Forever Never Trump

My Response To Bret Stephens

Earlier this week, Bret Stephens, a house conservative at the New York Times wrote a particularly terrible piece titled “Done With Never Trump.”

Last night, I wrote a reply to Bret and considered sending it to the Times, but I had a moment of clarity this morning. I would have spent the day wrangling over it with them, when the idea deserves a prompt response.

Replying there was the old way of being in the public debate, so you get it here. If you like it, please share it widely.

FOREVER NEVER TRUMP

Bret Stephens’s “Done With Never Trump” is a sadly predictable capitulation.

It’s part of a long tradition of self-described conservatives who dress up their aesthetic distaste for Donald Trump in polite excuses to accommodate his assaults on our republic—his low character, casual criminality, and the damage he’s inflicted on our institutions and political culture.

Trump and his acolytes aren’t offering policy debate or thoughtful governance. They promise an even darker carnival of cruelty and revenge. Stephens’s call to “drop the heavy moralizing” isn’t realism; it’s a master class in enabling what conservatives once claimed they opposed.

Never Trump was never easy.

Some of us who refused to bow faced professional ruin, harassment, and even threats of violence. Still, we held the line against surrender to a leader whose brand of statist, authoritarian instincts has wrecked the rule of law and undermined 250 years of constitutional tradition.

Never means never.

Stephens’s argument rests on the fantasy that today’s Trump is a wiser, more disciplined figure. To cast him as potentially statesmanlike isn’t magnanimity—it’s appeasement, thinly disguised as maturity. Men in their late 70s rarely experience moral epiphanies, especially those who’ve shown nothing but contempt for the truth.

Pretending that Never Trumpers “overreacted” to January 6 is willful blindness. That assault on the Capitol wasn’t a momentary lapse; it was a deliberate outcome of the election denialism, sedition, and conspiracy theories that Trump stoked for months. Many of those who cheered it on are now poised to become the next administration’s senior officials.

Stephens suggests we move on because “ordinary people” care more about inflation or immigration than our fragile democracy. So what? Moral leadership isn’t about polling. Edmund Burke understood the perils of letting the mob’s impulses run free. History doesn’t look kindly on those who dismiss existential threats simply because they’ve grown tiresome.

Conservatives once championed free markets and the rule of law. Now they face a candidate who promises a reign of tariffs, cronyism, and a systematic purge of perceived enemies. Our economic vitality depends on stable institutions, not on an executive’s vendettas.

Yes, our institutions are strained. But who wants to break them entirely? Who aims to fill government with loyalists bent on turning America into an illiberal, vengeful caricature of its former self?

We sounded the alarm early and often. Trump hasn’t changed; what’s changed is his courtiers' obsequiousness and his enablers' brazenness. Stephens’s genteel shrug—his holiday wish to look away—is how democracies fall: not through a single cataclysm but through a slow erosion, aided by polite excuses and reluctant nods.

Never Trump matters because it refuses to normalize the absurd and the abhorrent. To abandon the fight now, simply because it’s taxing or unpopular, is a surrender no serious defender of our nation and our values should contemplate.

Let the apologists contort themselves. For me, never mean never. If I am the last priest of a dead religion, so be it.

We’ll stand, as we always have, against the gravitational pull of a man and a movement intent on hollowing out our Republic from within.