The Ruin of Conservatism

For conservatives, the deal with Donald Trump is looking worse by the day.

Written by Bo Winegard.

About Donald Trump, they were right—the Never Trump Republicans. Supporting him is not worth it.

One of Nietzsche’s most cited aphorisms applies with eerie precision: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.” The monster was wokeness. Back then progressivism was regnant. Police were assailed and ridiculed. Racism, sexism and a thousand other isms were said to be everywhere. Scholars were fired for stating basic biological truths. An illiberal ideology pervaded the media and universities. In this hostile environment, conservatives made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump: Kill the monster and we will support you. But for many on the right, embittered by years of culture-war losses, even victory was not enough. The left had to be punished, had to suffer. Owning the libs became central to the MAGA movement. And thus conservatism began to mutate into a monster.

Of course, Trump’s fitness for office has always been dubious. In 2016, one could be excused for supporting him. He was brash and boorish—but also new and audacious. In an era of stifling political correctness, his freedom with language and willingness to speak candidly about taboo subjects, even if crudely, seemed refreshing. The Reaganite Republican party seemed obsolete, built for a different era with different challenges. Trump was the creative destroyer. What was strong and worth preserving would survive his chaos, while the rest would fall away in ruin.

But this is no longer plausible. Trump is not a creative destroyer who preserves what is great about the country. Rather, he is a malignant destroyer. And whatever is redemptive about him is dwarfed by the damage he inflicts on the country and on conservatism here and around the world. His narcissism, his ignorance, his impulsiveness and his pettiness are all disqualifying. If conservatives continue to support him, they will squander any moral credibility they have. Their appeals to religion, decency and family values will seem little more than hypocritical cant.

This was once something conservatives understood. Character is destiny. Trump is Trump as a lion is a lion. If you invite a lion into your mansion, it does not become a house cat. And if you embrace the lion, it might tear you apart. Certainly, Trump is tearing conservatism apart.

In just the past month, he has not merely advertised but paraded his uniquely pernicious personality and unfitness for office.

In mid-December, the beloved director Rob Reiner was tragically murdered by his own son. He was—it is true—a vocal, vehement and sometimes scurrilous critic of the President. But he was also an advocate of productive discourse and debate. Most people, even if they despised Reiner, would have recognized his murder as a tragedy and sent condolences. But not Trump. He blamed Reiner’s death on “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

The pettiness, bitterness and narcissism of this message is hard to fathom. It is unbecoming of a petulant teenager, let alone the leader of the free world. And of course, it is utterly indefensible.

A conservative who supports Trump might respond that such a statement is indecorous and regrettable but then accuse me of “pearl clutching” for caring about Trump’s vulgarity and casual cruelness. Indeed, for some Trump supporters, the cruelness is precisely the point. Unlike the “cuckservatives” who came before, Trump is unafraid to assail the delicate sensibilities of the liberal elite. If this means his rhetoric sometimes misses the mark or becomes hyperbolically cruel, so be it.

But such rhetoric has consequences. It encourages a more cruel and crass public discourse. Certainly conservatives, who have long expressed concerns about vulgarity on television and in the movies, and have long championed the importance of restraint and decorum, should not ignore this. Furthermore, like the moldering facade of a house, the ugly rhetoric suggests a deeper, more pervasive disorder inside.

With Trump, this more pervasive disorder is not exactly hidden. Take his most recent flirtation with annexing Greenland. The idea itself was not new. As far back as 2019, Trump had discussed acquiring the territory, while noting that it was not urgent. By 2025, a more emboldened Trump was apparently more ardent in his desire for Greenland. In a speech to the joint session of Congress in March he said:

We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it … We will keep you safe. We will make you rich. And together we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before.

People were mostly bemused by this, as it was unclear how serious Trump was. With Trump, irony, jest and earnestness are almost impossible to disentangle. But by December of 2025, talk of acquiring Greenland heated up again.

Katie Miller, wife to the White House deputy chief of staff, posted a tweet depicting Greenland covered in the American flag that read “Soon.” In an interview, Trump said that the US “does need Greenland, absolutely.” The White House told the BBC that “the president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chief's disposal”. Trump subsequently refused to rule out military force, and then threatened the EU with a 25% tariff unless Denmark ceded the territory.

