The Never Trump Failure

Among the more interesting consequences of the Trump era is the advent of the Never Trumper.

This motley crew of conservative Republicans broke with the party and dedicated their efforts to attacking Trump. Whether William Kristol or Jonah Goldberg or Bret Stephens, this group went over to the dark side. With a vengeance….

Stephens, a highly intelligent New York Times columnist, voted for a subliterate reformed courtesan rather than to vote for Trump. Is this a sign of good judgment or of no judgment?

Like other high princes of negativity these thinkers staked their journalistic reputations on the notion that Donald Trump was the worst thing that had ever happened to the Republican party and to conservatism. 

After all, Trump was boisterous and blustery, he spoke off the top of his head, he indulged in streams of insults directed at his fellow Republicans and he manifested a singular lack of decorum and propriety.

Add to that, he was inexperienced in the ways of Washington, and you arrive at a picture of someone who will be anything but competent to run the government. Like it or not the Never Trumpers were convinced. They thought that the Donald was an existential threat-- assuming that they knew what that meant.

But, it was not merely about wanting a different candidate. The Never Trump contingent believed that the Donald would compromise everything they held sacred. And thus, anything was acceptable to take him out of the race.

Since the Never Trumpers were willing to go to any lengths to destroy the Donald, they found themselves in collusion with leftist Trump haters.

Fair enough, the Democrats who hated Trump had different reasons. They thought that Trump was a white nationalist and a racist. Which is another way of saying that he was a Republican.

Dare we mention that the candidates who ran against Donald Trump were certainly not the best or the brightest. Hillary Clinton was largely uninspiring, having gotten her position by engaging in a bizarre marriage with Bill. 

Joe Biden was suffering from senile dementia in 2020-- quoth one Dr. Michael Burry-- but the Trump haters on the left and the right pretended that there was no problem. And the worst candidate in recent history Kamala Harris embarrassed the Democratic Party and the Never Trump contingent.

The more sane and sober voices on the left, from Van Jones to James Carville, have been saying that they seriously underestimated Trump.

While the Never Trumpers and their Democratic allies were railing against Trump, the latter produced a major political realignment. He made the Republican Party the party of working people.

Now we have a leading Never Trumper like Bret Stephens eating some serious crow. Among his arguments is a simple one. Their negativity produced political blindness. Worse yet, it produced some serious hypocrisy. Much of what the Never Trumpers hated about Trump they had applauded when they saw it in other politicians,

How come so many who denounce Trump as a sexual predator were, 20 years earlier, Bill Clinton’s steadfast defenders? Why were the same people who demanded investigations into every corner of the Trump family’s business dealings so incurious about the Biden family’s dealings, like the curiously high prices for Hunter’s paintings?

As I have noted before, the Never Trump movement came a cropper during the 2024 election campaign, because people had already seen Trump in action and they had discovered that he was not Hitler or Mussolini or even a fascist. Trump’s instinct is to run policy as a negotiation, as deal making. It does not speak fascism. In fact, it is very conservative.

Stephens explained:

We warned that Trump would be a reckless president who might stumble into World War III. If anything, his foreign policy in his first term was, in practice, often cautious to a fault. We hyperventilated about his odd chumminess with Vladimir Putin. But the collusion allegations were a smear, and Trump’s Russia policy — whether it was his opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or his covert aid to Ukraine — was much tougher than either Barack Obama’s or (at least until Russia invaded Ukraine)President Biden’s.

Never Trumpers put all their chips on January 6. By their lights the events of that day in 2020 signalled that Trump was a fascist who wanted to overthrow the constitutional order. To which Stephens replied:

 But if democracy means anything, it’s that ordinary people, not elites, get to decide how important an event like Jan. 6 is to them. Turns out, not so much.

As Van Jones stated clearly, Trump read the electorate correctly. The Never Trumpers did not:

What ordinary people really cared about this year were the high cost of living and the chaos at the border. Why did Trump — so often deprecated by his critics as a fortunate fool — understand this so well while we fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation?

And, of course, there is the projection factor. Democrats were doing to Trump exactly what they accused him of doing to the nation. You cannot rail about threats to democracy when you are practicing lawfare to prevent your opposition from running for office.

That’s not all:

That, as much as Trump might lie, Americans also felt lied to by the left — particularly when it came to the White House cover-up of Biden’s physical and mental decline. That, as bigoted as elements of the MAGA world can be, there is plenty of bigotry to go around — not least in the torrent of Israel-bashing and antisemitism that emerged from the cultural left after Oct. 7. That, as much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether it’s higher education or the F.B.I., many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.

Chastened but unbowed, Stephens recommends a bit of sanity, even a bit of guarded optimism for the oncoming Trump administration.

Let’s enter the new year by wishing the new administration well, by giving some of Trump’s cabinet picks the benefit of the doubt, by dropping the lurid historical comparisons to past dictators, by not sounding paranoid about the ever-looming end of democracy, by hoping for the best and knowing that we need to fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we fear, that whatever happens, this too shall pass.

In truth, the Never Trumpers protested too much. They indulged in every manner of irrational speculation, trotted out a bevy of paranoid theories, to the point where people tuned them out. 

They were trying to force people to vote against Trump. They were not offering a choice or an option. They were not saying that theirs was the better way. They were using a subliterate rhetorical ploy by pretending that Trump was Hitler. A vote for Trump was a vote to open death camps. You might have thought it idiotic. The ladies of The View actually believed it.

One thing that these serious thinkers could have learned in rhetoric class, was this. When you are forcing someone to believe something, they will naturally reject your position because they will reject being subservient. It does not matter whether you are right or wrong. You will lose the argument, because of your bad attitude and your disrespect for your audience.

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