Two TDS columns in three days! These are truly strange and magical times we live in.
My attitude toward the Never Trumpers has changed quite a bit since 2016. I had a lot more wiggle room in my patience for a wide variety of Republican opinions then. I thought they were overwrought, but I had a more generous spirit, lo those many years ago.
That guy has left the political building.
One of the more wearisome things about the Nevers — and that's a lengthy list — is their constant rending of the garments over the way former President Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party. What they really miss is the Beltway version of the GOP, where they'd all hang around the Capitol Hill Club in their red ties, plotting where their connections to the Bush family will take them next.
The seemingly endless Bush reign of error in the Grand Old Party met an ignominious and most necessary end when Liz Cheney was sent packing by the good Republicans of Wyoming. The Nevers were angsty before, but losing the Bush tether to insider access broke the poor dears.
Earlier this week, former Republican and early Trump Derangement Syndrome victim Peter Wehner wrote an Opinion piece in The New York Times titled "What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me."
Haunts him, I tell you!
With so much attention focused on the changes at the top of the Democratic ticket, we are not paying enough attention to the lack of change on the top of the Republican ticket. This month, Donald Trump won his party’s nomination for the third straight time. Whatever else we might say about him, he is a transformative figure.
This further confirmed, for me at least, the wisdom of my decision eight years ago to break with the Republican Party. In January 2016, I warned what were then my fellow Republicans that if they nominated Mr. Trump, he would constitute a grave threat to the nation. But I added that there was an additional reason to oppose him: Mr. Trump’s nomination would pose a profound danger to the Republican Party, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. “For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it,” I wrote. “But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.”
Let me make one thing very clear: if Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016 we would be going through the motions to crown her successor in November. The Democratic Party long ago took a lemming run off of the leftist cliff and is hell-bent on shredding the Constitution. We've seen the damage that Joe Biden and his puppet masters have done in three-and-a-half years; imagine eight years of Hillary Clinton doing the same AND working out her various psychological issues.
Wehner's lamentations about the GOP that was are tainted by the cozy Beltway insider perspective that, in reality, has not served the party well at all. That's typical of the prominent Never Trumpers. They've been floating around the upper echelons of the Bush Republican Party for years and are more concerned with their insider perks than whether the Republicans will even exist in 20 years.
My many years of upper-level conservative grassroots experience have taught me just how out of touch Beltway elite Republicans are. As long as they're getting invited to the dinners and happy hours with other power brokers, they don't care about winning elections. Wehner's contention that Hillary wouldn't have been as bad is clinically insane. If the Nevers have their way, the Republican Party will soon be going the way of the Whigs.
Wehner's version of Republican reality and real reality are very different:
The Republican Party championed free trade and fiscal discipline, though in practice it often fell short. It was welcoming of legal immigrants and refugees. Republicans argued that reforming entitlement programs was vital. Many of its leading figures insisted that moral character was an essential trait for political leaders and especially for presidents. Republicans warned, too, that a cruel, squalid political culture undermined a decent society.
Today, the Republican Party has jettisoned every one of these commitments.
The devotion to free trade and fiscal discipline didn't often fall short—it always fell short. No serious person believes that Republicans of the last 40 or so years have ever been serious about fiscal belt-tightening.
His assertion that Trump Republicans aren't "welcoming of legal immigrants and refugees" is patently false. Our problem is — and always has been — with illegal immigrants. In fact, old-school Republicans who have adopted a lot of the Democrats' language about illegal immigration paved the way for the dangerous situation we now have on the southern border.
Wehner is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, a Christian faith-based non-profit. He might want to familiarize himself with what the Bible says about lying.
As for moral character, give me Donald Trump fighting for the Constitution over Mitt Romney every time. I don't need a pal to hang out with after work; I need a president who's focused on the important things.
Like relentlessly going after the Left.
As I said earlier, I used to have more patience for the Nevers' nonsense —not much, mind you, but more than I do now. Everything they say to back up their allegedly principled stand is utter garbage after the wrecking ball that the Biden administration has taken to our institutions and the Constitution.
Relevant: Honest Question for Trump-Averse Republicans: How Bad Do Things Have to Get?
I don't miss a thing about the Republican Party that went up against Barack Obama with John McCain and Mitt Romney. If the Democrats manage to get Kamala Harris elected in November, Peter Wehner will quickly realize that he never should have either.
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