Greg R. Lawson

In the wake of the blue tsunami in #Election2026, there is a lot of soul searching going on for the GOP & #conservatism overall. Let us be clear, Trump was a consequence of deeper structural problems in America that the conservative movement was not adequately addressing long before he descended the escalator in 2015. He rode a wave because he saw it, or at least intuited it, when no one else major did or was willing to say so. To me the great tragedy is how bad things were that a man with the flaws of Trump became seen as the main tribune of the "left behind." Under no normal set of circumstances would someone like him come anywhere near the White House once much less twice. He is a severely flawed vessel, but he contained an important message. The lessons of 2026 are not that everything Trump did should be discarded, nor that the old GOP & conservative movement leadership should be restored. There are elements of Trumpism that are magnficently correct. 1) We should focus on #China. He was right to change the old status quo on China that had built up over a gemeration even if he seems weaker on China now in the second term; 2) We should embrace a more #Nixon/#Kissinger style foreign policy of #realism Global power is diffusing & we can no longer violate the strategic wisdom of Frederick the Great when he said, "he who defends everything defends nothing." 3) Strategic, focused tariffs can be used to achieve strategic ends, though indiscriminate & broad-based ones are a mistake as a matter of policy & politics; 4) Strategic industrial policy is needed to break Chinese dominance of critical supply chains, especially rare earths; 5) We do need to secure the border & deport those breaking crimes. The pre-Trump business aligned GOP did NOT support that the way they should have, many did so hardly at all; 6) We cannot cede the ground on social issues while woke ideology runs rampant & hijacks our institutions all the way down to public education. To be blunt, the pre-Trump GOP was fairly weak, if present at all, on these issues & dismissed any concern over them by invoking the ghost of Reagan & recycling old talking points from the end of the 20th Century. Again, I come back to the tragedy of our time. Trump was flawed, but who was out there to deal with the very real issues he exploited? Very few. Instead, most Republican leaders wanted to keep running an antiquated playbook even as the cultural & strategic ground beneath their feet shifted. It probably never should have been Trump. But there was no one else at the time. THAT is the deeper problem of #history & remains such as we move forward. Who can retain the necessary corrections of Trump, but do so with more discipline, focus, & not ongoing smell of corruption? Is there a new #Fusionism that can be crafted that meets today's needs? If not, then Socialism, & possibly worse, beckons.