The latest article to cause a buzz in conservative circles on Twitter is claiming that the end has finally come for Never Trump conservatives. It is a long article that deserves to be looked at, so I will go through it paragraph by paragraph to give my response to this notion (Emerald Robinson's words are italicized).
With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?
Okay, so the introductory paragraph sets out the thesis- which is that the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy (in addition to the recent confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch) is ironclad proof that Never Trumpers (NT) were wrong to distrust Trump. Moreover, it is just one of “so many humiliating defeats” for NT that have led to an “ignominious end.” And finally, this somehow means that Trump will be the “most consequential conservative president of the modern era” (or second-most behind Reagan). I will admit that Trump kept his word on Court picks, but other than tax reform, the Trumpian victories have been rather few and far between. The two Court appointments, plus tax reform, would have been achieved by any of the other 16 Republicans who ran for President in 2016. What most of them would not have brought to the table is the series of scandals, blunders, and national humiliations that President Trump has brought upon the country with his ethically-challenged and amateur-filled Cabinet, ad hoc foreign policies, counterproductive trade wars, and disgraceful behavior as President. Conservatives could have had those victories (and plenty more) behind President Rubio or Kasich or Cruz or even Bobby Jindal. Just because Trump figured out that Court appointments would buy the undying loyalty of the vast majority of Republicans does not make him the “most consequential conservative president ever.” George W. Bush’s Court appointments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, arguably moved the Court just as much to the right as Trump will have, and ensured that the Chief Justice would be a conservative for decades to come.
For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trump editorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.
I do not know what the purpose of this paragraph is, other than to celebrate the death of the greatest conservative columnist since William F. Buckler, Jr. RIP Charles Krauthammer.
One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.
Okay, so you beat Bill Kristol. Whoopty-do. Also, Michael Anton deserved to be chastised for that awful article that was an insult to the memory of the brave passengers of Flight 93.
Of course, Kristol was not alone in his contempt for Trump — he was only the most vocal and unhinged. Alongside him were other conservatives like Jennifer Rubin and George Will and Michael Gerson at the Washington Post; Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal; David Brooks and Ross Douthat at the New York Times; Jonah Goldberg and David French at National Review; Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg; and Erick Erickson at RedState. A number of others, people like David Frum and Ana Navarro, committed political seppuku early and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically.
Personally, I admire many of these people (except for Rubin) for putting principle above career aspirations. Other than Rubin, who has taken to switching all of her political positions so that they are the opposite of Trump, these figures have not changed their beliefs or kissed Trump’s rings in order to get back in good standing with the Conservative Media Establishment. They chose the harder path of staying true to their convictions, rather than the easy path of Anti-Anti-Trumpism or even being outright Trump sycophants.
What happened? If these intellectuals were so influential in the conservative movement, then why has their apostasy garnered so little attention? A Ramesh Ponnuru editorial in Bloomberg blurted out this truth: “In 2016 we found out that conservative elites didn’t speak for Republican voters.” This split between the party’s base and its donor class (as well as the donor-funded intellectuals) was years in the making, but it became obvious once Trump became the nominee. Then the truth became obvious and damning: the Never Trumpers represented no one but themselves.
Fair enough. It turned out that intellectual consistency and rigor matter little to the base. Instead of making the intellectual case for what was considered to be “conservatism” pre-2015, they would have been better served by appeasing the base instincts of the Republican base.
Looking back, it now seems self-evident that conservative pundits were preposterously out of touch. (Who isn’t amused by the poindexter pretentiousness of George Will’s bow-ties or the pseudo-scholarly piffle of Jonah Goldberg’s byline as “the inaugural holder of the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty?”). These intellectuals barely noticed the opioid crisis running through small town America; or the base’s anger regarding illegal immigration; and they were adamantly opposed to any restriction of free trade while working class frustrations mounted over NAFTA and its ilk. (This explains why J. D. Vance and his book Hillbilly Elegy was Washington’s must-read book of 2017: it provided a portrait of rural America that the political class could digest without condescending to visit such places or talk to such voters.) It turns out that conservative intellectuals, living inside the “Acela Corridor” and funded exclusively by think tanks and foundations, are poor barometers of Republican voter concerns.
Same deal as the last paragraph. The Republican Party turned out to be far more anti-intellectual than was previously assumed. If you get angry over George Will’s bowties, then there is nothing that we could have done to win you over. And as regards free trade, it looks like the base will have to learn the hard way that tariffs and protectionism are bad for the economy, including the industries occupied by the so-called “Forgotten Men.”
