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Posted on 11/20/2025 2:28:10 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The make-believe future that exists only among those who mistook Trump for a typo.
There’s a certain kind of conservative, often credentialed and overconfident, who clings to the belief that Trump’s departure from the ballot magically resets the board. They imagine the movement snapping back to a tidy, small-government ethos — as if the last decade were a loud, unruly detour rather than the story itself. Sarah Isgur’s recent conversation with David Leonhardt of the New York Times is a clear example of this instinct: a hope that the base doesn’t really want what it overwhelmingly chose, twice, and might suddenly return to the Church of Limited Government once the orange comet leaves the sky.
But that vision isn’t merely naïve. It’s a profound misunderstanding of what happened, why it happened, and why “returning to normal” is not only impossible but undesirable for the voters who reshaped the Right. And the harder truth is this: Even if Trump vanished tomorrow, even if a Republican restoration or a Democratic technocrat took the wheel, small government is not coming back. The country that once believed in it no longer exists. Big Tech is now a fourth branch of government. Wall Street has more influence over national life than most federal agencies. Surveillance is baked into everything from smartphones to school boards. The alphabet agencies didn’t shrink under Trump, Biden, or Obama. They metastasized. The state grew teeth, and it will not file them down because a few pundits find them unseemly.
On paper, Isgur is the model Republican insider: Texas-raised, Federalist Society, Romney campaigns, a stint at Trump’s Justice Department, now safely parked at The Dispatch and chatting with the New York Times. In public, she packages herself as the tough, no-nonsense “don’t tell me what to do” girl — the...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
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Populism catapulted Trump to office, not Trump Populism.
But it will be necessary for the next person to be an effective champion of these causes and not a con man.
Isgur and her ilk are hardly champions of small government. Another pant load of anti-Trump nonsense. Get used to disappointment chick...we are never going back to country club Republicanism.
Where is this small government ethos? Occasionally it pops up in representatives' and senators' campaign speeches. Even a member of the Bush family will say the words, but it is nowhere to be found once their airplanes land at Reagan National or Dulles and they motorcade into DC. If the Republicans did even half of what they said, Trump wouldn't have had room to get on the ballot.
“They imagine the movement snapping back to a tidy, small-government ethos ....”
When was the last time the GOP was such a thing? My goodness, George Bush brought us the much abused “Patriot Act”.
Full stop.
This article is partially centered around a Romneyist and with that in mind, the above line makes the rest of it fail.
The Romneyists are one of the main parts of the GOP Establishment. None of these Establishment people favor or want to see a small-government of any kind and have spent years, decades even fighting against any effort at all to make the government smaller!
That's where all of this fake GOP progressivism-styled-as-conservative gets utterly destroyed. They lied to us for decades, we even went out by the hundreds of thousands and protested (including, protesting republicans) and in the end we shoved Trump down their throats as fast and as hard as we could and they still don't get it.
Trump is not just the most(if definitely imperfectly) small government minded President in the last 40 years, he's the only one. Prior to Trump, there was Reagan - again, a guy that they, the republicans, opposed! And prior to Reagan you don't find a small government conservative President anywhere until you get to Calvin Coolidge.
Many GOP presidents, including the Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower, were all big massive government oriented.
The ridiculous idea that the GOP is a conservative party just simply does not match the reality test. They fight against any conservative attempts to make government smaller. And I didn't even get to naming the Boehners, McConnells, Ryans, the Bushes, Karl Rove and Trent Lott, and all the rest of them.
Populism is just another way to say pro working class.
“Isgur and her ilk are hardly champions of small government. Another pant load of anti-Trump nonsense. Get used to disappointment chick...we are never going back to country club Republicanism.”
Yeah, that point of view made no sense to me. Who has hacked away 93,000 Federal jobs? Trump. Who is hacking away at the department of Education? Trump. Who established the DOGE agency to reduce Federal waste? Trump.
No Republican or Democrat has done so much in my 69 years of life.
.
Trump needs to prioritize voting integrity now.
Big time!
