Character Is Destiny

“Maybe a year-end wrap-up sort of thing?” my editor said this morning, proposing a topic for the final column of the year.

A fine idea. But if you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

Biden could not have defeated Trump, probably not even if the infamous debate between them hadn’t happened but certainly not after it did. That the president persists in believing otherwise is pathetic. The story of 2024, the year of the MAGA restoration, is that his embarrassing delusions about his political viability ended up forcing his party into a corner from which it couldn’t escape. Too much inflation, too much immigration, waaaaay too much public anxiety about his health: Had he thrown in the towel on reelection after the 2022 midterms, allowing a proper primary to take place, maybe (maybe) the eventual nominee could have set down enough of Biden’s baggage to eke out a victory.

Instead he limped on until nearly August, forcing Democrats to resort to his underwhelming vice president as an emergency substitute and affording her little time to introduce herself to the public. (Much of which she squandered, in fairness.) Knowing now that he and his aides undertook to hide the extent of his infirmity since the beginning of his term, his determination to run again seems that much more outrageous. In hindsight, the Biden 2024 campaign feels less like a case of extreme muleheadedness than an act of almost deliberate party sabotage.

The Post excerpt is remarkable for another reason, though. As it circulated online this weekend, everyone but everyone appeared to agree that Trump wouldn’t have merely defeated an unpopular, enfeebled Biden; he would have smoked him. And Never Trumpers were no exception.

Which is an extraordinary admission, no?

For eight years, people like me have argued that Trump is unfit for the presidency in practically every way that a human can be. Choose any newsletter in my archive at random from the past 18 months and you’ll find some passage raving about coup attempts and insurrections and “retribution” and felony indictments. There’s a lot of material to work with in prosecuting the civic and moral case against him. And Never Trumpers have prosecuted the hell out of it.

The jury’s verdict: 312 electoral votes and a clear victory in the national popular vote.

Eight years of anti-Trump activism by disillusioned Reaganite conservatives ended with him back in the White House and more popular than he’s ever been. There are political failures, there are major political failures, and then there are “the guy I’ve been calling a mortal threat to the Constitution obviously would have crushed my preferred alternative, Joe Biden” failures.

As a tactic of political persuasion, Never Trump failed terribly. But on the merits, as a substantive critique of Donald Trump? Just you wait.

Moralizing.

Earlier this month New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declared himself “Done with Never Trump.” There’s much to fear and abhor about the president-elect, he conceded, but “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.”

That’s a fair cop. Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? Americans love to moralize but hate being moralized to. You will quickly learn to despise a child who’s prone to scolding you for not recognizing something that’s evident to them and should be evident to you—and all the more so if you do recognize it. Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Never Trump is also what we might call a “luxury ideology.”

It shouldn’t be. America’s greatness derives from its liberal traditions; if you value a society that’s prosperous and pluralistic, protecting the constitutional order from postliberalism should be your utmost priority. But it’s easy to say that when you make a good wage and face little foreign competition and less easy when inflation and immigration are directly threatening your ability to feed your family. Chiding voters for not letting abstract civic principles determine their electoral preferences recalls Anatole France’s famous line about the law: Never Trump, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from caring more about the price of eggs than about the Constitution.

Also, let’s face it: Never Trump is naive.

Or is it just me who’s naive? Either way, when Trump jumped into the 2015 Republican primary, I laughed at the idea of an amoral gossip-sheet goon with nothing to say about reducing government winning over a party of evangelical Christians and “constitutionalists.” I thought conservatism, in which Trump was sorely lacking, was the indispensable component in populist conservatism. Trump thought populism was. I was naive.

I was naive again in 2024 when I assumed Americans would find a way to talk themselves out of rolling the dice on a man who had engaged in actual sedition against the duly elected government a few years before. To believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that, however daunting the price of eggs might be, the people of the United States are too proud of their glorious civic heritage to betray it for a vengeful populist lowlife after they’d seen what he was capable of on January 6.

I was naive. There are, I’m sure, voters who agonized over supporting him before doing so reluctantly for kitchen-table reasons, but it’s you who’s being naive if you think every new Trump voter was arm-twisted by inflation or immigration into backing him. Many simply liked the demagoguery he’s selling and liked the way he went about selling it. Reducing the election to a false choice between expensive eggs and the Constitution is a form of cope that lets believers in American exceptionalism avoid confronting the fact that their country turned out not to be as exceptional as they thought.

And in case that makes me sound like I’m criticizing Americans for disappointing Never Trumpers: If the golden high-top fits, wear it.

Irrelevant.

Moralizing, naive, a bit too elitist—there’s something to all of that. But some criticisms of Never Trump are overstated or, well, stupid.

Take, for instance, its supposed failure as a persuasive tactic. By the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris had traded the cheerful “vibes” of her rhetoric in July and August for dark warnings about looming fascism if Trump were to be reelected. Her closing argument was delivered symbolically at the same spot in front of the White House where he spoke on January 6; she used the moment to warn about protecting democracy. She didn’t just deputize Liz Cheney as a surrogate on the trail, she campaigned with her personally. It was all quite Never-Trump-y by the end.