This myopia has several causes. The first is a kind of cultural “capture” that occurs when conservatives live in blue districts and big cities too long. They become, in other words, clueless (RINOS). The second reason is more obvious: many of these people are paid to be openly hostile to Trump’s agenda. The free trade absolutists at AEI and Cato are on salary to oppose any protectionist trade policies. Likewise, hawkish interventionists such as Max Boot knew they had no professional future once Trump’s isolationist instincts became policy.
Now this author is just assuming that we all wine and dine at DC cocktail parties, which is simply not true. I live in Orange, VA, which is anything, but a blue district, and I grew up in fire-engine red Lancaster County, PA. As for the scholars at AEI and Cato, who are “free trade absolutists,” maybe they oppose Trump’s policies because their studies of economics have convinced them that free trade lowers prices, opens up foreign markets, and raises living standards for everyone. In other words, they oppose Trump’s trade wars because they know that the trade wars are terrible policies.
There is also a low-testosterone, dilettantish strain of conservatism that has overdeveloped in the “mainstream” media to create such sterile hybrids as Michael Gerson and George Will and David Brooks. Nothing sunk these so-called wise men lower in the estimation of their fellow conservatives than their blithe indifference to the Clintons’ gangsterism. While Trump threw wild verbal haymakers at Hillary at campaign rallies, these intellectuals were basically on TV announcing they would be accommodationists for the Clinton Machine’s inevitable victory. Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea. The contrast in styles of conservatism was stark: it was the pugnacious billionaire against the stuffy wimps.
If it is wimpy to demand high standards of conduct from our side’s leaders, then I am guilty as charged. Our system is a republic, which demands virtue from our leaders for it to work. Sure, Clinton was a terrible candidate who would have been a terrible president. But, she would have been terrible within the normal boundaries of politics. She would not be throwing daily temper tantrums on Twitter. She would not have surrounded herself with amateurs in her Cabinet and on her staff. She would not promote Kim Jong-un, while ranting against Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Angela Merkel. Trump’s behavior is everything the Founders tried to prevent with Madisonian checks and balances- an unhinged demagogue who does not understand why his power needs to be restrained. As an aside, note how the author uses "low-testosterone" as an adjective to describe opponents. That is pretty much one step removed from calling people "cucks" and fully embracing the lexicon of the Alt-Right. Disgusting.
The greatest disconnect is religious and cultural: the Republican Party is overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian and traditional on social issues, while its pundits skew Jewish and agnostic and libertarian. Krauthammer wanted to have it both ways, which is not unlike the hedging that Brooks and Goldberg have displayed. George Will went so far as to say: “I’m an atheist. An agnostic is someone who is not sure. I’m pretty sure. I see no evidence of God.” Meanwhile, Gerson is a liberal Episcopalian who took to the pages of the Atlantic to attack evangelicals for supporting Trump. In sum, the conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.
This paragraph, right here, ought to insult any reader. Robinson is basically accusing NT of being a conspiracy of Jews and atheists against evangelicals. As an evangelical Christian, I am utterly ashamed of how prominent fellow evangelicals grovel at Trump’s feet. Like the Court appointments, Trump does not care about religious liberty. He merely sees it as an opportunity to win over a devout band of followers at little cost to himself. Trump, himself, surely knows that we could say “Merry Christmas” when Obama was President. But, he also knows that my fellow evangelicals crave to be “oppressed.” So he tells them what they want to hear and wins their devotion. By throwing a few meaningless culture war bones at the base, he easily acquires a devout following. Were he still a Democrat, however, figures like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Tony Perkins, and Todd Starnes would excoriate him, every day, for his rampant infidelity, lying, idolatry of money, shady business dealings, and everything else. Any honest observer should be able to understand why this evangelical hypocrisy would confuse these “Jewish, agnostic, and libertarian” intellectuals.
The curious uniformity of the Never Trump crowd extends beyond them being heretics who claim to be spokesmen for the Christian base. On every important issue of the election, it was hard to find one of them who could even articulate Trump’s position, let alone support it. Tucker Carlson was one of the few to see this stupidity early and he registered his dissent well in a break-out essay:
Trump’s positions are hard to articulate because he often reverses them and makes stuff up on the spot.
Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.
