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‘Never-Trump’ NYT columnist admits the left missed the point of the MAGA movement

December 19, 2024 | | Print Article

A New York Times columnist is admitting that he and other “Never Trumpers” missed the point of President-elect Donald Trump’s support and the MAGA movement.

In a column this week calling for an end to fearmongering about the former and future president, Bret Stephens announced he is “done” with his previous stance. While he delivered a convincing capitulation to some, many called out his insincere epiphany as a self-serving attempt to stay relevant.

“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,” Stephens began his op-ed.

“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,” he relented.

He went on to note the patriotic yet angry facets of the Make America Great Again movement, saying some of that anger is “correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn’t.”

“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,” Stephens wrote, citing examples that clearly showed biased handling of various scandals and controversies.

“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,” he contended.

While he maintains that there were still things traditional conservatives disliked about Trump, Never Trumpers “overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose.”

The columnist conceded that predictions about how Trump “might stumble into World War III” as president turned out to be unfounded and how the claims of Russia collusion “were a smear.” Stephens admitted that Trump was “much tougher” on Russia than the Obama and Biden administrations.

Stephens pointed out how Never Trumpers “missed that his working-class appeal would also reach working-class minorities,” pointing to the 48 percent of Latino male voters who supported his election bid. While he and other “elites” focused on the issue burning of “democracy” in the wake of the January 6 events at the Capitol, Americans, it seems were more concerned with inflation and the immigration crisis.

“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?” Stephens wondered.

“What else did we not sufficiently appreciate?” he asked, answering his own question by pointing to Americans feeling lied to concerning President Biden’s “physical and mental decline” as well as “the torrent of Israel-bashing and antisemitism that emerged from the cultural left after Oct. 7.”

And fears about Trump trampling on or outright destroying American institutions were also unfounded as many of those same entities, such as colleges and the FBI “are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.”

In conclusion, the longtime Trump critic had a message for others like himself on the left or 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,” Stephens wrote, “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.”

Frieda Powers
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