This guy John Mac Ghlionn is a liar and out of his mind. He is mixing all sorts of things up that do not belong.
The Reagan–Romney–Ryan consensus didn’t collapse because Americans suddenly forgot the beauty of balanced budgets or federalism.
There's no such thing as a "Reagan–Romney–Ryan consensus". It never existed! The Romneys and the McCains and the Bushs all exist as a rejection of Reaganism, not an embrace of it.
So first, this liar Mac Ghlionn lies to try to put Isgur as a "true conservative", then lies as if Reagan was anything like the rest of them.
Pathetic.
The strict conservative mistake is believing that Trump distorted the movement.
No, no, no! Look at how Trump has governed! One of his very first acts in the second term was to (as far as he could as executive) eliminate the Department of Education. This has been a conservative goal for a generation. Trump has been very much what Conservatives wanted all along.(even if at times imperfectly)
And additionally.... Here. Look at this drunk sentence.
voters were talking about something else entirely: wages, borders, factories, fentanyl, culture, and a country that felt like it was slipping through their fingers.
I would be well within my rights to say that John Mac Ghlionn is a right wing Constitution-hater. Would I call him a leftist? No, I don't think so and yes, right wing COTUS haters do exist. Borders, you say John? Conservatives have been crying out for relief on the border for many decades and it was the anti-conservative GOP led by none other than guys like John McCain who kept ignoring conservatives. Juan McCain, potentially the most progressive republican of our lifetimes! That's who John Mac Ghlionn is too moonbat stupid to understand was not and is not in any way a conservative.
Let's just get to his point otherwise I'll be here all day with his propaganda.
This is why a post-Trump conservatism cannot revolve around shrinking the state. It must revolve around strengthening the nation.
You see the bait and switch of words here? John Mac Ghlionn loves big government. He is a right wing progressive.
But he knows full well enough not to say that "shrinking the state"(his words) is dead so hey let's "strengthen the state" WHOA no I know I can't say that. I'll just say the word nation instead. He means government. He wants to strengthen the government. He wants to make government bigger. See, watch: This is why a post-Trump conservatism cannot revolve around shrinking the state. It must revolve around strengthening the state.
I hate guys like this. He started out with an outright lie: the GOP Establishment is conservative. Then, after creating a straw man he knocks it down in order to promote a huge government agenda.
Beware, everybody. That's all I have to say. Beware the charlatans out there like John Mac Ghlionn who want to try to get you to fall in love with the government all over again. There is no such thing as "we can finally have a good government just as long as we have the correct people in it" Government must be brought back down in size.
If you all want to say John Mac Ghlionn is a leftist, that's fine by me. But this article is seriously disreputable and very much based on massively false premises. The whole thing is bad faith one paragraph after the next designed to discredit real conservatives using non-conservative actors.
Looking through the lens of trying to discredit conservatism, the article then makes perfect sense why you would mix a Reagan and a Romney while pretending Trump isn't implementing conservative goals over and over and over again.
All excellent points. Thanks for posting that well thought out response.
Populism is just another way to say pro working class.
*************************
Well said.
What should also be noted, is many conservative ideologues hate the working class. Especially, low income earners who should work for even less money in their minds.
They’re going to have a tough 10-15 years moving forward.
Opus?
Not fond of people who use Gaelic name spellings as some kind of virtue signaling. “McGlynn” is just fine.
I’m not sure about your opus comment, because Latin isn’t my native language.😀
The economic trends I’m seeing aren’t going in the direction of the intellectual conservatives and their small government fantasy.
When did this small government actually exist?
Not in my lifetime which started in 1971.
So if government has been beneficial to some sectors of the political-economic system, it is fair to ask:
“What am I voting for and how do I benefit?”
I’ll read what the small government types write about, but I think they’re trying to paddle a canoe against a huge tide.
I hope I’m wrong, because I’m a private sector and let me do private business type
Your deliberate mischaracterization of conservatives is what I was referring to; pure left-wing talking points.
Yeah,
We’ll have many disagreements in the future.
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