To Protect Trump, Former Conservative Insurgents Become What they Once Fought
It turns out many of us united against NeverTrump and the Republican establishment from 2016 through 2020 were never fighting for the same things at all.
The first two years or so of Donald Trump’s presidency seemed like a period of opportunity for the American Right. It almost immediately became clear after his election that Trump himself would not be the unshakable revolutionary warrior he had played on TV (if only there had been signs...), but there was still a sense that the rebuke of conventional wisdom his candidacy represented gave anti-establishment conservatives momentum that could have empowered a new wave of real warrior candidates and fueled a broader reform of the various corruptions and neuroses that for so long hobbled the Republican Party and professional conservatism.
One of the clearest manifestations of that momentum was in conservative media. The Weekly Standard’s NeverTrump hackery ultimately sunk the magazine after 23 years, with most of the surviving personnel splitting into two new boutique online publications: the cartoonish Bulwark, and the less-animated and more-pretentious yet similarly-unscrupulous Dispatch. National Review survived its Trump obtuseness, but two of its worst personalities jumped ship (Jonah Goldberg to co-found the Dispatch, David French to do a stint at the same publication before going full mainstream media and landing at the New York Times), while a third, Kevin Williamson, tried his hand at being the liberal Atlantic’s token “conservative,” got humiliated for it, then returned to NR before eventually moving on to—you guessed it—The Dispatch.
As the righty media old guard was getting knocked down a peg, just about everyone on the Right who did not see Trump as the root of all evil bonded over what we thought at the time were shared values, priorities, and common sense against common foes. Yours truly, for instance, caught the favorable notice of several fairly large conservative media names for my Twitter takedowns of NeverTrump personalities.
One of those names was The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, who has since forced us to admit that many of us weren’t fighting for the same things at all.
Some of us grudgingly supported Trump in two general elections solely because Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were worse, denounced lies about Trump and Trump supporters strictly because lying is wrong, and defended the integrity of those who cast Trump votes for the sake of the underlying causes they were voting to advance. We abhorred NeverTrump’s double-standards because we wanted standards consistently applied to all Republicans. We bombarded the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and wagon-circling of hacks like Goldberg and French not because of who they targeted and aligned with, but because any dishonesty, double-standards, or wagon-circling was repugnant to us in conservative media, the whole point of which was to be better than the corporate press. None of it was for Trump’s own sake.
Others, it turns out, had different priorities.
For some, that meant personal enrichment through overt Trump sycophancy. But for many of our former comrades-in-arms, somewhere along the way whatever original ideals once drove them gave way to a more modest, yet no more defensible, form of corruption: the realization that a comfortable niche could be carved out, a sizeable-enough audience maintained, by simply doing for Trump the same things their former targets do for Trump’s enemies. For them, it wasn’t necessarily because they felt any unique devotion to Trump, but simply because Trump sympathy was the central value of this new market.
Hemingway, author of three books about leftists doing bad things to Trump or to a Trump judge, has sadly established herself in the latter category this election cycle. In just the past couple months, she has falsely claimed Trump was getting attacked for “pushing for” a pro-life law he was actually getting attacked for refusing to endorse, blatantly lied that Trump’s conservative critics were unreasonably upset that "he didn't do everything,” and pushed the dishonest Trump campaign meme that online supporters of Ron DeSantis are unfair and alienating for objecting to bad behavior (while brushing off the subject of infinitely worse behavior from Trump campaign surrogates, public figures endorsed by Trump himself, and behavior from Trump himself).
And oh by the way, she also happens to be editor-in-chief of a publication that never bothered to inform its readers that the Trump campaign bilked its supporters out of $250 million in 2020 with the promise of an “Election Defense Fund” that never even existed. Innocent oversight, I’m sure.
But this week, Hemingway arguably topped all of them with the incident that inspired this column, an act that manages to embody the dishonesty, condescension, faux indignation, and weaseling of the Dispatch crowd in just two tweets.
