Daren Jonescu reluctantly rips Roger Kimball - deservedly so

I like this term Jonescu has coined: New Trumpers.

LITD has taken a few of them to task in recent months: Dennis Prager, Kurt Schlichter and Bookworm.

First, let's get Jonescu's definition for his term:

. . . the group I am talking about is made up of those erstwhile anti-Trump voices who, the moment he became the GOP’s official choice, turned around at whiplash speed and suddenly became hardcore Trump apologists — and the most dogged critics of their former friends in the NeverTrump faction, as though they had never agreed with any of those arguments, including the ones they had often used themselves.

There are undoubtedly differences among this New Trumper brigade, but one trait they share in common is their desperate need — that’s the only way I can describe it — to destroy and humiliate their arch-nemesis, the NeverTrump faction. They seem to understand that the NeverTrumpers are the permanent thorn in their side, a constant challenge to their political manhood. To the New Trumpers, the NeverTrumpers seem to stand as a walking embodiment of the little devil on their own shoulder who asks: “Why did you cave in to the GOP establishment in the end? Why didn’t you have the courage to hold true to your principles when the going got tough? Are opportunism and enhanced readership really more fundamental to you than the future of America as a constitutional republic?”

This little pang of conscience, which they have denied in themselves while blatantly projecting it onto the NeverTrumpers, has grown in their souls to cancerous proportions. One of the most insidious symptoms of this disease is the New Trumper’s preternatural need to psychologize about the NeverTrumper, to diagnose the latter as deeply conflicted or morally weak, and to demand an answer to the question, “Could Trump do anything to change your mind?” thereby implying that Trump has already done so much to change skeptical minds that anyone who remains NeverTrump now must be relegated to the category of the emotionally immature or mentally blocked.

He goes on to cite Prager as an example, but then goes on to his main subject.

It’s painful to accept that someone you’ve long held in the highest esteem has joined a cult, rejected his own past, and falsified his own memories for the sake of an unworthy idol. But in this case that’s the kind interpretation of a New Trumper’s sudden turnaround. The unkind interpretation: he’s sold his principles to the temptations of careerism and popularity.

For years, Roger Kimball was in the pantheon of contemporary American conservatism for me, as one of the few political commentators whose opinions seemed to stem consistently from deeply studied ideas, historical awareness, and sobriety. His regular editorials at PJ Media, under the heading “Roger’s Rules,” were always erudite and refreshing, even when I didn’t fully agree with his conclusions. One of his strengths was staying above the fray of those superficial Republican vs. Democrat food fights which tend to enmesh the participants in mindless partisanship or tribalism of the sort that suffocates thought, particularly among conservatives, who should have learned eons ago that the Republican Party represents their perspective in no substantial way, and aggressively contradicts it in many ways.

During the 2016 GOP primaries, Kimball was one of the few well-known voices, and almost the only one at PJ Media, who stood on principle against the Trump cult juggernaut. I assumed this meant that should Trump actually win the nomination, he would continue to fight the good fight. Perhaps he would vote for Trump as the “only alternative” to Hillary, but he would be honest about not liking it, and use this predicament as an opportunity to join the conservative charge toward creating a new party to counter the worthless and duplicitous Republicans.

But no; within minutes of Trump’s nomination becoming essentially a fait accompli, Kimball was noticeably changing his tune. Suddenly Trump’s vulgarity and stupidity were refreshing directness. Suddenly his lack of consistent or even definable principles was an outsider’s healthy skepticism about business as usual. And suddenly all those people who, like Kimball, had been predicting a disaster for conservatism and the country if Trump should win the nomination were just sore losers and stubborn old prudes.

Here's a money line from a few more paragraphs in:

 . . . if I have to read a genuinely thoughtful man spouting childish, thought-obviating bunk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” one more time, I’m going to puke.

But then he gets to his refutation of Kimball's New Trump "substance":

Here’s Kimball’s list, so you can see what I mean when I say it is just the basic GOP platform retitled “Trump’s agenda”:

1. His judicial appointments. Is he keeping his promise to nominate judges and justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia?

2. Regulation. Is he keeping his promise to roll back burdensome and counterproductive regulation?

3. Immigration. Is he keeping his promise to get a handle on illegal immigration?

4. The military. Is he keeping his promise to upgrade the U.S. military and give it greater flexibility in responding to threats to our national security?

