Confessions of a Reformed NeverTrumper

Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to live with The Donald.

Donald Trump has been the Republican nominee in every presidential election in which I could vote. No, I’m not that young, but I didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 2014 and—as was the fashion at the time—waited until naturalizing before casting a ballot. Like most Americans, I was appalled by my options in 2016, ultimately holding my nose and casting my ballot for former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket. (It was actually an act of laziness; I would’ve written in Ben Sasse or Mike Lee, but at the time, my polling place used click wheels and I didn’t want to scroll through the alphabet for each letter of even short names.)

Then Trump took office and, surprisingly, it was everything that was promised—good, bad, and ugly. The good side featured judicial nominations, the tax bill, and getting out of the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accords. The bad side included tariffs and an ineffectual immigration policy, using precious political capital to fight over relatively short bits of wall construction and an under-lawyered travel ban. (And did you know that more illegal aliens were deported under Barack Obama than under Trump?) The ugly included the proverbial “mean tweets,” chaotic swirl of personnel, and erratic handling of the Covid pandemic.

Trump was often his own worst enemy in terms of governing—and of course, the Resistance (a cabal of elected officials, media, tech companies, and “deep state” civil servants) made it that much harder. But none of the fever-nightmare scenarios came to pass; he didn’t randomly bomb countries or create a police state or appoint his sister to the Supreme Court. Indeed, through the efforts of laser-focused White House Counsel Don McGahn, we got three originalist justices and a record number of steel-spined appellate judges. With Mitch McConnell’s help, Trump appointed just one fewer circuit judge than Obama did in two terms.

So when it came time to vote in fall 2020, just as Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg and my book on Supreme Court politics came out, I took a deep breath and checked the box for Trump. It wasn’t some cathartic conversion from NeverTrumper to UltraMAGA, just a decision that I’d prefer to continue what we had—there was now a track record, not just speculation—to what Joe Biden was promising. (This despite my having been blocked from serving in the administration by a twentysomething in White House personnel who discovered some deleted NeverTrump tweets of mine from 2015 that were milder than what J. D. Vance was saying at the time.)

But I could understand people who employed a different calculus, wanting to end the exhausting maelstrom of the Trump years with a “return to normalcy” under an old man we wouldn’t have to think about every day. Sure, Biden had been on wrong every major issue for 40 years, to paraphrase former Defense secretary Bob Gates, but he was “wrong within normal parameters,” to invoke P.J. O’Rourke’s description of Hillary Clinton four years earlier.

Then came the worst part of Trump’s presidency: the post-election. Not just the January 6 riot, which was more dangerous to the people inside the Capitol than to the transition of power, but the machinations to hold office and sow what the Left calls the Big Lie—the idea that the election was stolen. (For the record, you could say it was “rigged” in terms of shady Covid-era rule changes, social-media censorship, Democrats’ propagation of the Russia-collusion hoax, and the like, but there’s no evidence that it was “stolen” at the ballot box.) Not to mention throwing away two Senate seats in Georgia, and thus control of the upper chamber, out of spite. If Trump had been 10 percent less Trumpy, he would’ve won that election, but now he was impeached again and left office under a cloud. Maybe it would’ve been nice to have the circus leave town and go back to the playbook of opposing what was essentially Obama’s third term.

Except Scranton Joe made his old boss look positively moderate. From maintaining unwarranted Covid restrictions—including vaccine mandates and eviction moratoria that the Supreme Court blocked—to insinuating the noxious racialism of the Black Lives Matter and its “mostly peaceful protests” into every corner of government, the Biden administration was no different than an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders administration would’ve been. From an Orwellian-sounding Inflation Reduction Act that increased inflation to a feckless foreign policy that emboldened our enemies—the Taliban blew up our soldiers, Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran through proxies attacked Israel—this was no steady hand on the wheel. Biden fulfilled the only mandate he had (not to be Trump) on Day One, but he governed like FDR’s woke grandson.

FDR’s woke great-grandson?

This was not normalcy. And look at the bench the Republicans had, from Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to Tom Cotton and Nikki Haley, plus Glenn Youngkin from my own state of Virginia, elected as a response to the Democrats’ smug mishandling of education policy. My candidate was Ron DeSantis, who was reelected by nearly 20 points in supposed swing-state Florida and thus seemed to be the early frontrunner. But any of them would be fine, just to stop the insanity.

