Policy Trumps personality.

Former president Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Photo © 2024 Paul L. Gleiser)

There are people who claim to be Republicans but who steadfastly refuse to vote for Donald Trump. That number may have been greater in 2016 and 2020, but it is still a significant number.

Significant enough to perhaps constitute the critical difference in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

I have a good friend who is a perfect example. “What’s your problem with Trump?,” I ask him. “Character matters,” he says. “Donald Trump just isn’t a good guy.”

To which I say neither was Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton. I don’t disagree that character matters. But with respect to the presidency, policy matters more.

The republic has suffered little lasting harm from the philandering of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton. Though Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal did much to destroy the news industry, the Constitution nevertheless emerged intact. We survived Lyndon Johnson’s brutal crudeness. (Stories of Johnson summoning his secretary to take dictation while sitting on the toilet are not disputed.)

On the other hand, Jimmy Carter is one of the most decent men of the 45 who have ever held the office. Yet today’s boiling cauldron of trouble in the Middle East that is bringing us uncomfortably close to World War III is a holdover of Carter’s manifest weakness during the Iran hostage crisis – weakness that paralyzed American foreign policy while embarrassing the nation.

Roosevelt’s infidelity isn’t his legacy. His legacy is his New Deal that let the Big Government genie out of the bottle. The New Deal paved the way for ruinous social welfare policy that has, among its most pernicious effects, destroyed the nuclear black family – all while entrenching rather than reducing poverty.

The fact that Lyndon Johnson had to give up on reelection in 1968 was not because of his crudeness. It was because of his morally bankrupt Vietnam War policy that snuffed out the lives of 58,000 U.S. servicemen toward the accomplishment of no good purpose.

Donald Trump has personal deficiencies. I have expressed my concerns about them many times in this space.

But I would also offer that those deficiencies aren’t nearly as great as a hostile media relentlessly makes them out to be. And I’d further offer that Trump’s presidency was by and large a policy tour-de-force. The economy boomed, the border was secure and foreign adversaries minded their manners. All three have taken a 180 degree turn since Joe Biden took office.

My concerns about Trump’s personality flaws have always been driven solely by my concern as to their impact on his electability.

From a governance standpoint, I’d argue that Trump’s strong personality is more of a feature than a bug. Trump the Mega Alpha going toe-to-toe with Xi Jingping is an altogether more comforting thought than a similarly situated Kamala Harris.

The presidency is a tough job always but a particularly tough job now. The times, they are a cryin’ out for someone tough to hold it.

No one can argue that Trump isn’t tough.