By now you’ve probably heard all about Trump mouthing off about the Hamas attack on Israel Wednesday evening, in which he called Hezbollah “very smart,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant an incompetent “jerk,” and Bibi Netanyahu “not prepared” for the attack, while also bizarrely accusing Netanyahu of having “let us down” by supposedly tapping out of the operation to kill Qasem Soleimani then trying to “take credit for it,” and of course making the unfalsifiable boast that the attack never would’ve happened if he was still president.
This provoked DeSantis to tear into Trump, finally showing a little of the indignation that’s been largely missing from his campaign so far. Enter Mollie:
Of all the idiotic campaign things, claiming Trump is a Hezbollah supporter is quite possibly the stupidest. Anyone pretending to believe it also looks idiotic. Yes, Mr. Embassy-to-Jerusalem-Abraham-Accords guy is a Hezbollah supporter. Brilliant galaxy brain stuff there.
Guys, this clip with just a few seconds more info, is not hard for anyone with a room temperature IQ to understand. Stop pretending to be stupid. Stop claiming your political opponent is a Hezbollah supporter. It's idiotic. Don't be an idiot. Be smarter.
82 words, and not one of them contributes to anything resembling a substantive argument. Hemingway replaced one of the actual criticisms, that Trump complimented Hezbollah, with a blatant strawman nobody of consequence claimed, that Trump “is a Hezbollah supporter.” She did so without having the guts to name the campaign she was talking about (obvious though it was) or link to a specific objectionable claim that could be objectively compared to her characterization of it.
She did so without mentioning, let alone addressing, anything that Trump’s critics are actually saying about any part of the controversy—the recklessness of giving terror apologists propaganda fodder, the geographic stupidity on which his observation was based, the irresponsibility and callousness of publicly trashing a country’s leaders just days after a terrorist attack, his outright lie about Israel’s contributions to the Soleimani operation and supposedly wanting the credit for themselves, the pettiness of trying to make the conversation about himself when talking about an atrocity that’s just befallen ostensible allies, or the frightening narcissism indicated by the likelihood that Trump’s outburst was animated at least in part by his downright sick resentment of Netanyahu not putting Trump’s domestic 2020 election woes ahead of Israel’s most basic, obvious diplomatic need to maintain positive relations with any American president.
And yet, Mollie did see fit to condescendingly sneer about the alleged stupidity of those who had a problem with comments she didn’t even try to defend.
How is any of this one iota different from the type of MSM propagandizing for leftists that conservatives document every day? From the aforementioned spinning our mutual NeverTrump enemies used to do for their preferred Republicans? From the tactics Democrats use to obfuscate and distract from Joe Biden’s scandals (tactics the Federalist crew has called out themselves)?
It's not, and Hemingway knows it. In fact, it’s quite literally her job to know it. You see, Hemingway teaches journalism at my alma mater, Hillsdale College, because as she says, “as the journalism profession deteriorates, good reporters with an interest in truth-telling are more important than ever.” True words and important words—but she doesn’t believe them, or at least feels no sense of personal or professional obligation to be one of those good reporters.
Worst of all, in positions of influence in mainstream conservative media, she’s closer to the rule than the exception. Most do not seem willing to lie so obviously, but major hosts and personalities are, for the most part, content to turn a blind eye to such lies, and more importantly to the underlying problems being lied about.
This is exactly the situation Conservative Standards was launched to call out and contrast with, but to call our fight an uphill battle would be a massive understatement. Because while some of us meant every word of our case against the NeverTrump faction of 2016-2020, it’s now clear most of that coalition was just biding its time until they could get theirs through a pro-Trump mirror image.
On the Mark Levin watch, from what I have seen/heard - which is not everything - he has not strawmanned his praise of Trump by citing unfair online attacks by DeSantis supporters as Mollie has. His praise for DeSantis also seems less perfunctory than Mollie's. And because Levin's book sales probably greatly exceed Mollie's, he might have a bigger financial interest in keeping close to Trump.