Progressive prosecutors had other ideas. In April 2023, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicted Trump on convoluted knee-bone-connected-to-the-forearm-bone charges of business-accounting fraud involving election-related hush-money payoffs to mistresses. I’m still scratching my head at that prosecution theory, even as Bragg eventually secured a conviction, but this shot of lawfare had the galvanizing effect on Republican primary voters to rally around Trump and use his persecution as fuel for another presidential nomination.

The continuing craziness of the Biden administration made my electoral choice rather easy, even conventional: you fight it out during the primaries, then come together for the general election. Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric isn’t good for civic health, but the Democrats are so institutionally bad that it was imperative to remove their hands from the levers of executive power. In other words, the illiberal takeover of the Democratic Party threatened the rule of law more than anything that came out of Trump’s mouth.

The Democrats talk a good game about preserving democracy and respecting the norms of public life, but they’re willing to blow up any rule or institution to maintain power—including, yes, questioning our elections. Stymied by parliamentary procedure in Congress? Have the administrative state issue diktats while working to end the Senate filibuster. Don’t like what people are saying online? Censor it. The Supreme Court not ruling your way? Pack it. (Biden even caved to activist pressure this summer by announcing a sweeping “reform” proposal that would retire the most senior justices—John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, as it happens—and allow lower-court judges to force recusals in controversial cases.) More broadly, frustrated by the Constitution’s limits on federal power? Call it racist, sexist, and thus illegitimate. And it was all aided and abetted by those at the commanding heights of culture, media, and higher education.

Our checks-and-balances are designed to minimize Trump’s idiosyncratic excesses but have proven powerless to push back against the growth and centralization of progressive-oligarchical government that dates back not to Obama or even FDR but Woodrow Wilson.

When Kamala Harris forced Biden out of the race, it made things even worse. Her vapid “joy” campaign devolved into calling her opponent Hitler, while her attempt to run as a “change” candidate collapsed into ratifying all of Biden’s unpopular policies. The case for Trump became stronger than it was in 2016 or even 2020. And so, unlike Dan McLaughlin, whose views I very much respect but who wrote in Mike Pence, I voted for Trump. I felt it was a cop-out to say “I’d much rather that Trump win” but let others do the dirty work.

And so I am gratified that voters resoundingly rejected the incumbent administration. Beyond creating or ignoring overlapping crises on the border, inflation, and crime, and pursuing a foreign policy that endangers America, Biden and Harris misread their modest non-mandate to enflame Culture War 3.0. People simply don’t want whole-of-government DEI (which I discuss in my forthcoming book Lawless), radical gender ideology in schools, or censorship and gaslighting under the guise of “misinformation policing” or “expert policymaking.” They can also see through calls to destroy democracy in order to save it. Trump may be an unlikely vessel to carry hopes for sound governance, but a clear majority of Americans liked his policies more than what Biden has pursued or Harris promised.

I actually picked up that hat as a 2016 souvenir but had never worn it.

I join them—and so as a glorious day breaks on the third morning after the election, I feel not just relief, or schadenfreude at elite progressives’ subversion by “garbage” people, but actual elation that Trump won. I’m also impressed and a little awed that he won in the face of the most concerted political headwinds imaginable: he was impeached (twice), nearly assassinated (twice), found guilty of sexual assault, faced 116 indictments and was convicted in a Manhattan court, and received 85 percent negative media coverage (versus 78 percent positive for Harris). In the words of Elon Musk—another improbable figure of our political age—Trump is the man “who they tried to kill twice, bankrupt, and imprison for eternity.”

Many are likening Trump’s comeback to Richard Nixon’s, or making the direct comparison with Grover Cleveland’s nonconsecutive stints in the Oval Office more than a century ago. While accurate enough historically, these analogies seem almost too superficial, too much on the nose. [A more apt comparison may be Grigori Rasputin, the mystic and faith healer in late imperial Russia. Rasputin was stabbed and recovered, then later poisoned, shot, and who knows what else by a group of nobles before being thrown in the Little Nevka River.] Some as-yet-unformulated metaphor awaits to explain Donald Trump and his place in the nation’s history. Of course, thanks to his smashing victory, the Trump story has more chapters to write. We’ll see how it ends—and I’ll certainly do my best to keep the administration on the straight and narrow, focused on its vision of a melting-pot America that empowers people to build lives of dignity and purpose. But for now, it’s a new dawn.

Reprinted from City Journal, except the Rasputin bit at the end that I just added.