And despite everything—Biden’s baggage, the eleventh-hour start to her candidacy, her own dunderheaded handling of the press—Harris nearly won. Trump finished with a hair less than 50 percent in the popular vote, 1.5 points ahead of Harris; the last time America faced a period of high inflation, the in-party’s candidate lost by nearly 9. His margin in each of the three Rust Belt battlegrounds was less than 2 points and he fell short of 50 percent in two of the three. His most impressive gains relative to 2020 came in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey, where Harris didn’t campaign. In the swing states, where she pressed her civic case against him, she was competitive.

Would Joe Biden’s vice president have done better by focusing on policy and unconvincingly renouncing everything that he and she did wrong on inflation and immigration? “Maybe” is the best I can do.

“Never Trump is unpersuasive” is overstated, but it’s not stupid. “Never Trump is irrelevant” is stupid.

It’s not stupid because it’s wrong. Never Trump has been irrelevant since at least February 2021, when Senate Republicans rolled over at Trump’s impeachment trial upon discovering that their base was anti-anti-sedition. There were glimmers of hope this past spring when Nikki Haley began scoring 20 percent in Republican primaries that a meaningful Never Trump vote might emerge for Democrats in November, but Trump once again understood right-wingers better than conservative pundits did. He didn’t bother courting Haley after she dropped out because he assumed her supporters would fall in line in the end. They did.

This newsletter is a running chronicle of how little classical liberalism matters to modern right-wing politics. Of course Never Trump is irrelevant.

What’s stupid about the criticism is that it’s irrelevant in its own right. Yes, Never Trump is irrelevant. So? What of it? What course of action should we supposedly take to remedy this sad fact beyond doing what we’re doing, advocating for a more liberal right? What should conservatives who favored smaller government have done in the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt ascendant? Become New Dealers?

Accusations of “irrelevance” imply that Never Trumpers should abandon a good cause like liberalism and take up a pernicious one like populism because there’s more influence (and money) to be had in the latter. And they hint, unmistakably, that the accuser himself would be willing to make that trade assuming he hasn’t done so already. The most reptilian sellouts in the GOP—J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, Mike Lee, 90 percent of congressional Republicans—forfeited some or all of their liberal values for the sake of “relevance.” If you’re urging a Never Trumper to be more like them when it’s our contempt for their opportunism that helped make us Never Trumpers in the first place, you’ve misunderstood us entirely.

It would be too much to say that Never Trumpers are proud of their irrelevance, as a little more relevance on Election Day would have been nice. But if irrelevance is the price of alienating ourselves from a movement as repellent as postliberal populism, we’ll pay it.

Vindication.

I’ll leave you with this thought as the calendar turns: Trumpers aren’t as relevant, and Never Trumpers aren’t as irrelevant, as either would like to believe.

It’s in the nature of populism (well, of any political movement, but populism especially) for its adherents to believe they speak for The People. That’s doubly true for Trump’s movement, which purports to represent Real America. If you want to know what the “silent majority” supposedly thinks, the nearest guy in the red hat will happily educate you.

Oftentimes it’s nonsense, though. Trump fans will be thrilled when he starts pardoning January 6 goons next month. Most Americans will not be. Trump fans will exult when he orders the military to round up illegal immigrants and put them in camps. Most Americans won’t. Trump fans will celebrate if he moves to limit highly skilled immigration. Guess how most Americans will feel about that.

Trump himself astutely attributed his victory last month to “groceries,” not to the hobby horses of MAGA diehards. His fans should consider that the next time they’re tempted to lecture about their immense relevance.

And they should consider this too: Never Trump will be vindicated—again—soon enough.

It might take four years or it might take a few months but sooner or later Trump will be Trump. He’s already doing it, in fact. His loathsome Cabinet nominations and autocratic recess-appointment scheme to install them without Senate consent are a warning that he’ll test civic boundaries more aggressively this time than he did in his first term. Why wouldn’t he? He’s term-limited, has a dubious “mandate” by dint of (barely) winning the popular vote, and ran on “retribution” against his enemies. What’s stopping him?

There will be a civic crisis, and probably several, because Never Trump’s core critique is and always has been self-evidently true: Trump is illiberal in outlook, predatory by temperament, and too narcissistic to ever place liberal traditions above his own petty interests.

I can’t tell you what that crisis will look like any more than I could have predicted the “Stop the Steal” saga that led to January 6 but the crisis will come because, after all, character is destiny. Trump will defy a Supreme Court ruling or he’ll use the military domestically in some grotesque way or he’ll sic federal law enforcement on his critics or he’ll begin inducing cronies and deputies to commit crimes for his benefit with the promise of pardons if they do so.

He is who he is, and so I regret to inform Bret Stephens that the “doomsaying” he so dislikes will inevitably bear out. Never Trump can’t be completely irrelevant because Never Trump is correct on the merits and we’ll all learn that lesson the hard way soon, just like we learned it—and then forgot it—once before. Character is destiny.

And on that note, happy new year to you and yours.