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CHAPTER 3

USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE LEFT

Demented and sad, but social.

—The Breakfast Club (1985)

In 2003, a prominent conservative commentator authored an impressive book that detailed how the Left helped legitimize communism throughout the twentieth century. The writer explained that Democratic lawmakers and presidents, academics, and elite news organizations defended the rise of the Soviet Union as it tightened its iron grip. Their boosterism lasted until beyond the end of the Cold War.¹

American liberals, the conservative influencer wrote, acted as “useful idiots” for a murderous ideology responsible for the death of tens of millions of people around the world and perpetuated the misery of hundreds of millions more.

The author of the book, entitled Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, is Mona Charen. Ironically, Charen, as a proud NeverTrumper, would give succor to the Trump-hating Left during his first term in office.

While her coddling of the Left obviously didn’t result in the execution and starvation of innocents, Charen and her fellow NeverTrumpers nonetheless reinforced the Left’s ranks during one of its most violent periods in modern American history and acted as the Trump era’s version of useful idiots for American liberals.

In even more idiotic fashion, NeverTrump did a 180-degree pivot from its very principled conservative perch. This is where NeverTrump’s useful idiots fare worse than Stalin’s: At least the Soviet Union’s American shills didn’t pretend to be something they never were.

As it became clear that Donald Trump intended to govern as a conservative, NeverTrump couldn’t in good faith, or even bad faith, continue their “principled” conservative crusade against the president. How could they object to tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judicial picks, climate policy rollback, updated trade agreements, and the like from a “conservative” standpoint?

As NeverTrumpers settled into left-wing news and opinion outlets, pleasing their anti-Trump pals at the Washington Post and CNN at any cost has been their top priority. This requires a reversal of their previous views on any number of policies and political strategies.

“One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with,” confessed MSNBC host Joy Reid in September 2017. “I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.”²

Shocked, you say?

In 2007, reporter David Corn, then at the Nation, vilified Kristol’s espousal of the Iraq War and declared (correctly) that Kristol “ought to have his pundit’s license yanked.”³ In 2013, Corn asked why people like Kristol hadn’t paid a price for promoting the war under false pretenses.⁴

Just a few years later, united in their common contempt for Donald Trump and everything he represents, Corn and Kristol would share the set as MSNBC pundits. Kristol, the man who excoriated Barack Obama for years, admitted in early 2017 that he would rather endure another four years of President Obama than one term of President Trump.⁵

Trump made strange people into bedfellows.

NeverTrump easily fooled its new followers on the Left to believe that, yes, they represented a large swath of the Republican Party who deep down hated Trump and only voted for him because Clinton was more objectionable. NeverTrumpers assured their distraught soul sisters on the Left that it was only a matter of time before the GOP would see things their way and dump Trump. It was chicken soup for the Trump-loathing soul.

“We have seen a number of people who have been friends and colleagues of ours go pretty strongly in the other direction [away from fundamental conservatism], just embrace big government liberalism because they don’t like Trump.” That observation, ironically, came from NeverTrumper Stephen Hayes in a podcast interview with Charlie Sykes.⁶

The leftward lurch of NeverTrump happened fast—and nowhere did it happen quicker than on the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, occupied by Jennifer Rubin.

RUBIN’S RANTINGS

Her anti-Trump tirades began in 2015.

Disguised as a conservative, Rubin offered Clinton pre-election advice on how to attract Republican voters; that counsel came one year after Rubin listed 20 reasons why Clinton’s campaign was on the ropes and possibly doomed to fail.⁷

She fantasized about what would happen to Trump after Clinton defeated him. “That’s the best part of this election—it will end and so will Trump’s domination of the news,” Rubin predicted a few weeks before Election Day.⁸ Her post-election ridicule extended to Trump’s cabinet picks—she referred to his early nominees as “ignoramuses, billionaires and a few generals”—and his base of support teeming with nativists, white nationalists, and bigots.⁹

One would assume that considering Rubin’s support for Hillary Clinton, her contempt for Trump and his conservative backers, and her broken political meter in general, the Post would have offered that coveted spot to a legitimate conservative, perhaps even a fair-minded columnist without an axe to grind against the Republican president. (Trump tweeted in December 2015 that Rubin was one of the Post’s “low IQ people” and “a real dummy.”)¹⁰

And since the Post made it clear that it would ratchet up its nonstop negative coverage of Trump during his presidency—the paper introduced its new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” in February 2017—giving yet another Trump hater prime real estate on the Post’s opinion page to rant about everything and everyone related to Trump seemed repetitive.

