NY Times 'Never Trumper' Stephens: Let's Stop It

A New York Times opinion columnist and self-proclaimed "Never Trumper" conservative says it's time for President-elect Donald Trump's "perennial" critics "to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying" concerning the next chief executive and his incoming administration.

Bret Stephens, in a recent column, wrote that after nine years, he no longer considers himself a Never Trumper. He says that he and others like him never truly understood what made Trump popular and effective.

"Who, and what, is Trump?" Stephens asked. "He's a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic — and angry."

Some of that anger, Stephens added, is "correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn't."

Also, Stephens said, Trump understood during the 2024 campaign that "ordinary people" cared greatly about the high cost of living and the migrant crisis at the southern border.

The columnist basically said he and other Never Trumpers were hypocritical and ignorant when it came to Trump.

"How come so many who denounce Trump as a sexual predator were, 20 years earlier, Bill Clinton's steadfast defenders?" the columnist wrote on Dec. 17. "Why were the same people who demanded investigations into every corner of the Trump family's business dealings so incurious about the Biden family's dealings, like the curiously high prices for Hunter's paintings?"

In creating fear by insisting Trump could lead the U.S. into World War III, was too friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and would ruin the Republican Party, Never Trumpers overstated the possibilities, according to Stephens.

"[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," Stephens wrote. "And we were alarmed by Trump's protectionism and big-spending ways. But the economy mostly thrived under him, at least until the pandemic."

When it came to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021 – the No. 1 reason Stephens voted for Vice President Kamala Harris this year – Never Trumpers misread that, too.

"[I]f democracy means anything, it's that ordinary people, not elites, get to decide how important an event like Jan. 6 is to them. Turns out, not so much," Stephens wrote.

Never Trumpers never quite grasped that Americans also felt lied to by the left — see Biden's physical and mental decline — and saw the "torrent of Israel-bashing and antisemitism that emerged from the cultural left after Oct. 7," Stephens wrote.

Now, Stephens encourages other Never Trumpers to change their ways.

"So here's a thought for Trump's perennial critics, including those of us on the right," Stephens wrote to end his column. "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."

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