Never Trumpers Were Right, Actually
A response to Bret Stephens. Plus drone talk from the front lines.
1. Always Right
Bret Stephens has a column today in which he renounces his Never Trump patrimony and castigates Trump critics for being overheated and wrong about so many things.
You should read his piece to get the full breadth of his argument. But I’ll give you a taste:
Never Trumpers also overstated our case and, in doing so, defeated our purpose.
We warned that Trump would be a reckless president who might stumble into World War III. If anything, his foreign policy in his first term was, in practice, often cautious to a fault. We hyperventilated about his odd chumminess with Vladimir Putin. But the collusion allegations were a smear, and Trump’s Russia policy — whether it was his opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or his covert aid to Ukraine — was much tougher than either Barack Obama’s or (at least until Russia invaded Ukraine) President Biden’s.
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.
With respect: This is silly.
First, Stephens uses arbitrary temporal windows to make his argument. For instance: Biden was softer on Russia until Russia invaded Ukraine.
Maybe?1 But Russia did invade Ukraine in February 2022. Three-quarters of Biden’s presidency has taken place since then and during that period Biden inflicted more pain on Russia than any American president, ever.
Then Stephens says that Trump’s economy was great right up until the pandemic hit. But the pandemic did hit. That is a real thing that happened and it took up a quarter of Trump’s presidency and was the last thing Trump did on his way out the door.
So on Russia, we are supposed to judge Biden by the policies of his first year while on the economy we are supposed to ignore the outcomes during Trump’s final year. Cool, cool.
But 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?