Ben Shapiro channels his inner William F. Buckley Jr.:

Republican voters deserve to get answers.

Right now, there is only one question that matters with regard to 2024: Which candidate is the most conservative who can beat Joe Biden?

That means the American people should be asked about the policies that actually matter to them most.

But instead, virtue signaling is determining how the Republican race is run.

Yet there’s this bizarre dynamic where Republicans are trying to hit on the issue set that made Donald Trump, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, however, isn’t an issue set. He’s a person. He’s one of one.

That isn’t stopping some from attempting to cram their own intellectual viewpoints into the Trump movement. In Iowa, Tucker Carlson tried to cudgel some of the candidates into taking positions that he himself likes on Ukraine, even though — again — there are very few people who are prioritizing Ukraine as an important issue, generally.

Carlson interviewed Mike Pence, who really does not have a path to the nomination. He doesn’t have a path because Donald Trump said, untruthfully, that Mike Pence had the singular power vested in him by the Constitution to overturn the results of state certified elections. He did not have the power to do that. Ever since then, he has been considered an enemy by some parts of the MAGA world.

So Tucker asked Pence about Ukraine. And then some took Pence’s response out of context to suggest that because he cares about the war in Ukraine, he doesn’t care about American cities. That line was false. It wasn’t even accurate to Pence’s comments.

But it underscored a dynamic that’s becoming more prevalent within the Republican Party: the attempt to suggest that disagreement is motivated by animus for the country rather than actual differences.

That’s ugly.

Here’s the truth: It is dishonest to suggest that if we took the money we are using in Ukraine and poured it into Detroit, Detroit would be a blooming place filled with joy and wonder. We’ve poured trillions of dollars into poor cities in the United States over the course of the last few years. You can make the case we shouldn’t be giving aid to Ukraine, but these two things do not have to do with one another.

When did it become a conservative principle to pour money into domestic problems? That is a Democratic point. That is not a conservative or Republican point.

When you comment about politics, the easiest task is to say what people want to hear. And the hardest thing in the world is to say what people do not want to hear. I’m seeing an increasing attempt to say things that people want to hear, but present it as though you’re saying something nobody wants to hear.

None of that will win elections. Truth matters. And the American people want to hear it. They’re begging to hear it. Candidates should be judged on their ability to tell those hard truths. We can only hope our political class asks the questions of our candidates that allow us to determine who will truly be able to face down Joe Biden’s lies with truth and conservatism.