In this episode of “Who’d a Thunk It?”…
Much has been written about the state of the left in the aftermath of President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding win over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. From congressional Democrats to their sycophantic media to the lady geniuses of ABC’s silly program “The View,” we’ve seen everything from abject anger to profound disbelief to depression to untold numbers of on-air meltdowns.
However, this article isn’t about the left’s meltdown. Rather, it is about a self-proclaimed “Never-Trumper” and his post-election realization that he and his fellow Never-Trumpers have been wrong about the incoming president from the beginning.
In a Tuesday op-ed titled “Done With Never Trump,” conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens did a mea culpa of sorts and fessed up that “We [Never-Trump] never quite got the point” of the MAGA movement and looked at why so many Americans did.
Stephens kicked off his op-ed thusly:
It’s been more than nine years since I first denounced Donald Trump as a “loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians.” I’ve called myself a Never Trump conservative ever since, even when I agreed with his policies from time to time. I also opposed him throughout his run this year.
To be sure, Stephens’ column was far from a love note to Trump and his supporters, but it was a rare site to behold from a member of an obstinate group of conservatives who have for years twisted themselves into irrational pretzels as they’ve vilified Trump at every opportunity.
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Still, asked Stephens, could a second Trump term be as bad as his critics fear? True to form, his answer was “yes” before he called for a change in the minds of Never-Trumpers.
Could his second term be as bad as his most fervent critics fear? Yes. Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement — and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse? Yes, please.
One (this one, anyway) wonders about the degree of metamorphosis a guy like Stephens had to endure before publicly admitting the above — and far more.
Stephens suggested that he and his colleagues hadn’t forgotten about the scandals of the Clintons or allegations about the Bidens as he attempted to justify Never-Trump before explaining why he finally personally abandoned the ill-fated label.
It wasn’t that we’d forgotten Clinton’s scandals or were ignorant of the allegations about the Bidens. It’s that we thought Trump degraded the values that conservatives were supposed to stand for.
We also thought that Trump represented a form of illiberalism that was antithetical to our ‘free people, free markets, free world’ brand of conservatism and that was bound to take the Republican Party down a dark road.
In this we weren’t wrong: There’s plenty to dislike and fear about Trump from a traditionally conservative standpoint. But Never Trumpers also overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose.
Yes, Stephens and his colleagues defeated whatever purpose they professed to hold dear. The columnist continued to explain, via specific examples, where Never-Trump got it wrong.
We predicted that Trump’s rhetoric would wreck the Republican Party’s chances to win over the constituencies the party had identified, after 2012, as key to its future. But we missed that his working-class appeal would also reach working-class minorities — like the 48 percent of Latino male voters who cast their ballots for him last month. And we were alarmed by Trump’s protectionism and big-spending ways. But the economy mostly thrived under him, at least until the pandemic.
Again, who’d a thunk it? Moreover, Stephens appeared to still be mystified by Trump’s ability to connect with and talk directly to mainstream Americans in such an effective way.
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? What else did we not sufficiently appreciate? 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.
There it was.
As a reasonable person, I could never understand why Never-Trump conservatives had more contempt for Trump than the Democrat Party and what it had done and continues to do to this country. Is Trump perfect? Of course not. But is today’s radicalized Democrat Party far worse and intent on destroying America as we know it? Absolutely.
Stephens then threw in the towel and wished the incoming Trump administration well.
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.
While pigs do occasionally fly and hell does sometimes freeze over, seeing a Never-Trump conservative admit that he and his colleagues were wrong about the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States is quite a phenomenon.
