Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden of the White House, April 2, 2025
As my colleague Bob Kuttner noted earlier this week, Wall Street Journal editorialists have been regularly chastising Donald Trump for his deviations from conservative orthodoxy, which almost nobody defends so faithfully as the Journal’s editorial scribes. But even the Murdoch minions must take second place when it comes to the care and feeding of paleoconservatism’s foundational beliefs. Their fiercer and more literate defender, today and for the past half-century, is George Will.
Both Will and the Journal agree that Trump has trampled one conservative axiom after another: free trade, opposition to entitlements, the freedom of established institutions (elite universities, major corporations, white-shoe law firms) to do as they please, and resistance to the growth of state and, most particularly, presidential powers. The Journal will periodically lump Trump’s misdeeds with what they see as the executive overreach of Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, though Will locates the original sin in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. (Neither really traces it back to Lincoln, where it rightly and quite justifiably belongs.)
This past Wednesday, Will delivered the Summa Theologica of the paleocon case against Trump, in a column sure to be remembered as a tour de force of blinkered argumentation. Will termed Trump’s administration “the most progressive in U.S. history,” not merely enumerating Trump’s various heresies, but also ascribing them to progressivism run amok and thereby exonerating conservatism from any responsibility for Trump’s tin-pot presidency.
The Will bill of progressive particulars included Trump’s belief in “government’s ability to anticipate and control the consequences of broad interventions in modern society’s complexities”; “presidential supremacy ensured by using executive orders to marginalize Congress”; and “constructing coalitions of government-dependent factions, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal did with the elderly (Social Security, 1935), labor (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act favoring unions) and farmers (the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act).” He further classifies as progressivism-gone-wild Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and his attempts to dictate university curricula.
That list comes complete with a host of problems, of course. Will doesn’t distinguish the means that Trump and progressives have used from the very disparate ends they’ve sought, but ends are just as essential in defining a politics as means are. Both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Trump’s current deportation program were, and are, government interventions into modern society’s complexities, but one was championed by progressives to create a more egalitarian America and the other by xenophobes to preserve the nation’s white majority and character.
Ends are just as essential in defining a politics as means are.
Presidents’ executive orders have served a host of disparate ends, but to depict Trump’s use of them as comparable to FDR’s fails on quantitative as well as qualitative grounds. Roosevelt signed nearly 80 congressionally passed bills during his first hundred days, thereby following the Constitution in creating the New Deal; Trump signed just five bills during his first hundred days, preferring instead to personalize power as Roosevelt did not. FDR was a Madisonian progressive, while Trump is the president against whom Madison warned us and sought to forestall with the Constitution’s separation of powers. And yes—Roosevelt and Congress did enable constituencies to receive government support, but that was because, in the depth of the Great Depression, those constituencies clearly needed that support to survive, and the nation needed the boost in purchasing power that those programs and other federal spending created to avoid lapsing into another depression.
As to Trump’s attempts to take over the arts and culture and the substance of education, these fall more neatly under the category of megalomania, or his affinity for the sultanate form of government, than under any previous presidential precedents, progressive or reactionary.
By his detachment of means from ends, and by failing to establish clear precedents even among the means, Will presents a picture of Trump that completely elides what the man and his presidency are about. Using the same methodology, one could have defined Hitler as a Keynesian, since he used deficit spending to build the autobahns, wage world war, and exterminate the Jews. That would have missed the mark in defining Hitler, however.
So, too, with Will’s characterization of Trump. If we entertain the thought that Trump’s policies do continue some entitlements (while also further enriching the rich) but seek to restrict them to the native-born, particularly the white native-born, while seeking to expel and suppress immigrants and nonwhites, we’re describing classic fascism, not progressivism. And if we look at the xenophobia and racism at the core of Trump’s policies—all refugees must go, save only South Africa’s Boers—we must note that kindred policies were defended and advanced by such conservative icons as William Buckley, and brought into the mainstream of American conservatism by Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, and Ronald Reagan. The ends of Trump’s policies, the affinities and hatreds of the MAGA faithful, build directly on these foundational aspects of modern American conservatism.
In Will’s binary world, however, you’re either a laissez-faire Friedmanite or a progressive. Deviate from the former and you’re ipso facto the latter. But there’s more to heaven and earth than has been cumulatively mislabeled in the worldview and work of George Will.
