The President’s White House team is sending out their enforcers to make sure you all stay in line.
The White House delivered a warning to conservative groups on Thursday: We’re watching you.
Two days after voters rebuked President Trump and his party, the administration moved to hold together a coalition that[was beginning to splinter].
The White House Office of Public Liaison, which works with outside groups, sent a memo to more than 3,000 conservative organizations that laid out a list of Trump’s accomplishments in office and pledged to prevent newly ascendant Democrats from reversing them. The memo concluded with a sentence that was highlighted in yellow.
“As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations,” the memo said. Leaders of two prominent conservative organizations confirmed that they had received the memo.
You, Con, Inc., the conservative movement in Washington, D.C., you have nothing left to lose because you have nothing left. You chose a seat at the table instead of being a prophetic voice speaking to power. You let your donors lead you, instead of leading. You thought you could get stuff, but what did you get?
Prolifers got the abortion pill and a cabinet secretary who has probably paid for more abortions than all cabinet secretaries in American history combined. Let’s not talk about the state-level abortion bills that have passed.
Christians barely escaped having a witchcraft practitioner as a surgeon general — only saved by senators who refused to go along with it. But along the way, you compromised your witness to the unchurched by using phrases like “vote for the lesser of two evils” when your faith preaches against evil. You stayed silent in primaries only to demand the faithful vote for corrupt serial adulterers, racists, and others. You never spoke up as a prophetic voice to power. You spoke up for the powerful against the powerless and dragged your congregations into compromising character for temporal worldly power.
Fiscal conservatives got tariffs and fiscal wrecklessness. Look at the debt.
Low tax guys got back-door taxes through tariffs.
Gun guys got bump stock bans and were only saved by the Supreme Court.
The defense hawks got capitulation to Russia and China, rejection of Ukraine, and a half-assed war with Iran and missile shortages.
The business lobby got tariffs on steel, aluminum, lumber, and virtually everything else driving up their costs.
The capitalists got government equity stakes in private corporations.
The social conservatives got social progressive takeovers in Georgia and Texas.
Oh, and you guys got an ass kicking on Tuesday, losing worse than at any time since Watergate — the last time the right aligned for a price fixing, tariff imposing, morally compromised Republican President who the voters saw as corrupt.
The Heritage Foundation sold its soul and memory-holed its principles to get JD Vance elected in 2028. A lot of other groups, too, have decided to abandon their long-held principles to get Vance elected. They’re now tools of a personality used as enforcers to bully others into submission, not consciences of a cause.
How far gone are the rest of your souls?
You know damn well the man at the top wants a legacy and is willing to cut deals, no matter how bad, for history’s sake. You know it. Did you not see his bump-stock ban in the first term?
Now you have no firewall left except the filibuster.
You don’t have a lot of your usual states to file lawsuits and usual state level attorneys general to help you.
You lost all that because of the President lacked discipline, alienated Americans with policies you all used to be against, and got viewed as corrupt in a way none of you were willing to speak out against.
You became sycophants who politely seal clapped for every dumb thing he’s done. You let the conservative movement, not just the GOP, turn into a movement whose only conviction and principle is the affirmation of an eighty-year-old’s wild whims.
Many of you turned a blind eye as the racists and John Birchers filtered back in. Some of you even stayed quiet after the Bo French tweet and the Vivek Ramaswamy ad. Your silence perpetuated a view that the whole movement is cruel.
You have nothing left now.
So you have nothing left to lose.
Get back to first principles: free markets, free people, restrained government, and common sense.
Cruelty, jackassery, bad economic policy, half-assed military strategy, and presidential whims lost on Tuesday.
But please note how many conservative-oriented ballot initiatives passed nationwide on Tuesday.
Please note how many Americans in every state said tariffs hurt them.
Please note how Americans still support the conservative position on immigration, even as the process deployed was rejected.
It is not the time to move on from Donald Trump. He’s still the President for two more years.
It is, however, time that you start, again, being a conservative movement, not just a tool of a guy in a white house who runs a political party that got beat to hell and driven to the verge of extinction on Tuesday night.
You can be conservative. You do not have to be an apparatus of the Republican Party. The GOP needs you. But it needs you as a bulwark, not as a tool for its own political ambitions that forces you to set aside principles for power.
