Great article, and great speech by Klingenstein!
It articulates exactly what has exasperated me about Never-Trumpers from the very beginning!
âTrump revealed - not caused - the divide in this countryâ and just like any good leader, his personal flaws are irrelevant to his ability to lead.
Trump is âthe most towering political figure of our timeâ - yes.
He, and only he, can save America and our civilization.
Thank you Cogito for bringing this to our attention. Iâve been looking for something like this for when the subject of Trumpâs character and personality comes up in discussion groups. I think Victor Davis Hanson has written something similar somewhere but I havenât re-located it yet. Also, Tom Klingenstein published an article in The American Mind (Claremont Institute) which is similar to but not a direct transcript (more like a paraphrase) of his speech linked in the American Thinker article by M.B. Mathews. Hereâs that article in American MindâŚ
We have been lucky â history gave us Lincoln and Churchill and, yes, FDR, in times of crisis (I refer not the Depression, but to the problem of an expansionist Germany and Japan).
Then it gave us Trump.
You play the hand youâre dealt. You go to war with the army youâve got.
I supported Hillary in 2016, for fear that Trump would get us into a nuclear war if he felt he was insulted by some foreign leader. But I now see that Hillary was far more likely to do that. And her Supreme Court nominees would have been the final nails in our coffin. At least now we can buy some time, as the Left leads us down the disposal chute.
Doug1943 â Do you feel like you were played in 2016 by the Trump boogey-man caricature?
Terrific. Many thanks
He is a force of nature. If anyone can save the West, it is certainly Trump. I hope it is not too late.
Absolutely agree. We have all known that he is a man more sinned against than sinning.
Here also is Brett Stephensâ Op Ed from the NY Times, which I just copied and pasted from the Baltimore Sun, because sometimes it is difficult to get. In the end, however, he pauses in the taint of Jan. 6, and doesnât give Trump or Trump supporters credit for their choice this timeâŚstill, for what it is worth, he is thinking outside his box.
The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit â yes, I know, itâs a crowded field â was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: âIf by now you donât find Donald Trump appalling, youâre appalling.â
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Mr. Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
What were they seeing that I wasnât?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Mr. Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Mr. Trumpâs supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.
I was blind to this. Although I had spent the years of Barack Obamaâs presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called âthe protected.â My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against lifeâs harsh edges.
Mr. Trumpâs appeal, according to Ms. Noonan, was largely to people she called âthe unprotected.â Their neighborhoods werenât so safe and pleasant. Their schools werenât so excellent. Their livelihoods werenât so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists â clinging, in Mr. Obamaâs notorious 2008 phrase, to âguns or religion or antipathy toward people who arenât like them.â
No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Mr. Trump they often took both. But that didnât mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.
Mr. Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nationâs elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.
Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs â regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome â became, more and more, not just passe, but taboo.
Itâs one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. Itâs another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.
This was the climate in which Mr. Trumpâs campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me â people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the countryâs problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.
For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.
Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax â thereâs just no other word for it â that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.
A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Mr. Trumpâs current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6, 2021?
Morally speaking, no. Itâs one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. Itâs another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. âA drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,â Abraham Lincoln noted early in his political career. âIf you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.â Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times, where this originally appeared.
Doug, I was a Never-Trumper, but I did not support Clinton. I did, however, write of the notion that perhaps the US had to go all the way to the bottom before we would fight back and begin on the path to renew the Republic. So we got Trump, and then we got Biden (or whatever) and what a difference there was. I supported Trump a few months into his first term, because he proved to me that he was what and who he said he was. I still support him. We are on the way all the way down, and I hope we are going to fight back and begin on the path to renew the Republic.
And, yes, Damon, I was played big time in 2016. Yet the man that I trusted most to inform me, altered his stance on Trump as I did, and supports him still. Trump proved himself. I changed my opinion and take the warts and all. Actually, the warts were not as numerous as I had been led to believe, not by far.
There are others, tooâŚbut first the Left has to be beaten in 2022 and 2024.
But we also need to consider who could be his follow-on. Not only thinking in terms of one successor, because we would benefit by a deep back bench of Trump-like emulators. Iâm sure he has his own favorites, like Jim Jordan, and probably also Matt Gaetz, the âfirebrandâ. I am crazy about Jim Jordan, but I think Gaetz is even more âin your face, communistsâ. Any would-be successor needs to be an aggressive and brave combatant.
edit: And how could I have forgotten DeSantis? Anyone else have other suggestions?
He admits he was âblindâ about Trump, but concludes that he wouldnât be morally wrong to âlambasteâ Trumpâs current supporters, because of âhis record of attempting to break the republicâ.
Stephens is still blind, not only about Trump, but in his delusion that his opinions are worth listening to.
Iâm astonished. And pleased that Bret Stephens, whom I used to admire and in whom later I was so disappointed, has come round to a better understanding. Perhaps he will yet come all the way round and see that Trump DID win in 2020, and did NOTHING wrong on January 6.
My astonishment extends to the incomprehensible fact that the NYT published this statement.
Thank you very much for bringing this to us.
As a friend of mine put it:
"This man is blinded by his own omniscience.
Why doesnât he tell us that he went all in for Biden and âhowâs that working out for you?â as Saran Palin (another deplorable) once opined.
When you stand âwho the people pickedâ next to âwho the elite opinion makers picked,â the contrast between insight and chumps becomes all the clearer. So spare us your mea culpas after the horses have left the barn.
I didnât listen to you then and Iâm not listening to you now.
Well, not really âplayedâ. I still donât feel I understand the man. On the surface, he seems ⌠well, frankly, stupid. But then thereâs the converse (?) of the âIf you so smart, why ainât you rich?â jibe.
So I donât know. If you go to [ Why Trump Succeeded Where Others Failed ] youâll see an entry by its author trying to analyze why Trump is different from other Republican politicians.
(And, by the way, that âTwilight Patriotâ site is VERY interesting. The author is about 20 years old, a graduate in aeronautical engineering, and frighteningly intelligent. I wish had less âpessimism of the intellectâ and more âoptimism of the willâ, to steal a phrase from Romain Rollande, but his posts are always intellectually stimulating.)
In the end, I went with the âFlight 93 Electionâ analysis.
Another very interesting article in the Claremont Review of Books is an interview with Norman Podhoretz, here: Present at the Creation - Claremont Review of Books
Any anyone interested in US elections â past and future â needs to look here: Subject Matters 2020 election - Claremont Review of Books
I think the problem many of us had, and perhaps still have, is this: weâre thinking that politics is still, qualitatively, like the politics we grew up with. (For me, the Eistenhower-Stevenson contest of 1952!)
So, if it were Trump vs JFK, or Trump vs LBJ, or even Trump vs Clinton ⌠that would be one thing. If we lost, the ship would be steered a bit to the Left. When we won again, we could steer it a bit to the Right. Or, as with Clinton, if our case was strong enough and popular enough, we could even force a Democrat President to steer a bit to the Right.
But things really have changed. These people running the Democrats now are steering the ship straight towards the icebergs. Whether they are doing it out of some profound ideological conviction, or are just responding to the pressure of part of their base, is irrelevant.
And ⌠we may not be able to regain control. Which means we need to start preparing the lifeboats.
Amen! If you canât even get off the fence youâre trying to straddle with your apology, its worthless!
Your reaction, your comment, Cogito, is the right one. Much more to the point than mine. I was moved more by remembrance of my own disappointment in the man than by his actual words.