5. Energy. Is he reversing the Obama administration’s various strictures on America’s ability to harvest its own energy resources?

6. Jobs. Is he working to create an environment that is job-friendly for American workers?

7. Obamacare. Is he working to repeal and replace Obamacare?

8. Taxes. Is he working to cut taxes?

9. Making American Great Again. This is more amorphous but not therefore indiscernible. What has Trump done about the virus of political correctness and the ideology of identity politics? What’s the mood of the country?

Kimball speaks as though the fact Trump vaguely, inconsistently, and without details, espoused this platform counts as his having virtually accomplished all of it. Without going through each item, let’s take a look at the realities and assess whether they ought to be enough to persuade NeverTrumpers of anything.

Let’s begin by subtracting all those “accomplishments” that may be classified as “givens,” things any Republican president would have been expected to do, such as nominating a Supreme Court justice with a seemingly more conservative judicial philosophy and record than many other possible nominees. (Name a Republican president who didn’t do that.)

Ditto on the energy, taxes, military, and regulations fronts. As for Kimball’s phrase “working to,” as in “working to create an environment that is job-friendly for American workers,” one would have to establish some concrete meaning for this before it would become a sensible mark of praise. Don’t conservatives always say “presidents don’t create jobs — private enterprise creates jobs”? Now suddenly Trump’s attempts to create trade wars with every country on the map, thus reducing the availability of affordable goods and in all likelihood American jobs, are to be applauded as “working to” create a job-friendly environment. The Soviet Union, where full employment was an economic goal, had a very low unemployment rate. They created an environment that was job-friendly for Soviet workers. How did that environment work out in the end?

Next, let’s subtract the accomplishments that are nebulous in nature pending further observation of where Trump’s administration goes on the issue. For example, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement was all well and good, but this pull-out, according to the terms if the agreement itself, will not take effect until toward the end of Trump’s term as president, Trump has repeatedly shown vacillation on the whole issue of climate change, and after his meeting with French President Macron, the latter indicated that he thought Trump might be persuaded to rejoin the agreement, a suggestion that must have been based on something.

Furthermore, I think it wise not to follow the Trump cult in counting as accomplishments things that Trump supposedly wanted to get done but in which “he was thwarted by the Congress.” Consider Obamacare repeal, for example. Aside from a few stupid tweets, first threatening the House Freedom Caucus and later other individuals, and cheering excitedly for a bill conservatives called Obamacare Lite, what did Trump actually do to get repeal through? It is obvious that he did exactly nothing. Far from counting as a kind of accomplishment-by-intention, this failure might count as a major mark against him — the single most serious and seemingly doable item on the Republican agenda, and Trump contributed nothing but hot air to the effort to make it happen. (Not a big surprise, since apart from wanting to remove the name Obamacare from the lexicon in favor of Trumpcare, Trump has been a longtime advocate of socialized medicine, and therefore had no heart for the fight to truly repeal Obamacare, anymore than his old establishment ally and favorite senator Mitch McConnell did.)

Finally, the fact that Kimball includes “Making America Great Again” — a campaign slogan — as an agenda item, shows how desperate he is to make his case against the NeverTrumpers’ resistance.

 

And there's not much disputing the definition of Never-Trump that Jonescu puts forth, so as to set the record straight in the face of distortion from the likes of Kimball:

NeverTrump merely meant, and could only have meant, “As long as Donald Trump remains the Donald Trump I see — longtime progressive and establishmentarian, amoral megalomaniac, semiliterate blowhard, flim-flam man and brand-seller without serious accomplishments of any kind beyond making (and losing) money for himself — I cannot allow any political movement I would want to be associated with to be smeared by his crud.”

I suppose one could take the same position with New Trumpers that it's prudent to take regarding jihadists - that it's a waste of time to try to discern root causes, that the proper response is merely to fight them, due to the harm they're causing. But in the case of New Trumpers, we're talking about former brethren. I can't help but wonder what motivated those mentioned in this post to so suddenly switch positions on something as basic as Trump's character, especially since the print and audio record of their previous stance is so readily accessible.

It's hard to find common ground with those who are clearly adding to the sum total of cacophony in this world.