WEDNESDAY, JUL 22, 2015 01:33 PM EDT

Sorry, Rick Perry: Donald Trump isn’t a “cancer” on conservatism — he embodies conservatism

Donald Trump is not corrupting the conservative movement; he's benefiting from the
movement's existing corruption

SIMON MALOY

Donald Trump’s ascendance in the 2016 Republican polls has proved to be something of a boon for lower tier candidates looking to bask in the corona of Trump’s enormous media spotlight. Among those candidates, no one has done more to position himself as the anti-Trump than former Texas governor Rick Perry. Eagerly responding to Trump’s unending stream of insults and provocations, Perry’s been throwing out denunciation after denunciation, arguing that Trump is unfit to serve as president. His campaign has been trolling The Donald on Twitter, retweeting the racist billionaire skidmark’s past praise of Perry. Now he’s taken to referring to Trump as a “cancer” on conservatism.

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I’m all for calling out Trump and saying as many nasty things as can possibly be said about him, but let’s be clear about something. Trump isn’t a problem for Republicans because he represents a perversion of conservatism. He’s a problem because he represents conservatism too well.

Trump’s rise in the polls is attributable in some part to his celebrity and his knack for drawing media attention, but it’s also true that the outlandish nonsense he says about immigrant rapists and building a giant wall on the southern border resonates with a significant portion of the Republican electorate. This is not some unpredictable accident. The official policy of the Republican Party is to be overtly hostile to undocumented immigrants and to treat them with as much disdain as can be mustered. They do this because even the slightest hint of non-hostility to immigrants will open up Republican officeholders to charges that they’re pro-“amnesty,” and that’s when the primary challengers start filing their paperwork. Rick Perry understands this better than most Republicans: during his 2011 presidential run he was raked over the coals by conservatives after he chastised Republicans as heartless for opposing in-state tuitions for undocumented immigrant students.

There’s also the recurring phenomenon of Republican base voters flocking to candidates embody the “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense” that Perry laments. In the minds of voters and activists, candidates who freely and forcefully say crazy shit are merely “saying what needs to be said.” This veneration of the willingness to be “un-PC” is a natural reaction to the many years of griping from conservative media and Republican officeholders that liberals and the mainstream press are trying to police their speech. Before Trump joined the 2016 fray, Ben Carson was the chief beneficiary of this phenomenon, drawing rave reviews from the activist right as he compared America under Barack Obama to Hitler’s Germany.

And so while Rick Perry makes the argument that Trump is a tumor within his party, conservatives on TV and (more importantly) talk radio are making the case that Trump captures the conservative spirit better than the other candidates in the race.

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