The American Spectator brings us this editorial that details the effective end of the “Never Trumpers.” Not that they will admit defeat or go away, mind you. But their influence and power are at an end. No one takes them seriously and no one is listening to them any longer. Their time in the sun is over.
The Never Trumpers were and are part of the establishment. They were never on the side of the people; they are bought and paid for by those who look down on the American people and their real love for the country and what it originally stood for. The elites do not want a free people or real representative government; they want their oligarchy, power, and money. Trump is taking that power away from them and giving it back to the people. That’s why the elites hate him.
Looking back, it now seems self-evident that conservative pundits were preposterously out of touch. (Who isn’t amused by the poindexter pretentiousness of George Will’s bow-ties or the pseudo-scholarly piffle of Jonah Goldberg’s byline as “the inaugural holder of the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty?”). These intellectuals barely noticed the opioid crisis running through small town America; or the base’s anger regarding illegal immigration; and they were adamantly opposed to any restriction of free trade while working class frustrations mounted over NAFTA and its ilk. (This explains why J. D. Vance and his book Hillbilly Elegy was Washington’s must-read book of 2017: it provided a portrait of rural America that the political class could digest without condescending to visit such places, or talk to such voters.) It turns out that conservative intellectuals, living inside the “Acela Corridor” and funded exclusively by think tanks and foundations, are poor barometers of Republican voter concerns.
