Commentary
Long-time readers may recall my treatises on Bret Stephens. On September 13, 2016, I wrote, “Bret Stephens for Dummies,” and followed with “Bret Stephens for Dummies, Part Two,” on October 26, 2016. Then, on October 6, 2017, I wrote Part Three in “Bret Stephens, Screwier Than Ever.”
To many of you, the name will be unfamiliar, and you may ask, “Why is Kramer continuing his criticism of Stephens?’ It’s simple. Stephens is a Never Trumper, who writes in the leftist New York Times. You, like me, need to know what the opposition is saying in print.
Stephens’ recent column, “Done With Never Trump,” caught my eye for obvious reasons. He opened with an admission of being a nine-year Never Trump conservative, who opposed him throughout this year, and voted for Kamala Harris.
But he then asked, “Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement? Yes.”
But first, let’s look back
Here are a few Stephens quotes from my past blog editions:
“The key to beating Trump is to treat hm as the nonentity he fundamentally is.”
“If Trumpism is the model of conservatism, the term has lost any connection to what I thought of as the enduring meaning of conservatism.”
“I don’t see the point of belonging to a party on the increasingly dubious assumption that it’s slightly less bad than the opposition. If I can’t get my Grand Old Party back, I’d rather help build a new one.” He chose an unusual way to do that, sacrificing his integrity preferring to “live with” four years of Hillary Clinton.
“If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
For over eight years, Stephens has belittled and despised Trump, once referring to his presidency as “an unsightly pimple on our long Republican experiment.“ Stephens got left behind when the GOP became the party of common-sense working-class Americans.
Stephens Comes Around
“How come so many who denounce Trump as a sexual predator were, 20 years earlier, Bill Clinton’s steadfast defenders? 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?”
Now he concedes the Russian collusion being a smear and about first term worry that Trump would be a reckless president who might stumble into World War III, while in practice, “he was cautious to a fault.”
“We predicted that Trump’s rhetoric would wreck the Republican Party’s chances to win over the constituencies the party had identified as key to its future,” Stephens wrote, “But we missed that his working-class appeal would also reach working-class minorities.”
He wrote about Trump’s understanding of American’s concern over the high cost of living and the chaos at the border, while the left “fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation.”
“We did not sufficiently appreciate,” he wrote, “that as much as Trump might lie, Americans also felt lied to by the left when it came to the cover-up of Biden’s physical and mental decline.”
Stephens noted how the Democrats went overboard on the risk of our democracy. “But if 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.”
About those institutions that were in danger with Trump as president. “As much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether its education or the F.B.I., many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.”
Done With Never Trump?
“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 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.” – Bret Stephens, December 17, 2024
The Jury is Still Out
Notice how he writes, “fight the wrongs.” Will they be wrongs only in his mind?
It reads a bit like columnist Peggy Noonan’s advice to opinion writers: “Watch for what’s good and say so, watch for what’s bad and say that.” The skeptic in me says they will concentrate on the “bad.”
I’ve been following Stephens’ opinions for more than 10 years, when he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. How appropriate, I thought, when he moved over to the New York Times in 2017.
I find it difficult to believe that there will be a single line of fairness to Trump in his future columns. I’ll be watching.
May God continue to bless the United States of America,
