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Bret Stephens: ‘I Was Wrong About Trump Voters’
Thursday, there was a remarkable sight on the New York Times Opinion Page. Eight different columnists remark on how they were wrong about different issues. Paul Krugman admits that he was wrong about inflation. Thomas Friedman admits that he was wrong about the extent of Chinese censorship. Gail Collins admits that she was wrong about Mitt Romney. And Brett Stephens admits that he was wrong about Trump voters. It is a great column and can be found here. While the New York Times columns are behind a paywall, I think that you can read ten columns a month for free. This should be one of them.
Bret Stephens was a great columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Reportedly he left the Journal after concluding that they were being too easy on Trump, and he joined the New York Times. I ended my subscription to the Wall Street Journal about the same time, for about the same reason. So, Stephens and I have a long history of antipathy towards Trump. However, he admits that he has been wrong about Trump voters, and I generally think that I have been too. Stephen’s column begins, “The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: ‘If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.’”
I agree. What a way to make and influence people. Stephens continues,
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing 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.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
I agree with Stephens. This is so well stated. Stephens then states,
… Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’ 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 life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called ‘the unprotected.’ Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
Ouch. I am part of the ‘protected class.’ I live in my beautiful mountain and university town with a population of only 100,000 with all of the amenities of a city five times as large. I live in a nice neighborhood with nonexistent crime, surrounded by a golf course. I have Medicare for health insurance. I am my own boss and run my office as I see fit. My judges know and like me. Life is pretty good for me.
Stephens continues,
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to ‘guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.’
I remember having lunch with a major Democrat figure who told me that he was convinced that opposition to Obama was primarily racist. Grrrr.
Then Stephens says,
Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s 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 — 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 — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.
It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.
I share this anger about the above things. But again, I am protected. For better or worse, lawyers are pretty protected. The best book about the evils of the transgenderism, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was written by a lawyer with strong First Amendment protections. If a Psychologist or Counselor were to have written this book, they would be facing an ethics charge by their licensing board. But the State Bar would laugh at such an ethics charge.
Stephens then states,
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.
I have faced my share of MAGA warriors. But far more Trump voters are ambivalent, doubtful, and dismayed by Trump than I give them credit.
Then Stephens hits home with this paragraph:
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 — there’s just no other word for it — that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.
Ouch. Oh, all the hours I wasted watching MSNBC’s evening shows! All of the energy that I wasted hoping that Trump would be caught! I was not until I read Bill Barr’s book One Damn Thing After Another that I realized that I had been wrong and wrote about it here.
The book is very well done. And it changed my mind. After the Mueller Report came out, I posted both the Introduction and Executive Summary on Collusion and Obstruction. (See here.) Barr does a deep dive into the Mueller Report and how Mueller both over-read and under-read his remit. My mind had been marinated in the MSNBC and my own TDS. But now reading Barr’s account led me to the conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a search for not all that much, and was a general waste of time and money. I was stunned. But I changed my mind.
To the credit of my fellow Ricochetti, there was almost no “I told you so.” Incredible.
Stephens ends his piece,
… I would also approach these [Trump] voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. ‘A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,’ noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. ‘If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.’ Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
Words to live by when posting and commenting at Ricochet.
Published in General
That is the amount of time from when Trump ended his speech on the Ellipse to when he released his Rose Garden statement. During that time the Capitol was overrun and members of Congress were forced to flee for their safety.
This is a pretty good example of how deception works among the NeverTrump media and its acolytes. The 187 minutes is the time between Trump finishing his speech and the time when he attempted to post material on Twitter that was immediately suppressed. In that message, he did tell people to go home.
So, in their quest to dishonestly overlook Trump’s other messages that afternoon that did not literally say “go home” N/T-ers insert the “go home” part to cover a de facto lie with a veneer of truth and just skip over Trump’s earlier messages. Despicable.
Bad faith argument, goal post moving.
Where were those who are responsible for Capitol security?
See #92, above.
Jeff Goldblum is.
Cold symptoms will disappear after three days of intensive orange juice consumption. Without the orange juice? About three days.
Orange juice bad!
Just to add more specificity, the deceptive use of the “go home” qualifier on display here is designed to obscure:
I just can’t take this seriously after so many were “forced to flee for their safety”, were injured, and some lost everything during the summer of 2020. My DIL’s elderly aunt was unable to “flee”, so my DIL stayed on the phone with her for 8 hours, listening to the violence getting closer and closer.
No one cared about my DIL’s elderly aunt; I don’t care about able-bodied congresspeople.
Especially given that within the following hour, the President attempted to de-escalate the situation twice. So it’s a lie twice over.
