Richard Viguerie: I Like Who Donald Trump Walks With

Movement conservatives are now in charge of the Trump campaign. 

“Who you walk with tells me a lot about who you are” is an aphorism that I have long applied as a foolproof test of whether a candidate or elected official is going to govern as a conservative. This might be seen as a companion or corollary to another one of my favorite rules of politics—personnel is policy.

When Ronald Reagan was running for president, every time I saw him, and I saw him quite a bit, he was surrounded by people I knew from conservative politics: Sen. Paul Laxalt, Jeff Bell, Lyn Nofziger, Marty Anderson, Dick Allen, Judge Clark, Ed Meese and so on.

This gave me confidence that when Reagan was elected, he would look to the conservatives with whom he had surrounded himself to staff his White House, and the Cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments in his administration.

And with a few notable exceptions, that’s what he did.

On the other hand, when I looked at Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole, or both Bushes, what I saw were lobbyists, industry insiders, professional political operatives and other “rented strangers” as columnist George F. Will once called those of the professional political class.

So when we look at who Hillary Clinton walks with—leftwing financier George Soros, Muslim Brotherhood-connected aide Huma Abedin, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and other radical leftists—we know where she is going to lead the country.

But what of Donald Trump?

Trump has spent the past three decades in the company of the show business stars, sports legends and pop culture figures who promote his business ventures.

He’s readily admitted that, as part of his business strategy, he’s supported both political parties and their candidates—he even donated to Hillary Clinton in one of her past campaigns.

However, since he began to the think about running for president, and once he announced, he has walked mostly with people from the right-of-center, from Sen. Jeff Sessions to Jerry Falwell Jr. to conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly to his National Co-Chairman Sam Clovis and economic advisers Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow, Trump’s major supporters and many of his inner circle have been from the conservative movement.

Now, the hiring of Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager and Steve Bannon as chief executive of the campaign brought two more movement conservatives into the leadership of Trump’s campaign.

Donald Trump’s recent economic speech, his national security speech and his law and order speech in Wisconsin were full of sound conservative policy prescriptions and were reflective of a strong conservative governing philosophy.

Most importantly, through the ups and downs of his campaign, contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused by the D.C. political class and the establishment media, Trump has not “moved to the center,” but marched steadily to the right.

With Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon at the top of the campaign, Mike Pence as vice president and Sen. Jeff Sessions at Donald Trump’s side, the Trump campaign is shaping up to be the most ideological campaign since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter.

Does this mean that Donald Trump, the secular businessman, has suddenly erased his glitzy past? Of course not. Trump is still Trump with all that comes with that.

However, conservatives can look at Donald Trump’s campaign and draw more and more assurance that through the application of Viguerie’s Foolproof Test and its corollary Donald Trump is going to govern as a conservative, and that is, in the end, exactly what we conservatives want from this election. {eoa}

Richard Viguerie transformed American politics in the 1960s and ’70s by pioneering the use of direct mail fundraising in the political and ideological spheres. He used computerized direct mail fundraising to help build the conservative movement, which then elected Ronald Reagan as the first conservative president of the modern era. As the “Funding Father of the conservative movement,” Viguerie motivated millions of Americans to participate in politics for the first time, greatly expanding the base of active citizenship. He is our era’s equivalent of Tom Paine, using a direct mail letter rather than a pamphlet to deliver his call to arms.