Except Rubin did not want to jeopardize her sweet spot at the Post yet again. In 2013, the paper’s former ombudsman advised Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder who had purchased the news organization, to fire Rubin. Disclosing that Rubin was the “#1 source of complaint mail” from Post readers, Patrick Pexton blasted Rubin’s poor writing skills, unoriginal analysis, and overall unprofessionalism. “Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable,” Pexton wrote. “Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.”¹¹

Rubin has employed that same playbook against Trump since late 2015. Stroking Trump foes from the Right would protect her sinecure; she eagerly enlisted in #TheResistance.

Comparing Rubin’s views before Trump’s election and after his inauguration causes a major case of whiplash. A pitfall of being a political pundit is that there exists an electronic record of your past opinions available for the world to see. As I pointed out in a December 2017 article, Rubin flipped and flopped on a number of issues solely based on their favorability to Trump and his knuckle-dragging base.¹²

An advocate of tax cuts way back in 2013, Rubin criticized Obama’s stagnant economy and insisted that the country would “not get robust economic growth and significant job creation with the world’s highest corporate tax rate.”¹³ Four years later, channeling Bernie Sanders rather than Milton Freidman, Rubin called Trump’s tax cut proposal a “moral and economic monstrosity” aimed at enriching “the wealthy and big corporations” at the expense of the most vulnerable.¹⁴

Rubin sympathized with out-of-work coal workers as late as 2014. Correctly concluding that the Democratic Party had been taken hostage by the climate change cabal, Rubin warned that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to significantly reduce carbon emissions, jeopardized the party’s Senate majority in that year’s election. “Unfortunately for mainstream Democrats, the president and their party are captives to elite, radical environmentalists. It is not only an economic issue, but also reveals the degree to which Democrats are compounding inequality and depressing economic growth.”¹⁵

That compassion disappeared like carbon vapor on November 8, 2016. “While they accuse ‘elites’ of being out of touch, the GOP climate-change deniers and non-college-educated voters—especially those who reside in poorer, rural and small-town America—are increasingly oblivious to the world outside their ideological bubble,” she sneered in June 2017. “Rather than level with voters, their GOP representatives cater to their ignorance and mislead them about the state of science and of our economy.”¹⁶

Her conversion to a disciple of climate science and promoter of the same radical environmental agenda she had slammed a few years earlier was complete with Trump’s announcement the US would withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Rubin had written several columns condemning Obama’s signature international policy agreement; she even accused Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry of using the deal to distract from their failed attempts to defeat ISIS.

But Trump’s opposition would be enough to trigger Rubin’s epiphany on the issue. “The only difference between then and now is that Trump eventually endorsed Rubin’s take in its entirety,” Sean Davis wrote for the Federalist. “And because Rubin now calibrates her political compass to the opposite of whatever Trump is doing, she feels compelled to vociferously support a vapid agreement she at one time opposed on the merits.”¹⁷

Ditto for the Iran nuclear deal. Before Trump, Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) posed a significant threat to national security, according to Rubin, by paving the way for the terrorist-harboring nation to build nuclear weapons in the future.¹⁸ But after Trump announced he would “decertify” the JCPOA, Rubin fretted that the move would agitate the Islamic Republic, not to mention Russia and China.¹⁹ “Putting at risk that deal with really no sort of backup plan, they’re just going to kind of bluff their way through and see if the Iranians come back to the table,” Rubin commiserated with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in October 2017. “Our allies are not on board with us, the Russians, the Chinese, so is that another storm that’s coming?”²⁰

Rubin mocked prayer; urged stricter gun control laws; objected to a repeal of the estate tax; and defended abortion rights. After Rubin’s fierce opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, a group of conservative leaders sent a letter to the Post’s editorial board, demanding that the paper stop referring to her as a “conservative,” while offering to recommend a replacement “who can eloquently and effectively defend the positions held by our President, his party, and the millions of voters who elected him.”²¹ Rubin dropped the “conservative” descriptor but still occupies the Post’s “Right Turn” blog.

