anonymous Trump administration official praising themselves and others for trying to keep the powers of the presidency out of the actual president’s hands, I found myself nodding along to two kinds of essays about this inside-the-administration Resistance — even though they were making superficially opposing points, one against resistance, one in favor of it. The first sort of essay argued that by working to thwart a duly-elected president, the anti-Trumpers inside the administration aren’t saving democracy but subverting it — and setting us up for a bigger crisis down the road. Issues like free trade and foreign policy, where the anonymous op-ed writer vehemently disagrees with the president, “were hotly debated and thrashed out publicly in the campaign,” National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out, and “this adviser’s side arguably lost the popular debate.” When such a debate is fought and lost, The Federalist’s Ben Domenech wrote, the losers “should want the voters to reap the benefits of their bad (from their perspective) decisions: oh, so you want a trade war? Let’s do that then, and you’ll pay the price.”To choose internal subversion instead, Damon Linker complained in The Week, is to basically decide that if a conservative president is “an ideological heretic,” a non-Reaganite, he doesn’t get to govern on the agenda he put before the voters — which makes True Conservative ideological correctness “more important than honoring the outcome of a democratic election.”

Source: New York Times September 08, 2018 20:15 UTC