Who Betrayed Whom? A Defense of Donald Trump’s Conservatism

Delivered June 4, 2026 in Oxford, England

Madam President, honorable members of this House, distinguished opponents Mr. Madrid, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Malcolm, and Mr. Stern, and my colleagues on the Opposition benches: good evening.

My opponents tonight have clad themselves in the armor of many of our great conservative thinkers. Yet tonight they delivered less a defense of conservatism than a eulogy for a splendid antique, beautifully preserved yet disconnected from the living nation it ought to serve. The purpose of conservatism is to conserve. Not every minor thing, but the first things, the principles that give us life and continuity and assure us a future.

Let’s be clear on what conservatism is and is not.

Conservatism is not a fixed policy menu from a bygone era, not a litany of tax rates, trade treaties, or ritualized reverence for every institution simply because it exists. Conservatism is a principle and an ethos. It is the determination to conserve the proper object of politics: the freedom of a sovereign people to live as themselves, under a constitutional order that restrains rulers rather than empowers them.

Institutions, markets, and past policies are means, not ends. When they cease to serve the people, when they become weapons turned against the people, conservatism does not counsel blind fidelity. It demands corrective action. Russell Kirk taught us to protect institutions from chaos. He never counseled conserving institutions that had already descended into it.

Edmund Burke, one of the greatest minds of British liberty and a true friend of America in our Founding age, reminded us that context and circumstance define the goodness of a thing. He reproached all who would defend the abstract without the specific:

“Circumstances … give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”

President Donald J. Trump does not exist in the abstract. He works in the specific. That is why he is, in the Burkean understanding, conservative.

Tonight, therefore, I rise to oppose the motion. Donald Trump has not betrayed conservatism. He has revitalized it.

I speak to this motion from a perspective none of my friends on the other side can. I was born in western Nebraska, the epitome of flyover country. What it is known for, besides cornfields and sugar beets, is Carhenge, a replica of Stonehenge made from rusty old cars planted in the Nebraska soil. There may be nothing more American than that. I moved to Texas as a young man to attend Texas A&M University, what I consider the Oxford of the South. I didn’t grow up in privileged circles, but I was privileged to know and learn from Americans abandoned by nearly thirty years of conservatives failing them.

This is exactly why I can speak to President Trump’s effect on conservatism. I am from the places where conservatism lives:

• our working-class communities,
• our small towns,
• our middle-class strivers,
• our working families seeking a break,
• our legal-immigrant communities making their place in the great American story,
• our Great Plains,
• our Midwest,
• our West,
• our South.

It may live out most saliently in these areas, but every American depends upon conservatism. It is nothing less than the creed and the ethic of the American Founding. These Americans depend upon it the most.

So, tell me, my distinguished opponents: why are these the very same Americans who have gone for Donald J. Trump the most?

You say he has betrayed conservatism, yet the most deeply conservative Americans vote for him again, and again, and again. They rally for him. They overturned one of the two major American parties for him.

Why? You may argue that they are incompetent to understand the very thing that sustains them, that they are voting for their own destruction, ignorant of their own interests. They are nothing more than a basket of deplorables.

Others have certainly made those arguments. The decade-plus of “Trump versus conservatism” invective is strewn with condemnation of Trump supporters for their ignorance, their susceptibility, and their gullibility.

They are wrong. I grew up among these Americans, I know them and I love them.

Here’s what you don’t get. Donald J. Trump loves them too, and they see it. They also see that generations of increasingly aristocratic and disconnected “conservative” leadership does not. I wish you could see my prepared text, with “conservative” in quotation marks. What has “conservative” leadership told the American people for the past two generations?

• It told them to accept the destruction of their jobs, industries, and towns in the name of consumerism and bad trade deals.
• It told them to accept the destruction of their history and heritage in the name of moral progress.
• It told them to accept the unanswered aggression of the left in the name of procedural propriety.
• It told them they are nothing more than an idea, divorced from history and place and people, their rootedness across generations no more precious than the assent of a man who arrived yesterday.

The conservative movement before Trump, especially in this twenty-first century, presided over and endorsed nearly every phenomenon eroding the lives and livelihoods of the Americans who need conservatism most.

Who’s betraying whom, again? Did Donald J. Trump do all that?

Of course not. You, the institutional and generational keepers of what used to be the conservative movement, did. Having failed to conserve, you now attack the man who was a consequence and a catalyst of conservatism’s revival, not its cause. If real conservatives turned to him, it’s because they were left no choice.

Is President Trump an imperfect vessel? Of course. I expect we will hear a lot about that this evening. Some of it will be true, and all of it will be irrelevant.

This debate is not on who is a sinner in the eyes of God. You are, and I am, and we may end the conversation here if that is our point. The debate is about who betrayed conservatism. The Senate of Rome was corrupt long before Caesar came along. Donald Trump is not Caesar, but the failure of the institutions and their keepers came first, and it makes figures like him inevitable.

This is the real question before us. Not whether Donald J. Trump betrayed conservatism, but, my friends, why did you?

If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here, and neither would Donald Trump. To return to Burke, our opponents here would have us “congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broken prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights.” But Americans want the highwayman and murderer jailed.

That’s exactly what Trump gives them.

Look at what he’s given them:

• A secure and sovereign border.
• Historically low crime, including the lowest murder rate in a century.
• The overturning of the unconstitutional, horrific, and inhumane regime of Roe v. Wade.
• The most conservative American judiciary in nearly a century.

If that is betrayal I would love more of it!

But that’s no betrayal of conservatism. It’s a fulfillment of what conservatism is supposed to deliver.

This is not a debate about personality or style. Trump the man is not in dispute in this house. Trump the conservative, is. He will be vindicated not by abstractions divorced from effects, but by the record.

I urge you to walk through the Noes lobby and vote against this motion.

Thank you.