NEVERTRUMP FOLLOWS RUBIN TO STAGE LEFT

Bret Stephens has followed a similar route. In early 2017, Bret Stephens jumped ship from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. His hiring sparked outrage among the Times’ readership; Stephens had been a longtime critic of anthropogenic global warming, now known generally as climate change. That blasphemy, according to the climate cabal, makes one a climate “denier.”

“Before he was hired at NYT, Stephens was a source of standard-issue right-wing hackery on climate change,” wrote David Roberts at Vox after the Times announced Stephens’s new gig.²² Leading climate scientists canceled their Times subscriptions.²³ A petition drive to fire Stephens gathered more than 40,000 signatures.²⁴

Stephens got the message loud and clear. The same commentator who once compared climate change to religion—“another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen,” he snickered in 2011—suddenly saw the solar-paneled light.²⁵ In his debut column for the Times, Stephens called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s claims about the rise in global temperatures “indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming.” He tiptoed around much of the fuzziness of climate science but quickly added a pandering disclaimer: “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.”²⁶

When pressed later by fellow Times columnist Gail Collins whether he believed global warming is happening and is mostly man-made, Stephens said yes. He hoped that his meetings with climate experts would result in “less ambivalence” on a subject on which he had expressed zero ambivalence for more than a decade.

Unfortunately, Stephens’s climate prostrating wouldn’t be enough to win converts at the Times. He needed something more drastic to preserve his spot there—so he dutifully did what any self-important New York Times columnist must do: He called for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

Following the horrific massacre of 58 people in Las Vegas by a mass shooter in June 2017, Stephens admitted that, as a conservative, he never understood the “conservative fetish” for the Second Amendment. Americans don’t need all these guns because they kill too many people and, by the way, the government will protect us when needed, he argued. “But [gun ownership] doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either,” Stephens opined. “The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that ‘Red Dawn’ is the fate that soon awaits us.”²⁷

But one would be hard-pressed to find a more embarrassing NeverTrump sycophant to the Left than Max Boot. Hardly a day passes that Boot doesn’t make a mockery of himself in service of blasting Trump, his family, his supporters, and the Republican Party in general.

Not only has Boot objected to every single “conservative” policy advanced by the president—including the appointment of constitutionalist judges to the federal bench, Trump’s exit from the Paris Climate Accord, and overdue immigration reform—he insisted that anyone who backed Trump’s conservative agenda “owned” the president’s alleged bigotry.²⁸ “If you want the Trump tax cuts and the judges, you’ve also signed up for the racism, the misogyny, the amorality, the lawlessness, the deranged tweets, possibly even something close to treason. Trump supporters own it all,” he tweeted in December 2017.²⁹

Boot, a Russian immigrant who came here as a child, claimed that because of Trump, he felt like he no longer belonged in America.³⁰ Boot officially quit the Republican Party in 2018—“I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers,” he sneered, referring to Trump’s family separation policy—even though there is scant evidence that, aside from his penchant for war, he ever was a Republican.

Once a climate change skeptic, Boot, like nearly every other NeverTrumper, converted to a wild-eyed climate prophet. Conservatives who reject anthropogenic global warming, according to Boot, are willing hostages of the fossil fuel industry. There is little daylight between Boot’s delusions of climate doom and those of the most egregious climate propagandists such as Michael Mann or Bernie Sanders. “It is a tragedy for the entire planet that the United States’ governing party is impervious to science and reason,” Boot lamented.³¹

The Second Amendment, Boot wrote after a tragic massacre at a Florida high school in February 2018, is a “suicide pact” with politicians, Republicans in particular.³² After Beto O’Rourke suggested an assault rifle buyback program a month before he dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential race, Boot thanked O’Rourke for his courage. Comparing “assault rifles” to military artillery, Boot again sneered at “Second Amendment absolutists” who defend the ownership of “weapons of war.”³³

All this, of course, has been rewarded by his new allies on the Left; Boot, like Jennifer Rubin, is a regular columnist for the Washington Post and an MSNBC contributor.

