The Conservatives Who Sold Their Souls for Trump
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Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”
No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.
Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.” Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.
All of this was presented in the pages of America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times.
What’s going on here?
Many journalists are reluctant to report on Trump’s obvious instability and disordered personality—the “bias toward coherence” that The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has cautioned about. But Lowry’s article was different. I cannot know the actual thinking at the Times, although I suspect the paper accepted the article to offer a pro-Trump contributor as a way of displaying a diversity of views. The plunge that Lowry and others have taken into the muck of Trumpism, however, is not new, and has origins that are important to consider in the coming months of the 2024 election.
When Trump decided in 2015 to run for president as a Republican (after years of being, at various times, a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican), the GOP establishment reacted mostly with horror. At the time, it claimed to be appalled by Trump’s character—as decent people should be—and rejected him as a self-centered carpetbagger who would only get in the way of defeating Hillary Clinton. Lowry’s National Review even asked some two dozen well-known conservative figures to spend an entire issue making the case against Trump.
The reality, however, is that much of the conservative opposition to Trump in 2016 was a sham—because it came from people who thought they were safe in assuming that Trump couldn’t possibly win. For many on the right, slagging Trump was easy and useful. They could assert their principled conservatism and their political wisdom as they tut-tutted Trump’s inevitable loss. Then they could strip the bark off of a President Hillary Clinton while deflecting charges of partisan motivation: After all, their opposition to Trump—their own candidate!—proved their bona fides as ideologically honest brokers.
It was a win-win proposition—as long as Trump lost and then went away.
But Trump won, and arrangements, so to speak, had to be made. The Republican base—and many of its heaviest donors—had spoken. Some of the conservatives who rejected Trump stayed the course and became the Never Trump movement. Others, apparently, decided that never didn’t mean “never.” Power is power, and if getting the right judges and cutting the right taxes has to include stomping on the rule of law and endangering American national security, well, that’s a price that the stoic right-wingers of the greater Washington, D.C., and New York City metropolitan areas were willing to pay.
Lowry and others in that group never became full-fledged MAGA warriors. Many of them hated Trump, as Tucker Carlson, now a born-again Trump booster, admitted in 2021; they just hated Democrats more. But they also hated being reminded of the spirit-crushing bargain they’d made with a tacky outer-borough real-estate developer they wouldn’t have spoken with a year earlier. As Charlie Sykes wrote in 2017, they adopted a new fetish: “Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism.”
None of this internecine conservative sniping would matter, except that the anti-anti-Trumpers, in order to justify the abandonment of their principles, are driven to poison the well of public debate for everyone else. They never expected having to deal with Trump for this long; they never foresaw themselves doubling and tripling and quadrupling down to the point where they now must politely look away from felonies, attacks on America’s alliances, and promises to pardon insurrectionists. Lowry and others are intelligent people who know better, but their decision to bend the knee to Trump—even if only with a very small curtsy—requires them to take to the pages of America’s national newspapers and say that Trump might be terrible but Democrats are worse.
For example, a colleague of Lowry’s at National Review, Dan McLaughlin, has for years argued that he could never vote for Trump but that he could not vote for Clinton, Biden, or Harris, either. Harris’s sudden upending of the race might change that. McLaughlin posted yesterday on X that “Harris isn’t just as bad as can be on nearly every policy issue—even profound life-and-death questions of conscience—she’s a menace to the survival of the constitutional order.”
This is a panicky and massive case of projection. McLaughlin might hate Harris’s views on abortion (among other things), but Trump is a demonstrated “menace to the survival of the constitutional order,” and McLaughlin surely knows it.
The anti-anti-Trumpers must now define Harris—and all Democrats—as evil beyond words. Otherwise, how would they explain the ghastly compromises they’ve made? How would they argue against voting to stop Trump? When other conservatives, such as noted retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, are enthusiastically endorsing Harris, some pretty fancy dancing is required to explain why your principles are more consistent than theirs. Unfortunately, when Trump is out there raising the bar on idiocy, cruelty, and anti-Americanism every day, that dancing looks more like Raygun than Fred Astaire.
For the MAGA media soldiers—the prime-time lineup on Fox News, the talk-radio hosts, the podcasters, and others—wacky (and hideous) accusations against Harris and other Democrats about “Marxism” and “communism” and “after-birth abortions” come easily because they are aimed at people who are already addled by a steady diet of rage and weirdness. But the conservative intellectuals who once opposed Trump have been reduced to dressing up such bizarre arguments as reasonable criticisms. They often seem to be sighing heavily and regretting having to be on the same side as Trump—but that doesn’t stop them from making the risible claim that Trump and Harris are equally terrifying possibilities.
Stepping outside of years of partisan tribal affiliations comes with professional and social costs (and for politicians, electoral consequences). But principles are sometimes burdensome things; that’s part of what makes them principles. The behavior of the anti-anti-Trumpers continues to be an inexcusable betrayal of the values they once claimed to hold. Many of them spoke, even passionately, against Trump—and then they shuffled into line. And for what? One more federal judge? A few billion more dollars in the account of a donor?
It’s one thing to sell your soul cheaply. It’s another to keep taking out second and third mortgages on it until all that’s left is debt and shame.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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