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Finally, a political blog entry like the ones I ALWAYS post!

Finally, a political blog entry like the ones I ALWAYS post!

Last updated on: September 15, 2026 at 6:35 pm by Dan Peterson

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Finally, a political blog entry like the ones I ALWAYS post! 2026-09-15T18:35:56-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Oil painting of Hyrum Smith, Willard Richards, Joseph Smith, Orson Pratt, Parley Parker Pratt, Orson Hyde, Heber Chase Kimball, and Brigham Young. Cropped photo of painting. Original canvas at LDS Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Have you taken a look at the official homepage of the Becoming Brigham project? There’s some very good stuff there, and there’s much more good stuff to come. Have a look! And did you realize that you can subscribe to the series? The homepage is the place where you can do that.

And, despite the lengthy discourse below, it’s into matters like Becoming Brigham that I’ve chosen to put my energy, my focus, and my remaining years. They’re far more important to me and, I believe, to the things that matter most.

The official 2025 inaugural portrait of President Donald J. Trump

I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to some accusations that are commonly leveled against me, especially on Facebook, and that have lately been boiling over yet again:

Why do you continually attack our president, Mr. Donald J. Trump? You attack him almost every day!

Actually, I don’t attack him or criticize him very often. Not publicly. Especially not here. Of the two generic “causes” closest to my heart, religion and politics, I judge the former to be incomparably the more important, and I’ve decided for the most part to forego the latter, lest my religious cause be obscured by political matters. And that takes considerable self-restraint on my part, as I’ve been deeply interested in political matters since I was very young. I actually, literally, pulled the lever for Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, permitted to do so in the booth with him by my beloved late older brother (although our parents voted for Lyndon Johnson). I’ve subscribed to National Review with only brief exceptions (e.g., for part of my mission to Switzerland) since I was twelve or thirteen. I’ve spoken multiple times at the huge annual libertarian FreedomFest conference. And so on and so forth.

It’s difficult for me to muzzle myself on political issues, but I’ve pretty much done just that. It certainly isn’t true that I attack Mr. Trump here every day. (The claim can be empirically tested and empirically disproven.) I sometimes share Facebook memes about him that I find funny or significant, but even that is quite rare when compared to my overall posting output. Today’s blog post is very much an outlier, but I think it advisable to make my position clear.

However, it is true, and I make no secret of the fact, that I’m not a fan of Mr. Trump’s character or personality. This article, by someone whom I do admire, lays out just one of the many reasons for my disapproval: “Opinion: All the president’s words — how a president’s language shapes our national character: When we lose our grip on decent language, we lose our grip on decent behavior.”

My form of conservatism isn’t only a matter of policies, as important as I believe wise policies to be. It’s also a matter of character, and civility, and decorum, and respect for tradition and what Edmund Burke (often considered the founder of modern conservatism) called “the unbought grace of life.”

But my reservations about President Trump aren’t primarily about his coarseness and his constant incivility. Nor even, really, about his apparently shameless grandiosity — putting his name, or allowing it to be put, on the Kennedy Center and paper currency and coinage, hanging banners bearing his visage on buildings of the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor and the Department of Agriculture, putting his face in passports, pushing for an aircraft carrier to be named after him, and etc. — all of which seems to me more reminiscent of a reigning monarch, even a Roman emperor, than the chief magistrate of a free democratic republic. (George Washington famously rejected the proposal to put his face on early American coins because he believed that such was the practice of kings and tyrants. It was, he said, unfit for the United States of America.)

A banner of President Donald J. Trump deployed at the United States Department of Justice in February 2026. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

So you would have preferred Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris!

I voted for none of them. I’ve thrown my vote away in the last three general presidential elections. Had I expected the voting outcomes to be close here in my adopted home state of Utah, I might have faced a really difficult decision. As it was, though, it was easy for me to cast a protest vote, making my little statement that neither major political party had nominated someone whom I could support.

I am, currently, politically homeless. And I’m deeply unhappy about that. Would I like to see a wave of anti-Trump votes in the approaching midterm elections? Yes, I would. Republicans deserve to be punished for their servility and their ineffectiveness. Do I want the Democrats to take over the House and the Senate? No, I don’t. Will I be happy if, in Texas, James Talarico defeats the Trump-endorsed moral abomination Ken Paxman to replace John Cornyn in the United States Senate? Yes, I will. (Google, if you will “Please summarize Ken Paxton’s scandals.” And then be sure to ask about the view of him held by his ex-wife, Republican State Senator Angela Paxton: “What does Ken Paxton’s ex-wife say about him?”) But a James Talarico victory will sadden me very much. And I’ll deeply regret a Republican loss of the Senate, if that happens, because it will hurt the cause of putting conservative judges on the bench (possibly up to the Supreme Court of the United States).

Why did you never criticize Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris?

