By Bret Stephens / The New York Times
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.
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.
Who, and what, is Trump? He’s a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic; and angry.
Some of that anger is intensely bigoted and some of it misplaced. That side of the anger gets most of the media’s attention. But some of it, too, is correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn’t, whether the subject is covid restrictions, immigration policy or how to get our allies to pay more for their defense.
It’s Trump’s sulfurous contempt for that elite — his refusal to be shaped by their norms or shamed by their scorn and his willingness to call out their hypocrisy — that makes him a hero to his followers. Cases in point: 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?
Never Trumpers — I include myself in this indictment — never quite got the point. 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.
How so? 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 Joe Biden’s.
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.
We also talked a lot about democracy. That’s important: The memory of Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2020 election lies were the main reasons I voted for Kamala Harris. 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.
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?
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, 2023. That, as much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether it’s higher education or the FBI, many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.
So here’s a thought for Trump’s perennial critics, including those of us on the right: 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.
Enjoy the holidays.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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