Trump also sent a bizarre message to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre, in which he linked his desire for Greenland and lack of interest in peace to being denied the Nobel Peace Prize. He deserved this prize, he said, for stopping eight wars (which were not specified).

The threat of aggression against a longstanding ally finally provoked some push back from an ordinarily impotent congress, though it came with the typical evasions, such as blaming Trump’s advisors for bad advice rather than blaming Trump himself for reckless stupidity. This is how Trump must be approached, because for many people, Trump is infallible and his only weakness is that he is too tolerant with the inane ideas of those around him. The supposedly populist president behaves more like a mad king, capricious, ignorant and utterly unpredictable. The best way to persuade him is to flatter his insatiable ego.

At last, perhaps in response to the stock markets, Trump walked back his threats to acquire Greenland by force, citing a vague “framework of a future deal” with the NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte. By this point, though, the damage was surely done. Allies of the United States learned, yet gain, that so long as Trump is president, the US is an unreliable partner in world affairs. The small clearing in the Hobbesian jungle of foreign relations, once protected by the United States, shrank as the jungle returned. And for what gain? Nobody knows for sure, but probably nothing. Trump got no more than he had to begin with—and certainly no more than he could have got through standard diplomacy.

As if this were not enough, during his tantrum about the perfidy of the UN and NATO, he questioned whether the United States needed NATO:

We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that. And they did — they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.

Unsurprisingly, this insulted numerous allies, including the British, who lost hundreds of troops in Afghanistan while supporting the US. Indeed, even Trump may have recognized, or been compelled to pretend to recognize, that he went too far. He later praised the courage of British soldiers on Truth Social (though other nations’ sacrifices went entirely unmentioned).

Of all Trump’s myriad flaws, perhaps the most deleterious is his insistence on sycophantic loyalty. His administration is based almost entirely on personal devotion, not competence. Therefore, many of the characters around him are irascible, incompetent and dishonest.

What is more, because Trump demands loyalty so completely, he compels even decent people to debase themselves. Consequently, the Trump administration lies with the brazenness of a corrupt fabulist. They lie about small things and big things, about petty things and unforgivable things. When border patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, various members of the administration immediately slandered the deceased, claiming he was an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist” who wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” But video evidence clearly contradicted these claims.

None of this is normal or defensible. It will not end well. And most intellectually honest conservatives admit this, at least privately. But consistent with their Faustian bargain, they continue to justify their support of Trump by pointing to the wickedness of the other side. Sure, Trump is boorish, impulsive, ignorant and mendacious, but hegemonic progressivism is even worse. So the deal is worth it. The problem, as Joaquin Phoenix put it in 8mm, is that if “you dance with the devil, the devil don’t change—the devil changes you”.

Conservatism cannot work through Trump without being degraded. It starts with one compromise. Then another. And hundreds of small compromises later, one arrives at the nihilism of friend–enemy politics, in which principles are for suckers and “winning” is the only durable currency. The road to perdition is paved with such rationalizations.

Even judged by this narrow, amoral conception of politics, Trump is a losing proposition. Although he still dominates the Republican base, he is increasingly unpopular in the broader population, with his poll numbers declining by the week. Some ardent fans of MAGA may appreciate the President’s belligerence, but regular voters do not. Many now see conservatives as fraudulent Trump toadies, so unwilling to criticize their leader that they eschew much of what they once claimed to believe in. If the President’s erratic behavior paves the way for a radical AOC administration in 2028, any of the real achievements of his term in office will be in vain.

The alternative here is not surrender. It is working with real conservatives and centrists to push back against progressive overreach. It is even, shudder, working with moderate Democrats and encouraging more of them.

Politics is ugly. And some compromise is inevitable. But as a teacher who is widely celebrated by conservatives once asked, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” That same teacher also taught the importance of forgiveness. Like Nietzsche many centuries later, he understood that few things corrupt the soul as predictably as the desire for vengeance.

Bo Winegard is an Editor of Aporia.

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