NeverTrump expressed little, if any, support for Trump’s pro-life advocacy from the Oval Office. In addition to proposing a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood, Trump frequently defended the sanctity of life and duty to protect the unborn; he used his international platform to promote anti-abortion policies around the world. “Every child born and unborn is a sacred gift from God,” Trump said during his September 2019 address to the United Nations.³⁴

Trump’s vocal defense of the unborn came at a time when the Democratic Party finally revealed its support for straight-up infanticide. After Virginia state lawmakers considered a bill that would permit the killing of a child even after the mother had given birth, Democratic governor Ralph Northam (supported by many NeverTrumpers over his Republican rival, Ed Gillespie) calmly explained how the “infant would be kept comfortable” as the mother and doctors decided whether or not to murder the baby.³⁵

NeverTrumpers, however, waved away the Democrats’ slouch toward infanticide. Most were silent about Northam’s comments. After Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seemingly advocated for abortion to halt climate change, Jennifer Rubin warned Sanders that he might want to keep their baby-killing plans quiet. “At a time when progressives have the high ground in abortion politics, citing the cruel and unreasonable abortion bans, Sanders’s remark is, to put it lightly, unhelpful,” she wrote. “This is similar to how the phony infanticide issue put Democrats on defense … as with Sanders, all the issue did was put the target on Democrats’ backs in the battle to determine who gets cast as the most unreasonable side in the abortion fight.”³⁶

Tom Nichols referred to abortion as a “medical process” and wondered why abortion is such a big deal to conservatives.³⁷ Even when David French finally gave Trump props for his pro-life advocacy, he added this disclaimer: “I appreciate Trump’s pro-life actions, but he can’t yet match GWB.”³⁸ When Trump became the first president to speak in person at the March for Life in January 2020, French’s blog, the Dispatch, gave it a one-sentence mention.

In a nine-tweet thread on the day of the march, French, who jumps on the platform at every opportunity to rant about the president, made no mention of Trump’s historic visit to the event.³⁹

So, almost en masse, on every issue of importance to devout conservatives, NeverTrump flipped. Rather than defend conservative “principles,” as was their alleged raison d’être, NeverTrump converted into propagandists for the pro–climate change, pro–gun control, pro–abortion, anti–tax cut radical Left.

The Trump era ripped the mask off the “conservative” costume donned by so many NeverTrumpers. This tweet by Bill Kristol in November 2017 said it all: “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”⁴⁰

In a lengthy interview with CNBC’s John Harwood in 2018, Kristol sounded more like Bernie Sanders than Ronald Reagan.⁴¹ The benefits of Trump’s tax cuts, Kristol said, didn’t need to be laundered through the corporations that benefited from the rate reduction—the federal government could have handled all of that from Washington! (Many companies announced bonuses for their employees after the cuts went into effect. Horror!)

“Wasn’t the whole point of the tax cut to free up money for investment? I mean, the government can just write checks to people. It doesn’t have to go through a middleman, you know. Give ’em to everyone, not just the people who work for certain favored companies,” said Kristol.

Calling himself a “conservative who’s been mugged by Trump” (Kristol’s father, a founder of neoconservatism, famously referred to his political transformation as a “liberal who’s been mugged by reality”), Kristol then suggested that conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action—a defining cog of the movement’s platform for more than three decades—was not based on principles of fairness but rather rooted in “bigotry.” Ditto for illegal immigration policies.

WHITE GUILT AND RACIAL POLITICS

Borrowing the most mendacious tactics of the Left, NeverTrump readily assigns racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic motives to Trump for any number of policies, comments, and tweets; even events outside of his control, such as the melee in Charlottesville in August 2017, are blamed on Trump for allegedly stoking racial strife.

There is nothing conservative, of course, about evaluating people based on skin color or gender or religion. Further, there is nothing conservative about blaming large groups for the actions of a few. But over and over, NeverTrump aids the Left in painting Trump, his administration, congressional Republicans, and Trump supporters as gay-bashing, Muslim-hating, woman-hating, anti-Semitic white supremacists. Imaginary threats about a surge in white supremacy stoke unnecessary fear in order to gratify their Trump-hating urges.