Trump is not a conservative, and he is bad for conservatism. It will take years for conservatism and the Republican Party to bounce back once Trumpism finally collapses. This pseudo-populist nationalist monstrosity that has engulfed the Grand Old Party may have won in the short-term, but in the long-term, it will seriously derail any chance the GOP has of winning national elections. Trump built a coalition of old, angry white men and drove away young and diverse conservatives. This is not sustainable. As Trump’s coalition dies off, the Democrat coalition will only get more numerous and will associate the GOP not with Reagan, but with the insanity of the Trump years. Good luck winning over Hispanics while tearing apart families for no good reason. Anyway, so much of this paragraph is full of strawmen that are simply not worth my time to burn.
The sad truth was that the Never Trumpers were not safeguarding the ideas of conservatism so much as themselves. Carlson nailed the heart of the matter: “If Trump is leading a populist movement, many of his Republican critics have joined an elitist one. Deriding Trump is an act of class solidarity, visible evidence of refinement and proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart.” That is why the continuing success of the Trump Presidency has been met with escalating anger and vituperation from the Never Trumpers — the news cycle is a daily reminder that they were wrong about everything. Can you be wrong about everything and still be part of the elite?
First of all, there are five Wal-Mart’s within a 25-mile radius of where I live. Second of all, what concrete successes have there been in this presidency? Tax reform and two Court appointments? That is a rather thin list of accomplishments a year and a half into this presidency, especially when juxtaposed with all of the administration’s failures and scandals. Once the economy tanks from Trump’s useless and counterproductive trade wars, there will be nowhere to hide. It will be indisputable that he wrecked the great economy he inherited.
That is a question being asked in front of many mirrors inside many Washington mansions today. Many people mistook their policy positions for principles, and Trump has made them look foolish. What do they stand for now? What does it mean to be conservative if you’re not clear about what you’re conserving? Credit David Brooks, of all people, with waving the white flag first this April, and with some humility when he admitted that “Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending.” Brooks then basically summarized the great failure of the Never Trumpers as “an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.”
I have no regrets for standing up for free trade, statesmanship, fiscal responsibility, and basic human decency. But I can see how standing up for principles might appear to be “insufferably condescending” in a party that only cares about triggering liberals. And how it might be offensive to tell people that they are being conned by a painfully-transparent con artist.
Meanwhile his former comrade, George Will, was not for surrender or appeasement. He had finally found an enemy to relish: his fellow conservatives. One measure of Will’s self-exile was the indifference his most recent column elicited, though it urged Republicans to vote against the GOP at the midterms “for their own good.” Was anyone still listening? It was Will who sagely warned the world mere days before the election: “Until the Republican Party gets right with minorities in this country, it’s never going to win another presidential election.” Not content with that spectacular blunder, Will had doubled down with attacks on Billy Graham and Vice President Mike Pence. The symbolism of such stunts, at least, was clear. As a model conservative, Will stands alone in his own estimation. And what could be more conservative than voting for liberal Democrats?
Maybe they should have interpreted Will’s article as a wake-up call for just how far-gone this party and movement have become? Throughout his career, Will’s only equal as a conservative columnist has been Charles Krauthammer. Perhaps the fact that Will is willing to vote for Democrats to defeat Trump should be viewed as a damning indictment of what Trump has done to this party- drive away actual conservatives and import those who have no understanding of conservatism, but are merely resentful of “elites” and people of color. Will understands that giving the Democrats power will hurt conservative policy goals, but that it is worth it if it awakens the Republican Party from this Trump-inspired stupor; if it returns our politics to a state of normalcy, rather than demagoguery. He is looking at the big picture, where Trump’s antics and demagoguery threaten the fundamentals of our constitutional republic and are enabled by a feckless Republican Party that is unwilling to hold him accountable for anything.
In that sense, Will’s latest column was merely the fitting coda to a long career of effete snobbery — one that had led him to “leave the party” before it won the White House and march off into the wilderness. (Someday, his columns from the Trump years will be collected and they should be titled: “An Apotheosis of Narcissism.”) He would take his tea and his bow-tie elsewhere. The headmaster of the stuffy wimps would not take part in the victory of the counter-punchers. At last, like so many of his fellow Never Trumpers, he was a pundit without a party and, ultimately, without an audience.
I get it. You guys won the day. But like Will, I truly believe that Trump’s victory will one day be viewed as the most Pyrrhic victory in conservative and Republican history. In the face of demographic shifts that show that whites will someday soon cease to be an outright majority in this country, the Republican decision to double-down on an all-white party will be viewed as absolutely foolish. And when the economy goes bust because of Trump’s economic illiteracy, the Republicans will pay. And then we will finally be writing about the Collapse of Trumpism as the GOP is in ruins. So, enjoy this scandal-ridden period of power, because in the long-run, NT will be completely vindicated.
