We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Brett Stephens, one of the Never Trump Republicans at the New York Times, has had an epiphany: Donald Trump is a person, not a demon, and his supporters are Americans who are tired of the transnational elite’s destruction of America. 

Advertisement

It only took nine years to see things more or less as they are. I would say that counts as lightning fast on the Never Trump scale, and as stunning and brave when published in 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.

Advertisement

First things first: I have never thought of Stephens as in the same class as the Never Trump grifters. He belongs in the class of Republicans who were genuinely repulsed by the populist strain of politics that Trump represents but not in the class who switched sides in order to increase their marketability in the political marketplace that can be so remunerative. 

For this reason, while I often disagreed with Stephens, I was not repulsed by him in the way that The Lincoln Project folks inspired intestinal discomfort every time I saw their opinions vomited out on Twitter or now X. 

Stephens’ reaction to Trump was based on his allegiance to an older way of conducting politics and making policy. He preferred the Brahmin way of doing things, not the Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt style of politics. Oddly, many Brahmins now like the first Roosevelt president, but it is easy to do so when he is safely dead and no longer reminding him that he was one of the original Jingoists. 

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.

Advertisement

The revelation that changed Stephens’ mind seems odd: he now sees in Trump what Trump’s fans saw all along: that he latched onto and embodied the disgust that MAGA feels for the degraded American elite and that the elite took American institutions that worked, hollowed them out, and turned them into a corrupt tool of their tyrannical aspirations. 

The cardinal flaw of this version of Never Trumpism is that they were led to excuse the corruption of Washington because they hated Trump. They ignored the Hunter Biden scandal because it distracted from the “true” enemy–Donald Trump. It never occurred to them that Donald Trump was America’s reaction–a symptom of America’s immune system, not the disease itself. 

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 Biden’s.

Advertisement

The worst excesses of MAGA–and there are a few–should be seen as the body politic’s immune reaction to a deadly disease. They are like a runny nose and a fever, which aren’t the result of the virus but of the body’s destroying it. In more normal times, the affable Ronald Reagan can step into the Oval Office and chip away at the excesses of liberalism, but these are not normal times. 

The body politic is suffering from a deadly disease, and Trumpism may be a blunt instrument, but a blunt instrument is just what is needed, and Stephens seems to be waking up to the fact that perhaps Trump can begin the process of healing America. 

Stephens isn’t embracing MAGA, as the convert J.D. Vance has. But he sees the wisdom of wishing for its success. That’s a good start. 

The vibe is shifting. Even some of Trump’s biggest critics in the shrinking crowd of genuinely conservative Never Trumpers are beginning to see that the Bad Orange Man may actually accomplish some important things. 

Sure, people who make a living attacking Trump will keep it up, as with the true sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But the few people who are capable of rethinking their prejudices are beginning to do so. 

The world is healing.