Actually, I did criticize them. I was really irritated, for example, by the tendency to treat Barack Obama as a kind of messianic figure and, through placing his convention acceptance speech within a faux Greek temple, almost to deify him, and by such grandiose nonsense as his comment, made on 3 June 2008, when he had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination, that it would eventually be recognized that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

But, although I originally intended this blog to focus primarily on religion and politics, in that order, I eventually resolved — partially but not entirely on the basis of conversations with Church leaders (not General Authorities) whom I respect and trust — to emphasize the first of those and to substantially de-emphasize (and, in fact, virtually to eliminate) the latter. I made that choice back during the first Trump Administration and largely kept to it during Mr. Biden’s presidency. Again, this post today is very much an exception.

Why am I so vocal about Mr. Trump? Actually, I’m far less vocal about him and about other political issues than I would prefer. However, here’s some of my reasoning for the rare things that I do sometimes say: Relatively few in my circles or my audience support Clinton, Obama, Biden, or Harris. In criticizing them, I would largely be preaching to the choir. Many in my community and among my audience, however, support Mr. Trump — some reluctantly, with reservations, and some enthusiastically. If my occasional criticisms of Mr. Trump are likely to have any effect for change (which I doubt), it will be among such people. Not among committed partisan Democrats, who already oppose him.

A newly installed statue at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

How can you call yourself a conservative when you don’t support President Trump?

My reservations about President Trump aren’t primarily about his coarseness and constant incivility and astonishing egomania.

I don’t consider Mr. Trump a conservative. If he’s anything, really, in the taxonomy of politics, he’s a nationalist, and there are definitely some areas of overlap — like intersecting Venn circles — between nationalism and traditional American conservatism. In terms of economics, he’s actually a mercantilist rather than, as I am, a devotee of maximally free and unfettered markets bordering on (but not quite) libertarianism.

I disapprove of whimsically applied and continually changing tariffs. I dislike the imperial presidency, government by executive order, and the bloating of the executive branch. I lament the supine inertness of Congress. I disapprove of attempts to federalize elections. I strongly support Deidre Henderson in her principled resistance to such attempts: “Opinion: Utah’s lieutenant governor deserves applause: The Trump administration is trying to force every state into providing sensitive information about voters. Utah is saying no.”

Here are just four recent issues that have concerned me:

Mr. Trump lifted the ten percent tariff on Irish whiskey over the past weekend. (He had already lifted similar tariffs on U.K. whiskeys.) He made the announcement during the closing ceremony of the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg, Ireland. That is the gesture of an arbitrary monarch or despot. “The very definition of a Republic,” said John Adams, “is ‘an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.'”
So, likewise, with his response to the controversial matter of artificial intelligence and their supporting data centers. Some are calling for regulations, to put on the brakes. I have no firm position on this question yet; I don’t think that I understand it completely enough to have a solid opinion. But I’m scarcely reassured by Mr. Trump’s response: “The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” As Louis XIV put it, L’État, c’est moi. (Louis really liked lavishly gilded interiors, too.) See, on this issue, “Imagining What a Normal President Would Say About AI.”
I was not happy to see Mr. Trump order a substantial reduction in major joint military exercises with South Korea, in justification for which he cited his good relationship with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his frustration over Seoul’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Iran. This is strategy subordinated to a royal sovereign’s personal whims and moods. If conducting joint military exercises isn’t useful, we should have stopped doing it years ago. If it is useful, Donald J. Trump’s affection for the murderous Kim Jong Un and his personal pique at the leaders of South Korea are irrelevant and the exercises should continue as before. Mr. Trump’s continual antagonizing of traditional allies (in Canada and France and South Korea and Denmark and many other places), coupled with his seemingly more friendly relations with people like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping, is one of the weirder and more destructive aspects of his presidency.
A classic feature of socialist economics is government ownership of the means of production. Under the Trump administration, the federal government has either acquired shares or proposed ownership in roughly thirty to thirty-two companies, including Intel and Global Foundries (semiconductors and technology), U.S. Steel and MP Materials and Lithium Americas Corporation and Trilogy Metals (critical minerals and steel), and D-Wave and Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion and Atom Computing and PsiQuantum and Quantinuum and Diraq (quantum computing). Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado gave her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal to Donald Trump. In exchange for the medal, she remains a Venezuelan opposition leader, former President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist vice president Delcy Rodríguez remains in charge of Venezuela, the repressive state apparatus and security forces remain largely intact, human rights violations continue to occur in the country, and the government of the United States has gained control of Venezuelan oil exports and seized majority oversight of seventeen major Venezuelan oil fields.

I could not possibly remain a serious conservative and support such things.

Believe me, I could write about these and similar topics just about every day. But I’ve chosen not to do so. There is more to life than politics. And, whatever he may think, there’s certainly more to life than Mr. Donald J. Trump.

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