The rage and shame of the anti-anti-Trumpers is getting worse.
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”
No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.
Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.” Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.
All of this was presented in the pages of America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times.
What’s going on here?
Many journalists are reluctant to report on Trump’s obvious instability and disordered personality—the “bias toward coherence” that The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has cautioned about. But Lowry’s article was different. I cannot know the actual thinking at the Times, although I suspect the paper accepted the article to offer a pro-Trump contributor as a way of displaying a diversity of views. The plunge that Lowry and others have taken into the muck of Trumpism, however, is not new, and has origins that are important to consider in the coming months of the 2024 election.
When Trump decided in 2015 to run for president as a Republican (after years of being, at various times, a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican), the GOP establishment reacted mostly with horror. At the time, it claimed to be appalled by Trump’s character—as decent people should be—and rejected him as a self-centered carpetbagger who would only get in the way of defeating Hillary Clinton. Lowry’s National Review even asked some two dozen well-known conservative figures to spend an entire issue making the case against Trump.
The reality, however, is that much of the conservative opposition to Trump in 2016 was a sham—because it came from people who thought they were safe in assuming that Trump couldn’t possibly win. For many on the right, slagging Trump was easy and useful. They could assert their principled conservatism and their political wisdom as they tut-tutted Trump’s inevitable loss. Then they could strip the bark off of a President Hillary Clinton while deflecting charges of partisan motivation: After all, their opposition to Trump—their own candidate!—proved their bona fides as ideologically honest brokers.
It was a win-win proposition—as long as Trump lost and then went away.
