Like a passenger on a sinking ship, the president has been throwing one longstanding position after another overboard like so much dead weight. His closest advisors, biggest boosters and some members of his family are at war with one another, in a pitch battle to steer the president in their preferred direction. From balancing the budget to relations with
This might sound familiar. But that quote comes from 30 years ago. Then-New York Times reporter
The true believers had a rallying cry: "Let Reagan be Reagan!"
The phrase harks back to the earliest years of Reagan's presidency. (It was actually inspired in part by an anti-Communist documentary called "Let Poland Be Poland," but that's a story for another day.)
In the last week,
Trump has embraced
I welcome most of these reversals, but it's hard not to sympathize with those who feel betrayed. They made a simple mistake: They thought Trumpism was a coherent ideological program, akin to Reaganism. Indeed, during the 2016 election cycle, a great number of prominent conservatives went to remarkable lengths to compare Trump to Reagan. At times I feared the strain might give some of my friends hernias.
The problem is that Trumpism is real, but it's not an ideology. It's a state of mind. Or, to be more accurate, it's a constantly changing state of mind. Trump himself admits as much, saying that he won't be bound by ideology or doctrine, preferring "flexibility" not just on means, but on ends.
This should have been obvious by the way people used the phrase "Let Trump be Trump." It's usually used to scold the scolds who want Trump to be more "presidential."
In February, "Fox News Sunday" host
When conservatives said "Let Reagan be Reagan," they were referring to a core philosophy that Reagan had developed over decades of study and political combat. When people said "Let Trump be Trump," they meant let Trump's id run free. The former was about staying true to an ideology, the latter about giving free rein to a glandular style that refused to be locked into a doctrine or even notions of consistency.
That's why saying "Let Trump be Trump" is almost literally the opposite of saying "Let Reagan be Reagan."
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Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.