Specific incidents, while not directly Trump’s fault, NeverTrump explains, nevertheless should be pinned on the president because he once made derogatory comments about a Mexican judge and “attacked” a Gold Star Muslim family in 2016. Even Trump’s condemnation of kneeling NFL players, a trend started by former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, are racial “dog whistles” to his knuckle-dragging base of white nationalist Neanderthals, according to NeverTrump.

Max Boot got the shtick rolling in late 2017 in a self-flagellating article where he confessed that he is a beneficiary of “white privilege.” Boot’s introspection, oddly, coincided with his rising star as a Trump detractor and his new gig as a regular columnist at the Washington Post.

“Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it,” Boot confessed in Foreign Affairs magazine in December 2017.⁴²

Immigrants, Bill Kristol observed, work harder than native—meaning, white—Americans. David French, in a quasi-defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s contemptible anti-American rhetoric, referred to native-born Americans as “ingrates.” He claimed he could not take “pride” in his birth here in America in the same way that immigrants take pride in obtaining American citizenship. “Native-born Americans by the countless millions don’t trouble themselves to be educated enough about their own country to pass the basic citizenship test that we give to prospective citizen immigrants,” he wrote.⁴³ French’s message was clear: Just like the Left tells us, immigrants are better than US citizens.

After Charlottesville, Jennifer Rubin wrote that anyone who “continue[d] to support the president is continuing to deny he is unfit for office and to make excuses for his verbiage makes one complicit in his racial divisiveness and his determination to provide aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”⁴⁴

The Charlottesville riot occurred two months after a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to murder several Republican congressmen on a baseball field outside of Washington, D.C. Rep. Steve Scalise sustained life-threatening injuries that later required him to use a cane. Media outrage was brief and scant.

David French, in a frantic piece the night of the Charlottesville melee, when facts were still emerging, attempted to equate an attempted assassination with the events in Charlottesville:

America is at a dangerous crossroads. I know full well that I could have supplemented my list of violent white supremacist acts with a list of vicious killings and riots from left-wing extremists—including the recent act of lone-wolf progressive terror directed at GOP members of the House and Senate. There is a bloodlust at the political extremes. Now is the time for moral clarity, specific condemnations of vile American movements—no matter how many MAGA hats its members wear—and for actions that back up those appropriately strong words.⁴⁵

The wanna-be mass murderer hoping to kill a dozen Republican House members was a “lone-wolf progressive.” The alt-right protestor who drove his car through a crowd of counter-protestors and killed one young woman, however, is associated with MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters. French’s comparison is a craven example of the sort of false equivalency routinely employed by NeverTrump whenever it is convenient. The outrage about what happened at Charlottesville did not involve Trump. But French and his NeverTrump collaborators could not resist the chance to attack. (French also said Trump’s comments after the riot “hurt the nation he leads.”)

Bill Kristol called Trump’s post-Charlottesville statement “depressing” and said that it made him sick. (Kristol made no known public statement about the near-murder of Representative Scalise.)

“The president’s refusal to name the evil in our midst is the behavior of a man whose moral sense is stunted—if he has a moral sense at all,” sneered John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “This is what I feared would be the case when he became president. Perhaps those who say I have an obligation as a conservative to support Trump should wonder what their moral obligations require.”⁴⁶

NeverTrump also would continue to repeat the Left’s inaccurate trope that Trump commended neo-Nazis when he said there were “good people on both sides.” Stephen Hayes fumed that Trump wouldn’t criticize white supremacists; therefore, Hayes wrote in the Weekly Standard, “white supremacists are convinced that President Trump is more than just open to them.”⁴⁷ Absurd.

Just as the Left twists any Trump taunt or criticism into an example of his bigotry, so too does NeverTrump. Trump’s criticism of the “Squad”—which includes Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who screamed “we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker” the night she was sworn in—is another example of Trump’s racism and sexism, according to Mona Charen. “Every Republican who is reflexively defensive of Trump’s blatant nativism and racism should put him or herself in the shoes of immigrants and minorities. How can they not feel frightened when he is willing to stoke such ugly flames?”⁴⁸