4 lessons from 9 years of being ‘Never Trump’
I’ve been wrong about many things, but here are two of the bigger whiffs of my professional life.
I thought Donald Trump wouldn’t find any meaningful support in the Republican Party. I watched his strange campaign announcement, complete with a partially paid crowd and a wild, rambling speech and thought, “This man is going nowhere.”
And I thought evangelical conservatives would be the firewall against his ascendancy, not his most loyal constituency and the fuel for the fire of his political comeback after Jan. 6. I never imagined the Christian devotion to Trump that we see today.
I’d been an evangelical my entire life and a Republican since my teenage years. I thought I knew my own community. Then, suddenly, I didn’t. I was shocked and more than a little embarrassed, but also curious. Ever since that moment, I’ve been haunted by two questions: What did I miss? Why did I miss it?
I could write a book about the lessons I’ve learned, but this is a column, so I’ll be brief. Here are four things I wish my 2024 self could travel back and say to 2015 me, a much more naive writer for National Review.
Community is more powerful than ideology
If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.
In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.
Right until they didn’t. Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the GOP platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.
I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.
And so Republicans could cling to their ideas and face the wrath of their neighbors, or they could conform, keep their friends and comfort themselves with the notion that no matter what Trump did or said, at least he wasn’t a Democrat.
We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
On June 1, 1998 — five months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke — the Southern Baptist Convention convened in Salt Lake City and voted to approve a resolution on the importance of moral character in public officials. It included this memorable line: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
Yet now Southern Baptists are among Trump’s most loyal supporters. Were they lying in 1998? Was the evangelical argument for character a cynical partisan exercise from the beginning?
I don’t think so. I think the vast majority of Baptists who voted for the resolution believed those words. But I also think their commitment was untested.
I’m haunted by something a liberal friend told me when we were reminiscing about the Clinton years before the Trump era. “I’m not proud of some of our defenses of Clinton,” he said, “but I wonder if Republicans would behave any differently if the cost of holding to their values was losing a president.”
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” We don’t know if we’re actually honest until we tell the truth when the truth will hurt us.
Evangelicals thought they valued integrity in politicians, and they held to that conviction until the very moment it carried a cost. That is when courage failed.
Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
If you made me write a one-sentence explanation for why the Republican community abandoned its ideology, much less why it abandoned its morality and began to support Trump, I’d say, “It’s negative partisanship.” A central fact of American politics is that partisans on both sides utterly loathe the opposition.
A perfect expression of MAGA’s negative partisanship came from Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance. In a 2021 profile in The American Conservative, he told writer James Pogue, “I think our people hate the right people.”
Political hatred is amply documented. According to a recent study by More in Common, a nonpartisan organization that does research on political and cultural differences, 86% of Republicans believe Democrats are brainwashed, 84% believe Democrats are hateful and 71% believe Democrats are racist. Democrats have an even dimmer view of Republicans — 88% believe Republicans are brainwashed, 87% believe Republicans are hateful and 89% believe Republicans are racist.
I was talking recently to a friend who was astounded that Republicans were so willing to support a corrupt and cruel man to defeat the alleged threat presented by a “normal Democrat.” But if the Republican view of Democrats is that low, then there are no normal Democrats. Instead, they’re a collection of depraved zealots, Marxists who are actively trying to destroy the United States. And desperate times require desperate measures — like nominating Trump again — to defeat this mortal threat.
Finally, trust is tribal
Central to MAGA culture is the idea that its rage and anger against the so-called mainstream media is completely justified by the media’s bias and the media’s mistakes. They are “the true enemy of the people.” When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”
I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.
When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.
Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.
The four points above certainly aren’t the only lessons I’ve learned these past nine years, but they are among the most universally salient. They reflect not just MAGA tendencies, but human tendencies. Fear and anger can make any person more vulnerable to charlatans. We all need community and are understandably reluctant to alienate those closest to us.
When Trump announced his first run for president, his vitriolic speech planted a seed of hatred in the American body politic.
That seed found fertile soil.
If I could talk to my 2015 self, I’d deliver a simple, dispiriting message: There isn’t a specific tactic or argument that will win back the Republican Party from Donald Trump.
You’ve already lost.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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