With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?
Okay, so the introductory paragraph sets out the thesis- which is that the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy (in addition to the recent confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch) is ironclad proof that Never Trumpers (NT) were wrong to distrust Trump. Moreover, it is just one of “so many humiliating defeats” for NT that have led to an “ignominious end.” And finally, this somehow means that Trump will be the “most consequential conservative president of the modern era” (or second-most behind Reagan). I will admit that Trump kept his word on Court picks, but other than tax reform, the Trumpian victories have been rather few and far between. The two Court appointments, plus tax reform, would have been achieved by any of the other 16 Republicans who ran for President in 2016. What most of them would not have brought to the table is the series of scandals, blunders, and national humiliations that President Trump has brought upon the country with his ethically-challenged and amateur-filled Cabinet, ad hoc foreign policies, counterproductive trade wars, and disgraceful behavior as President. Conservatives could have had those victories (and plenty more) behind President Rubio or Kasich or Cruz or even Bobby Jindal. Just because Trump figured out that Court appointments would buy the undying loyalty of the vast majority of Republicans does not make him the “most consequential conservative president ever.” George W. Bush’s Court appointments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, arguably moved the Court just as much to the right as Trump will have, and ensured that the Chief Justice would be a conservative for decades to come.
For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trump editorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.
I do not know what the purpose of this paragraph is, other than to celebrate the death of the greatest conservative columnist since William F. Buckler, Jr. RIP Charles Krauthammer.
One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.
Okay, so you beat Bill Kristol. Whoopty-do. Also, Michael Anton deserved to be chastised for that awful article that was an insult to the memory of the brave passengers of Flight 93.
Of course, Kristol was not alone in his contempt for Trump — he was only the most vocal and unhinged. Alongside him were other conservatives like Jennifer Rubin and George Will and Michael Gerson at the Washington Post; Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal; David Brooks and Ross Douthat at the New York Times; Jonah Goldberg and David French at National Review; Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg; and Erick Erickson at RedState. A number of others, people like David Frum and Ana Navarro, committed political seppuku early and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically.
Personally, I admire many of these people (except for Rubin) for putting principle above career aspirations. Other than Rubin, who has taken to switching all of her political positions so that they are the opposite of Trump, these figures have not changed their beliefs or kissed Trump’s rings in order to get back in good standing with the Conservative Media Establishment. They chose the harder path of staying true to their convictions, rather than the easy path of Anti-Anti-Trumpism or even being outright Trump sycophants.
What happened? If these intellectuals were so influential in the conservative movement, then why has their apostasy garnered so little attention? A Ramesh Ponnuru editorial in Bloomberg blurted out this truth: “In 2016 we found out that conservative elites didn’t speak for Republican voters.” This split between the party’s base and its donor class (as well as the donor-funded intellectuals) was years in the making, but it became obvious once Trump became the nominee. Then the truth became obvious and damning: the Never Trumpers represented no one but themselves.
Fair enough. It turned out that intellectual consistency and rigor matter little to the base. Instead of making the intellectual case for what was considered to be “conservatism” pre-2015, they would have been better served by appeasing the base instincts of the Republican base.
Looking back, it now seems self-evident that conservative pundits were preposterously out of touch. (Who isn’t amused by the poindexter pretentiousness of George Will’s bow-ties or the pseudo-scholarly piffle of Jonah Goldberg’s byline as “the inaugural holder of the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty?”). These intellectuals barely noticed the opioid crisis running through small town America; or the base’s anger regarding illegal immigration; and they were adamantly opposed to any restriction of free trade while working class frustrations mounted over NAFTA and its ilk. (This explains why J. D. Vance and his book Hillbilly Elegy was Washington’s must-read book of 2017: it provided a portrait of rural America that the political class could digest without condescending to visit such places or talk to such voters.) It turns out that conservative intellectuals, living inside the “Acela Corridor” and funded exclusively by think tanks and foundations, are poor barometers of Republican voter concerns.
Same deal as the last paragraph. The Republican Party turned out to be far more anti-intellectual than was previously assumed. If you get angry over George Will’s bowties, then there is nothing that we could have done to win you over. And as regards free trade, it looks like the base will have to learn the hard way that tariffs and protectionism are bad for the economy, including the industries occupied by the so-called “Forgotten Men.”
