Bret Stephens of The NY Times has written a fatuous piece abandoning his “Never Trump” status (which, I admit, I didn’t even realize he had obtained. Really?) Anyway, he says Trump’s not bad and never was and everyone is being hysterical. This is something I’m hearing from a lot of people. I’m not going to offer a gift link to it because it’s really not worth it. Unless you have amnesia of the last 10 years it’s anything but persuasive.
Instead I want to direct you to the Bulwark’s JV Last’s response which he has posted outside the paywall so you can click over to read the whole thing. Here is a small piece of it. It’s really good:
I want to take Stephens’s larger point: That Trump’s critics were wrong about the dangers Trump posed in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
It’s impossible to enumerate all of the warnings made about Trump and different people focused on different aspects of the danger he presented. But I think we can reasonably summarize the general concerns as:
- Trump is dangerously ignorant of basic reality.
- He is easy to manipulate.
- In a time of crisis, he can not be trusted to make sound judgments.
- His commitments to democracy and the rule of law are weak and his attraction to authoritarianism is strong.
- In a second term, he would surround himself with dangerous button men and be focused on retribution against perceived domestic enemies.
Now what did the reality of Trump deliver?
- He attempted to blackmail the president of Ukraine into lying about his likely 2020 election opponent.
- His handling of COVID represented the single greatest failure of the federal government in American history.2
- He disbanded the government’s pandemic response team in 2018.
- He coddled the Chinese dictator at the outset of the outbreak.
- He failed to push forward aggressively on the production of testing kits and PPE during the opening months.
- He muddled public health messaging coming from the government.
- His one COVID success was the creation of Operation Warp Speed, to accelerate the development of a vaccine. That project worked. But Trump then botched the rollout of the vaccine.
- And in the wake of the creation of the vaccine, Trump created a political atmosphere in which his supporters turned against first the COVID vaccine and then all vaccines.
- He surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and committed America to a hard deadline for withdrawal without securing any meaningful concessions from the Islamists.
- He refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and plunged the country into a crisis by lying about it.
- He summoned a mob to Washington on January 6th. He knew that this mob was armed. He directed the mob to march on the Capitol so as to prevent Mike Pence from certifying the electoral vote count. When this mob turned violent, he declined to send the National Guard to break it up.
- He allegedly stole classified government documents and then allegedly lied about it.
I’ve written this before, but the reality of Trump’s first term came pretty close to the worst-case scenarios. It is simply not true that Trump’s critics oversold the danger he represented. If anything, they underestimated it.
He goes on to discuss everything we’re already seeing for Trump II and I think people are very much underestimating his intentions. Whether he’ll be able to accomplish his toxic agenda is yet to be determined.
Never Trumpers and the rest of us who saw what Trump was, and see what he is today, are taking quite a bit of incoming from a number of different directions. We are outside the mainstream right now. But the idea that people who correctly anticipated Trump’s atrocities and called them out in real time are the ones who empowered him, as Stephens contends, is ridiculous. It’s the squishes and hacks like Stephens who are, this very minute, enabling yet another assault on democracy and the rule of law by pretending that he and this freak show he’s putting into government are normal and benign.
I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot I can do about Trump. I’m anything but a billionaire and I don’t have powerful connections. But I can try to convey the truth as I see it as clearly as possible. And what I have been seeing ever since he came down the golden escalator is an unfit, ignorant, immoral, narcissist who has no business being in charge of anything, much less the most powerful country on earth. Just because some people seem to really like all that about him doesn’t make it untrue.