Trump was such a bizarre candidate, he looked like a huge potential disaster. He would more than likely to lose to Hillary and put the Democrats back into power or he would win the general election, then screw up so badly that the Democrats would be back into power for decades.

I didn’t care about how many women he slept with or his immoderate manner of speech. I saw the “character question” in terms of whether he would be a terrible president, therefore terrible for the country and the GOP.

After Trump had been President for a year, I calmed down.

I haven’t checked Jonah Goldberg for a while, but last I did he was still clinging to the notion that “character will out.” As in “The Frog and the Scorpion” story Trump was due to screw things up really big time because it was his nature.

That’s still possible, just as a Sanders victory in November is, though I don’t notice any Trump supporters worrying about the former.

The question arises as to how they came to oppose policies they previously supported? The obvious answer, that they flipped for petty superficial reasons related to Trump’s personality, leaves them at a fork in the road. Either they get over their pettiness or remain in a lake of fire of their own making.

He has a new piece up defending himself and others like him who refuse to excuse Trump’s crudity.
* **
Paul quibbles a lot over inessentials. It’s probably a lawyer thing.
I think Hanson has the better arguments.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/23/neversanders/

Certainly, the current NeverTrumpers, for all the “character is king” lectures, remain inert, and without influence. Again, they have never squared the circle of opposing the implementation of agendas they spent their careers promoting.

Instead, the rump that is left of the NeverTrump Right, more and more, is sustained by the Left, which finds them either useful idiot panelists on cable news, or eager website panhandlers of leftwing tech largess—always on the condition they write ever more contorted anti-Trump tirades.
…
We can see glimpses of the NeverSanders Left dilemma in the confusion of the current NeverTrump right. For most of the primary season, they more or less praised Joe Biden, the front-runner and assumed likely nominee who ultimately supposedly would govern in the fashion of Bill Clinton, and thus was clearly preferable to the despised Trump.

But now?

Most are going silent on the question of 2016, given the embarrassment that the logical dividend of hating Trump in 2020 is the election of America’s first socialist, whose agenda makes his spiritual predecessors Eugene Debs and Huey Long seem tame in comparison.
…
Note that Trump was not only more consistent with his party’s values than Sanders, but more representative of the views of American voters in general. One might object that Trump is crude and off-putting and thus cancels out the appeal of his record. But is Bernie pleasant and measured?

His policy nostrums are frightening. He cannot take criticism, but becomes gruff and animated. And he is a different sort of septuagenarian than is Trump, who has a sense of humor and can be self-deprecating. Get-off-my-grass Bernie, like most true-believers and fellow travelers of mandated government redistribution, is serious 24/7. He never really addresses criticism, and his fallback position on any issue is always another predictable socialist bromide, a frown and two frail arms flailing in the air.

Republicans rooting for Sanders because they don’t like Trump is something my granny would call “jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.”

No, it’s something that exists in your head only.

It’s the morass or jobs, chairs, endowments, and assignments that get handed out to the mass of scribblers who know how to bark out the correct neo-liberal/libertarian cant about any particular issue the folks signing the checks care about at any particular time.

Strange as it may seem to you, people commonly believe what they say. There’s nothing particularly unconventional emanating from AEI and it’s recognizable to anyone who has had elementary instruction in economics.

The Wingnut Welfare Train is a pretty well established concept. It’s the morass or jobs, chairs, endowments, and assignments that get handed out to the mass of scribblers who know how to bark out the correct neo-liberal/libertarian cant about any particular issue the folks signing the checks care about at any particular time.

A virtually identical thing exists on the Left, though it’s more noticeable on the Right how so much of its intellectual class have spent their careers NOT competing in the marketplace. Jonah’s like the Matt Yglesias of conservatism.

Mike

Mirengoff, Ed Morrissey, the insufferable Allahpundit. It seem like about 1/3 to 1/2 of the voices at prominent Republican outlets favor the viewpoint of < 10% of all Republican voters.

A good question to apply to all the NeverTrumpers, AlwaysTrumpers, BernieBros, etc. And remember that the issue is never the issue.*

Common sense about personality cults that the NTs won’t ever read.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1231952819978227713.html

For all the caterwauling about Trump having a personality cult, the big knock against many of his supporters is that they’re too “transactional” – i.e. hypocritical, willing to set “principles” aside for specific policy gains.
Meanwhile, the anti-Trump cult of personality is so strong that some nominal conservatives and moderate pundits are willing to either support a Marxist radical or passively accept his extremism by declaring they’ll sit the race out or cast a protest vote.
..
If the anti-Trump cult of personality confronted the substance of Sanders’ statements or proposals, they’d have to start looking at the substance of Trump’s record as president instead of just carping about what he says at rallies or posts on Twitter.
They can’t do that, because then they’d have to admit they were wrong. They can’t do it even when Sanders is pushing a doomsday collectivist agenda and vowing to attack every single conservative principle at its core. They can’t take their eyes off Trump’s Twitter feed.

That’s the functional definition of a personality cult: only the object of the cult’s fixation matters. The virtues and motivations projected by the cultists into the Great Man they’re obsessed with matter much more than the real-world results of what he actually DOES.
…
There isn’t much room for your precious principles in a land where Bernie Sanders becomes the “center-Left.”

Some of that damage will be done by mainstream media networks that invite their favorite tame “conservative” pundits onto the op-ed pages and Sunday shows to validate Sanders as an acceptable alternative to the hated Trump.

It will end as a complete inversion of the NeverTrump slam against conservative Trump voters. Those Trump voters have been pilloried for years because they supposedly compromised deep principles to accept Trump, but now NeverTrump will abandon EVERY principle to accept Sanders.

*
https://www.weaselzippers.us/222785-the-issue-is-not-the-issue-the-issue-is-the-revolution/

Yes, these people are shills, even if they didn’t start out to be. That’s fairly blatant at this point. It is an indicator of how dishonest the legacy media is. It’s particularly galling in re PBS and NPR.