Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, is no longer a Never Trumper, a nine-year-old movement that characterizes many establishment Republicans’ opposition to President-elect Donald Trump.
The change of heart by Stephens, who announced the decision on Tuesday, is an admission of Trump’s successful realignment of the Republican Party in the interest of the American worker.
In a Times column, Stephens disavowed Never Trumper resistance “as heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying” that “rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse.”
He admitted that “Never Trumpers also overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose,” while Trump addressed the needs of the American workers, who “really cared” about “the high cost of living and the chaos at the border.”
He cited Trump’s success at exposing the political elites, draconian coronavirus restrictions, open borders, NATO members’ refusal to pay their fair share, and the Biden family’s business scandal.
“Never Trumpers — I include myself in this indictment — never quite got the point,” Stephens acknowledged:
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.
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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.
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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.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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