In 2016 we found out that conservative elites didn't speak for Republican voters.
Think-tankers may have hungered for entitlement reform and valued free trade, but a large group of Republican voters disagreed, and another large group had no strong views on these issues. When Donald Trump won the primaries and then the November election, many people who considered themselves conservative leaders found out that Republican voters weren't who they thought they were.
Now it turns out that Trump's prominent early supporters don't speak for the Republican masses either. Many of these luminaries are unhappy about Trump's airstrike against the Syrian government. "Those of us who wanted meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates," tweeted Ann Coulter.
Republican voters, on the other hand, overwhelmingly approve of Trump's action. A Washington Post poll found that 86 percent of them support it.
To the extent these high-profile Trump fans are now disillusioned, it's because they over-read what the president and his voters stand for. As McKay Coppins points out in the Atlantic, Trump did not campaign as a consistent skeptic of military intervention abroad. "Instead, Trump entered the Oval Office with a bone-deep belief in vengeance, a tendency toward impulsiveness, and a history of saber-rattling rhetoric."
Intellectuals, whether they are for or against Trump, want to construct an "ism" into which they can fit his politics: an "ism" that includes opposition to free trade, mass immigration, foreign interventions that aren't necessitated by attacks on us, and entitlement reform. But Trumpism doesn't exist. The president has tendencies and impulses, some of which conflict with one another, rather than a political philosophy.
Some primary voters surely backed Trump because they thought he would be less prone to Mideast "meddling" than other Republicans, and some people who don't always vote for Republicans in presidential elections may have found him an attractive choice for the same reason. His stance on trade drew other voters to him.
But trying to figure out what "Trump's voters" wanted in any detail is a fool's errand. Take, for example, this argument that "the people who elected Trump" would love for him to embrace a single-payer health-care plan. People backed him for a lot of different reasons. Some primary voters thought it was time to have a successful businessman in the Oval Office. Some liked Trump's style.
I'm one of those voters who don't have strong views on what to do about Syria. I'm inclined to oppose the airstrikes along with Coulter et al.
They should just keep in mind that most voters don't have ideological commitments--which helps explain why politicians will almost always disappoint those who do.
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Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist.
Editorial on 04/14/2017