New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is rethinking his 'Never Trump' stance, admitting that the movement overplayed its hand and failed to understand Trump's appeal.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens appears to be giving up on the 'Never Trump ' identity he embraced during the first Trump era, realizing that he and his media colleagues missed the mark following the 2024 election. '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 column, 'Done With Never Trump,' Tuesday. '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 conceded. Stephens acknowledged that Trump's 'sulfurous contempt' for the political elite, his 'refusal to be shaped by their norms' and his 'willingness to call out their hypocrisy' makes him a 'hero' to his supporters, something of which he and other Never Trumpers '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,' Stephens wrote. 'In this we weren’t wrong: 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 purpos
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