Some of the Never Trumpers are still never right about Trump and his supporters

Victor Davis Hanson:

I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:

But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls” — those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.

Though wishing to leave “a stench on them,” Schoenfeld instead gives us a sad exercise in self-abasement. And his review offers an illustration of the poverty of Never Trump personal venom and incoherence.

In his review, Schoenfeld tosses out names such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the Third Reich Jew-haters in service to Hitler, to suggest, with a wink and nod, that I play a comparable role in relation to Trump.

Schoenfeld certainly has an odd sense of timing. The same day that Schoenfeld, an adjunct Hudson fellow, leveled his smears in The Bulwark, I was speaking at his own home Hudson Institute about the book. I discussed, among other things, Trump’s support for Israel and the dangerous anti-Semitic drift of the Democratic party, a theme I repeated again that evening on television. I guess by dropping the names of Nazi sympathizers Schoenfeld wants to imply that I am anti-Semitic (how odd from a former supportive editor of Commentary, where I have authored a number of essays) — an unhinged trope that he ran into the ground in the past, especially in despicable attacks against Trump supporters such as Roger Kimball.

In amateurish praeteritio style, after indirectly comparing me to Third Reich anti-Semites, and in general to those who praised Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, Schoenfeld then clears his throat and says he is not really saying that I am a Stalinist, a Nazi, or a genocidal Maoist. As a two-bit practitioner of apophasis, he claims he referenced such names, you see, only to suggest there is a long tradition of traitors (such as myself) of the intellectual class who abased themselves in writing propaganda.

And again, what was my Nazi-like thought crime?

I offered an analysis of how Donald Trump, despite often crude rhetoric and behavior, won the primary and general election of 2016, and for his first two years, enacted a successful agenda of economic growth and foreign-policy recalibration while ensuring superb judicial picks and seeking to address the stagnation of the American interior.
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There is much more.

The Never Trumpers have shrunk to a niche market for commentary opposing the President by former conservatives.  As ostensibly former Republican supporters  I find them rather off-putting. During the primary campaign, I was not a supporter of Trump.  I did not care for his style and I was unsure that he would embrace the conservative principles I supported.  He has far exceeded my expectations and has implemented programs that are lifting people out of dependency and poverty. He is appointing conservative judges.  He is also fighting back against the evils of liberalism and the media which supports those evils.  Democrats are making their usual smears against a Republican President and it is a shame to see Never Trumpers embrace those smears.