The strange case of Donald Trump illustrates the neglect of conservative thought. Such a thing has never entered his head. From Edmund Burke to William Buckley, from Samuel Johnson to Paul Johnson, from Irving Kristol to Bill Kristol, the confluence of dispositions and ideas we call conservatism has cumulatively inundated the politics of the English-speaking peoples, leaving traces and sediments in the theory and practice of almost every leading statesman. Yet the mind of Donald Trump is, as far as anybody can ascertain, an idea-free zone. He has a slogan — “America First” — but it is a tainted one. Either he is unaware of Charles Lindbergh’s vile, anti-Semitic campaign under that banner to stop the United States fighting Nazi Germany, in which case his ignorance of history is shocking, or he does not care, which is actually sinister. The Trump campaign has cooked up the most unpalatably putrid stew of nativism, protectionism and paleoconservatism, served up as a patriotic dish for the populace, since Huey Long tried to use Louisiana as a springboard for the White House in 1935. His public works projects such as the Mexican wall are an echo, perhaps a conscious one, of Roosevelt’s New Deal — but Trump’s New Deal would, for all his vaunted skill in constructing towers, be built on sand: a ballooning debt that would be a bad investment for future generations. His would clearly be an activist, interventionist administration — except in foreign policy, where he advocates a crude form of Realpolitik, the opposite of the Bush doctrine of defending freedom and democracy. He despises Nato members and America’s far-Eastern allies as parasites. Instead, he promises “deals” with the least enlightened of despots. He has an unhealthy admiration for Putin and Xi Jinping, unaware of the usually disastrous denouement of dalliances between democracies and dictators. On the Middle East, he veers between professions of loyalty to the Jewish people and ominous intimations that he will force Israel to submit to one of his “deals” with the Palestinians. Nothing he has said on the subject suggests that he has the faintest notion of the complexities of the region. The best that can be hoped for is that he will make good on his promise to crush IS, but his pathological aversion to intervention rules that out. Despite having consulted Henry Kissinger, he is anything but a “realist”: he simply wants the rest of the world to leave America alone. It won’t.

Republicans rarely win without a unifying candidate, but even the most extreme cult of the personality cannot resurrect a defunct ideology from the graveyard of history. Both living Republican presidents, Bush pére et fils, have declined to endorse Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan commented: “We hope that our nominee aspires to be Lincoln- and Reaganesque.” Not only does Trump fall dismally short of that standard of statesmanship — he does not obviously belong in the same party as the best Republican presidents. But instead of rising to Ryan’s challenge, he has allowed his supporters to blackmail the Speaker. Trump’s promise to exclude Muslims from entering the US — a process that implies imposing a religious test — was prima facie unconstitutional; indeed, he has backed away from what he now says was “just a suggestion”. But such a lack of gravitas in matters so grave is a serious disqualification for a commander- in-chief. Islam’s challenge to the values of the West is grave, but it does not require us to jettison those values in the name of national security. Trump is not so much Reaganesque as Kafkaesque.