The Overlooked Conservative Tradition That Embraces an Executive Like Donald Trump

Studies of contemporary public opinion have shown that if most people know one thing about conservatives’ ideas about the Constitution, it is that they stand on the rock of originalism—the proposition that judges should read the Constitution by the lights of the nation’s Founders.

While there have been some laudable exceptions, many originalists at the country’s top law schools have steered clear of the broader Donald Trump phenomenon, in the meantime taking deep dives into hermeneutic linguistic theory and 18th-century understandings of words such as commerce and emoluments, and phrases such as public use and well-regulated militia.

But outside of legal academia, many conservative scholars—the Claremont McKenna College government professor ; the Saint Vincent College politics professor ; the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics director and AWC Family Foundation fellow at the Heritage Foundation ; the Johns Hopkins University political-science lecturer ; the Hillsdale College lecturer ; the Hillsdale politics professor ; the Amherst College professor emeritus of American institutions and director of the James Wilson Institute ; and legions of, white evangelicals have expressed unwavering support for the president, and many say there is nothing he could do that would cause them to reconsider. Many commentators have explained this embrace as crassly transactional: Conservatives, they say, accept Trump because he will appoint their judges, or roll back regulations they hate.