This myopia has several causes. The first is a kind of cultural “capture” that occurs when conservatives live in blue districts and big cities too long. They become, in other words, clueless (RINOS). The second reason is more obvious: many of these people are paid to be openly hostile to Trump’s agenda. The free trade absolutists at AEI and Cato are on salary to oppose any protectionist trade policies. Likewise, hawkish interventionists such as Max Boot knew they had no professional future once Trump’s isolationist instincts became policy.
Now this author is just assuming that we all wine and dine at DC cocktail parties, which is simply not true. I live in Orange, VA, which is anything, but a blue district, and I grew up in fire-engine red Lancaster County, PA. As for the scholars at AEI and Cato, who are “free trade absolutists,” maybe they oppose Trump’s policies because their studies of economics have convinced them that free trade lowers prices, opens up foreign markets, and raises living standards for everyone. In other words, they oppose Trump’s trade wars because they know that the trade wars are terrible policies.
There is also a low-testosterone, dilettantish strain of conservatism that has overdeveloped in the “mainstream” media to create such sterile hybrids as Michael Gerson and George Will and David Brooks. Nothing sunk these so-called wise men lower in the estimation of their fellow conservatives than their blithe indifference to the Clintons’ gangsterism. While Trump threw wild verbal haymakers at Hillary at campaign rallies, these intellectuals were basically on TV announcing they would be accommodationists for the Clinton Machine’s inevitable victory. Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea. The contrast in styles of conservatism was stark: it was the pugnacious billionaire against the stuffy wimps.
If it is wimpy to demand high standards of conduct from our side’s leaders, then I am guilty as charged. Our system is a republic, which demands virtue from our leaders for it to work. Sure, Clinton was a terrible candidate who would have been a terrible president. But, she would have been terrible within the normal boundaries of politics. She would not be throwing daily temper tantrums on Twitter. She would not have surrounded herself with amateurs in her Cabinet and on her staff. She would not promote Kim Jong-un, while ranting against Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Angela Merkel. Trump’s behavior is everything the Founders tried to prevent with Madisonian checks and balances- an unhinged demagogue who does not understand why his power needs to be restrained. As an aside, note how the author uses "low-testosterone" as an adjective to describe opponents. That is pretty much one step removed from calling people "cucks" and fully embracing the lexicon of the Alt-Right. Disgusting.
The greatest disconnect is religious and cultural: the Republican Party is overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian and traditional on social issues, while its pundits skew Jewish and agnostic and libertarian. Krauthammer wanted to have it both ways, which is not unlike the hedging that Brooks and Goldberg have displayed. George Will went so far as to say: “I’m an atheist. An agnostic is someone who is not sure. I’m pretty sure. I see no evidence of God.” Meanwhile, Gerson is a liberal Episcopalian who took to the pages of the Atlantic to attack evangelicals for supporting Trump. In sum, the conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.
This paragraph, right here, ought to insult any reader. Robinson is basically accusing NT of being a conspiracy of Jews and atheists against evangelicals. As an evangelical Christian, I am utterly ashamed of how prominent fellow evangelicals grovel at Trump’s feet. Like the Court appointments, Trump does not care about religious liberty. He merely sees it as an opportunity to win over a devout band of followers at little cost to himself. Trump, himself, surely knows that we could say “Merry Christmas” when Obama was President. But, he also knows that my fellow evangelicals crave to be “oppressed.” So he tells them what they want to hear and wins their devotion. By throwing a few meaningless culture war bones at the base, he easily acquires a devout following. Were he still a Democrat, however, figures like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Tony Perkins, and Todd Starnes would excoriate him, every day, for his rampant infidelity, lying, idolatry of money, shady business dealings, and everything else. Any honest observer should be able to understand why this evangelical hypocrisy would confuse these “Jewish, agnostic, and libertarian” intellectuals.
The curious uniformity of the Never Trump crowd extends beyond them being heretics who claim to be spokesmen for the Christian base. On every important issue of the election, it was hard to find one of them who could even articulate Trump’s position, let alone support it. Tucker Carlson was one of the few to see this stupidity early and he registered his dissent well in a break-out essay:
Trump’s positions are hard to articulate because he often reverses them and makes stuff up on the spot.
Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.
Trump is not a conservative, and he is bad for conservatism. It will take years for conservatism and the Republican Party to bounce back once Trumpism finally collapses. This pseudo-populist nationalist monstrosity that has engulfed the Grand Old Party may have won in the short-term, but in the long-term, it will seriously derail any chance the GOP has of winning national elections. Trump built a coalition of old, angry white men and drove away young and diverse conservatives. This is not sustainable. As Trump’s coalition dies off, the Democrat coalition will only get more numerous and will associate the GOP not with Reagan, but with the insanity of the Trump years. Good luck winning over Hispanics while tearing apart families for no good reason. Anyway, so much of this paragraph is full of strawmen that are simply not worth my time to burn.
