The Anti-Anti-Trump Thing, Man
They hate Trump. They hate the haters more. Conservative intellectuals found the coziest seat in the house — right on the fence. Receipts available upon request.
This is part 2 of a series. See here for part one
Okay so look. The Never Trump guys — these are the dudes who saw Donald Trump in 2016 and were like, “No man. No. Not ever. Not under any circumstances. I don’t roll that way.” That’s a whole thing. That’s the whole thing man.
But then there’s this other group. These are the guys who looked at the Never Trumpers and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not be hasty here.”
These are not Trump supporters. They’ll tell you that. At length, man. With footnotes.
They just spend a really... really suspicious amount of energy yelling at the people yelling at Trump instead of, you know, yelling at Trump. The aggression will not stand, man. Or something. I don’t know, I’m a little hazy on it.
Who are these people, man
We’re talking National Review — been around since like ‘55, very serious, William F. Buckley started it, very fancy. There’s The Dispatch, which Jonah Goldberg put together after leaving National Review. There’s this Erick Erickson fella down in Atlanta. The whole kind of center-right-but-too-classy-for-MAGA-but-also-not-Never-Trump scene.
Now here’s the thing about these guys. They don’t have a huge audience. The Dispatch has maybe 100,000 paying subscribers. National Review is more of a... boutique operation. They collectively reach maybe a million, maybe two million people. In a country where 155 million dudes showed up to vote.
But man, if you wander into that world, there is a lot of... self-congratulation happening amongst themselves. A lot of that, man.
Small audience. Very large sense of themselves. And they need you to believe several things simultaneously that do not entirely add up.
The impossible position, man
Here’s what they need you to hold in your head at once:
One: Trump is bad. Dangerous. A threat. They said so, publicly. They have the receipts, man.
Two: But also the Never Trumpers are annoying and hyperbolic and suspiciously cozy with Democrats. Somebody oughta push back on them.
Three: Conservative policy stuff — tax cuts, deregulation, hawkish foreign policy — that’s all still correct and good, regardless of the chaos happening while it gets implemented.
Four: They, personally, are the last honest adults in the room.
Holding all of that at once requires a flexibility that would impress... I don’t know, some kind of gymnast. The New Republic said National Review is trying to “broker détente with a Trump administration it cannot fully embrace.” They called it “incoherent.” That’s about right, man.
The Faustian situation
Look, here’s where I’d be, uh, charitable to these guys, because they did sort of get the stuff they wanted. Tax cuts. Three Supreme Court justices. Deregulatory agenda. For people who spent their whole careers arguing for certain policies, watching those policies actually happen — badly, chaotically, delivered by someone they found deeply distasteful — that’s a genuine pickle.
Do you oppose the man so hard you oppose the outcomes? Or do you hold your nose and take the wins?
You know how that story ends.
Some researchers put it plainly: conservatives disgusted with Trump are being asked to give up a lot in policy terms if they fully oppose him. That’s a real tension. I get it.
But here’s the thing, man. The chaos and the policy are not separate. The tariffs, the institutional degradation — that’s not a bug in the program. That’s the program. These guys have never really squared that circle. The rug really tied the room together, and they keep pretending it didn’t get peed on.
The identity thing, man
But the real explanation is simpler and less flattering. These people built their whole thing — their careers, their identities — as conservative intellectuals. And fully joining the Never Trump crowd would require admitting that the movement they spent decades building either failed badly... or was always something considerably uglier underneath the Buckley-esque intellectualism.
That is a psychologically costly thing to admit, man. So instead, they critique the critique.
Goldberg himself is genuinely smart and genuinely conflicted and you can watch the tension in real time. He wrote, recently, something like: “Trump changes his positions constantly, and his supposedly principled defenders change with him — and I’m the deranged one for not doing that?”
Fair point, man. That’s a fair point.
And yet The Dispatch consistently spends as much energy targeting Never Trumpers and mainstream media as they do targeting MAGA. The symmetry is... telling.
Early in Trump’s first term, Goldberg wrote a piece called “Never Trump is over.” Said he’d give Trump a chance. That piece did not age well, man.
What they’re actually doing
What these guys have built is a very comfortable place to stand where they can feel principled without paying the full price of principle. It’s like... standing on the edge of a volcano and pissing into it and thinking you’re helping.
They get to say they opposed Trump on character grounds. They get to defend conservative policies. They get to be the Reasonable Center between MAGA craziness and Never Trump hysteria. And they get to keep their conservative audience — which they’d lose if they went full Never Trump — and their intellectual credibility — which they’d lose if they went full MAGA.
It’s a business model as much as an ideology, man. And it works, on its own terms. The Dispatch is financially successful. National Review still publishes. Erickson still has his radio show.
What it isn’t — and we’ll get into this — is any kind of political strategy that’s gonna move the electorate. But that’s a problem for, uh... the next post, man.