Throwing gas grenades into the crowd, likely causing the deaths of two men, killing Ashli Babbit, and then beating Roseanne Boyland to death.
That’s what they were doing.
Especially the ones who claimed they were in immediate danger, but who we later learned weren’t even in the building.
Because they were ducking gunfire in Syria, right?
The list above is why I can’t respect or get past the damage to the entire world the Never Trump supporters caused. I work with all Democrats, and my neighbors are all Democrats. They are really nice people who believed a lot of this. The NTs gave credibility to the accusations the Democratic National Party waged against Donald Trump–from saying that he was racist for calling for a halt to the plane traffic from China to stop allowing more infected people to enter the country to saying that he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people because of the way he handled the pandemic.
My coworkers and friends are good people who really try, with their votes, to prevent suffering and premature death. That was why, despite the prosperity they were enjoying during the Trump administration, they voted for Joe Biden. That campaign of lies against Donald Trump gave us Joe Biden.
They aren’t stupid people. It’s just that these lies appeared everywhere they looked, and they thought to themselves, “Well, there must be something to them.” Funny story with Barbara Bush. In an interview I saw years ago on YouTube, she was talking about how dangerous the Internet had become. She and her assistant were looking at sources that gave Barbara’s life story, and they all got the name of her mother wrong. Barbara said, “By the end of the afternoon, I said, ‘Maybe that is my mother’s name.'” People are like that. The constant spreading of the lies about Donald Trump had a huge effect on American voters.
I sincerely hope my predictions are wrong, but I see global calamity ahead. And Biden really will be responsible for it because of his feckless energy policy and because he never stands up for hungry human beings over Democratic Party stupid people-killing policies. The energy and fertilizer crisis would never have happened under Donald Trump–the real humanitarian of the two men. And the United States, under Donald Trump, would have remained prosperous and a place of refuge for the world and a beacon of hope–and a good example of how to run a country so that needless pain and suffering and death do not occur. We keep the global economy going. The United States alone. Take us out, which Joe Biden has done, and death will follow around the world.
This growing economic domino collapse of western civilization under Joe Biden’s administration is probably why Bret Stephens is suddenly seeking absolution. People like Stephens never even investigated Biden. They never asked him what his policies would be and then draw the trendlines from those policies to see what havoc those policies would wreak around the world.
The Never Trumpers lied to the American people about Trump and were silent about Biden’s plans and character. It’s hard to get past that.
Yes. Take down Stephens’ self-congratulatory comments and replace it with THIS Twitter thread, which needs to be read in full . . .
After a recitation of the horrific lies and behavior of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans from 2016-2020, this is how it closes . . .
Oh, here it all is collected for readability.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550473125078487040.html
If you really want to understand, Gary, then please read the above. You don’t even need Twitter, so there’s no excuse.
Read and understand that, and you are one step closer to understanding why few here give a rodent’s hindquarters about this illegitimate Jan. 6 Committee.
Never heard of either.
Still waiting for:
Wrong about Trump being a racist
Wrong about the 2020 election
Wrong about January 6
What other wrongs did I miss? There are so many…
Barely remember him. Didn’t he have a band or something?
Dick Morris thinks Trump will run and will win. He thinks those who would prefer someone younger and better able to attract swing votes (where Presidential elections are still decided) are like folks who think we would have been better off with a kinder General Patton. But is Morris right to suggest that Patton’s greatness was the result of his flaws? Or Trump’s? Contra Dick Morris, it is my guess that Trump could not possibly win a general election. So in this case I think Gary is being practical. Of course, only time will tell–or actually, as Auden put it:
And moderate success on signature issue: immigration. But nothing that could possibly last, alas. (Only bi-partisan compromise could last past a regime change, and we can’t have that these days.)
He still does— O’Malley’s March is the band, playing “Celtic rock.” Shoot me for knowing that.
I heard him say that too. I also heard him take the position that Trump actually lost the election, in spite of the fraud. In which case, supporting the post election shenanigans looks a bit, well, Clintonian.
Dick Morris may actually be more Clintonian than the Clintons.
I hate to be a stickler for the Constitution, but it is the responsibility for the Legislative branch to manage security of the Capitol complex. The Executive offered overwhelming manpower in the days before, but Nancy Pelosi assured the Executive branch that she had sufficient manpower to handle any situation. Any unrequested effort of the Executive branch would be unconstitutional. Just because commies/Democrats are unable to stay in their constitutional lanes does not mean the rest of us can’t.
Last time I saw him, he was on The Apprentice.
That is the length of time from the end of his speech until his 4th Tweet about being peaceful.
This is worth a post.
Gary’s weekly attempt at getting a post on the main feed by copying someone else’s post at length. Soooo close this time.