Buchanan: Abandoning Populist Roots Would ‘Damage and Destroy’ Trump

Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan warned that if President Donald Trump forgets his populist roots, he will “lose the indispensable element of his winning coalition” and break the hearts of his supporters, during an interview Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Buchanan, a former senior adviser to former Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, noted that Trump is working with a vast array of ideology among White House advisers.

“I think he will lose the indispensable element of his winning coalition. I think he will break their hearts, and he will damage and destroy his potential, his possibility.”

Ingraham asked Buchanan what would happen if Trump gives in to the moderate, globalist voices and abandoned his “populist roots.” Buchanan predicted such a turnaround would be fatal blow to the Trump administration.

“I think he will lose the indispensable element of his winning coalition. I think he will break their hearts, and he will damage and destroy his potential, his possibility,” Buchanan said.

Noting that he was “exhilarated” when the president first announced his bid in 2015, Buchanan said he supported Trump “from the moment he came down the elevator” in New York’s Trump Tower. Buchanan believed that Trump could unite the conservatives and the populists in a way that could “win the country” and put the U.S. back on track.

If the conservatives and the populists do not see eye-to-eye with one another, however, “that’s where you get conflict,” Buchanan said.

Ingraham agreed with Buchanan, noting that the president succeeded in building a winning coalition around the idea of restoring “American Greatness.”

“You can see where that will conflict at times with conservatism, like the conservatives who believe that the free market just trumps everything,” Ingraham said. “And if it means that a bunch of people in Ohio have to lose their jobs, it means that a bunch of people in Ohio have to lose their jobs. That’s where the populists and the conservatives — that’s one of the key areas where they disagree.”

Should Trump pull back from his tough campaign talk on renegotiating the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and withdrawing from the Obama-era climate change-focused Paris Agreement — both issues the president has recently waffled over — he risks losing his base.

“I don’t think he’s going to do that,” Buchanan said. “I think a lot of this comes right out of inside [the White House], and I hope so.”

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“[The conservatives] say, you know, ‘Let the free market decide,’ et cetera. And we’re different. We’re much more, you know, rooted in history. And, what did Reagan use? Those phrases like ‘neighborhood, community, country, work’ — all these, which were very much traditionalist, as well as conservative,” Buchanan noted.

“And my view has always been that if you can get those together — like today — if you can get the economic nationalists, economic patriots, and border security people, and ‘America First’ folks and staying out of foreign wars [folks], together with the basic conservatism of Ronald Reagan … that’s the combination that can win the country,” Buchanan insisted.

And Trump managed to pull that off in a way that exceeded almost everyone’s expectations, the conservative commentator said.

“But this was basically the politics of … remaking the GOP into a party that really had reach,” Buchanan said. “It was standing for the middle Americans, the forgotten Americans — those were the silent majority.”