The sad truth was that the Never Trumpers were not safeguarding the ideas of conservatism so much as themselves. Carlson nailed the heart of the matter: “If Trump is leading a populist movement, many of his Republican critics have joined an elitist one. Deriding Trump is an act of class solidarity, visible evidence of refinement and proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart.” That is why the continuing success of the Trump Presidency has been met with escalating anger and vituperation from the Never Trumpers — the news cycle is a daily reminder that they were wrong about everything. Can you be wrong about everything and still be part of the elite?
First of all, there are five Wal-Mart’s within a 25-mile radius of where I live. Second of all, what concrete successes have there been in this presidency? Tax reform and two Court appointments? That is a rather thin list of accomplishments a year and a half into this presidency, especially when juxtaposed with all of the administration’s failures and scandals. Once the economy tanks from Trump’s useless and counterproductive trade wars, there will be nowhere to hide. It will be indisputable that he wrecked the great economy he inherited.
That is a question being asked in front of many mirrors inside many Washington mansions today. Many people mistook their policy positions for principles, and Trump has made them look foolish. What do they stand for now? What does it mean to be conservative if you’re not clear about what you’re conserving? Credit David Brooks, of all people, with waving the white flag first this April, and with some humility when he admitted that “Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending.” Brooks then basically summarized the great failure of the Never Trumpers as “an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.”
I have no regrets for standing up for free trade, statesmanship, fiscal responsibility, and basic human decency. But I can see how standing up for principles might appear to be “insufferably condescending” in a party that only cares about triggering liberals. And how it might be offensive to tell people that they are being conned by a painfully-transparent con artist.
Meanwhile his former comrade, George Will, was not for surrender or appeasement. He had finally found an enemy to relish: his fellow conservatives. One measure of Will’s self-exile was the indifference his most recent column elicited, though it urged Republicans to vote against the GOP at the midterms “for their own good.” Was anyone still listening? It was Will who sagely warned the world mere days before the election: “Until the Republican Party gets right with minorities in this country, it’s never going to win another presidential election.” Not content with that spectacular blunder, Will had doubled down with attacks on Billy Graham and Vice President Mike Pence. The symbolism of such stunts, at least, was clear. As a model conservative, Will stands alone in his own estimation. And what could be more conservative than voting for liberal Democrats?
Maybe they should have interpreted Will’s article as a wake-up call for just how far-gone this party and movement have become? Throughout his career, Will’s only equal as a conservative columnist has been Charles Krauthammer. Perhaps the fact that Will is willing to vote for Democrats to defeat Trump should be viewed as a damning indictment of what Trump has done to this party- drive away actual conservatives and import those who have no understanding of conservatism, but are merely resentful of “elites” and people of color. Will understands that giving the Democrats power will hurt conservative policy goals, but that it is worth it if it awakens the Republican Party from this Trump-inspired stupor; if it returns our politics to a state of normalcy, rather than demagoguery. He is looking at the big picture, where Trump’s antics and demagoguery threaten the fundamentals of our constitutional republic and are enabled by a feckless Republican Party that is unwilling to hold him accountable for anything.
In that sense, Will’s latest column was merely the fitting coda to a long career of effete snobbery — one that had led him to “leave the party” before it won the White House and march off into the wilderness. (Someday, his columns from the Trump years will be collected and they should be titled: “An Apotheosis of Narcissism.”) He would take his tea and his bow-tie elsewhere. The headmaster of the stuffy wimps would not take part in the victory of the counter-punchers. At last, like so many of his fellow Never Trumpers, he was a pundit without a party and, ultimately, without an audience.
I get it. You guys won the day. But like Will, I truly believe that Trump’s victory will one day be viewed as the most Pyrrhic victory in conservative and Republican history. In the face of demographic shifts that show that whites will someday soon cease to be an outright majority in this country, the Republican decision to double-down on an all-white party will be viewed as absolutely foolish. And when the economy goes bust because of Trump’s economic illiteracy, the Republicans will pay. And then we will finally be writing about the Collapse of Trumpism as the GOP is in ruins. So, enjoy this scandal-ridden period of power, because in the long-run, NT will be completely vindicated.
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