RUSH: You know, let me close the loop on something I was talking about earlier. I mentioned that I am constantly trying to study the people that surprise me. And some of the people — well, nothing surprises me, really, because I understand so much. But you get the drift. The Never Trumpers. The vitriol. These are conservatives and they’ve been opposed to Trump from the get-go. And I’ve thought that I understood why, and I have to a certain extent. It is largely establishment versus outsider, ruling class versus non-ruling class, country class.
But when Trump came along, she abandoned all of her conservatism. It was the most amazing thing. She began writing in opposition to things that she had previously claimed to have supported. And it made no sense to me. Intellectually, it made no sense. If you believe what you believe, you believe what you believe. Why change? And the answer was because it was Trump who was articulating what she believed. And it embarrassed her.
And so she had to change her beliefs or she gave the illusion of changing her beliefs simply because she couldn’t stand the embarrassment of realizing that Trump agreed with her or that she agreed with Trump. So she, in order to maintain her purity with the establishment buddies, that she had to strike out immediately against Trump. Well, this has led her to write a bunch of things that are highly contradictory, make no sense, especially when measured against things she’s written previously.
And this was observed recently by a writer at National Review named Charles C. W. Cooke. Charles C. W. Cooke decided to write a piece exposing the inconsistencies and everything else of a recent blog post by Jennifer Rubin. The details of this are irrelevant for my point here. I mean, I don’t mean to tell you what she wrote and what Cooke wrote.
But Cooke did not get personal in his blog exposing her inconsistencies. He didn’t get personal at all. Well, there were people who arose to defend Jennifer Rubin, and they set out to attack Cooke. Now, all these people claim to be conservatives. Every damn one of them claims to be conservative, and for the most part they’re all Never Trumpers. They’re locked in this internecine battle over who’s pure and who isn’t pure, and in this case, Charles C. W. Cooke was being savaged because it was said that he had personally attacked Rubin, when he hadn’t.
He simply exposed the utter folly of what she had written. And Jim Geraghty, who writes The Morning Jolt at National Review characterized it quite well. I can’t do any better than this. He writes, “A quick point on the allegedly ‘savagely personal’ attack on Jen Rubin, which consisted mostly of quoting her views on the Paris Climate Accords, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Iran Deal, tax cuts, welfare, energy, and gun control and noticing that as soon as Trump signed on to Rubin’s policy preferences, she suddenly became a critic of those same positions.”
And so she was embarrassed, and so she wrote a piece that contradicted everything she believed only because she was embarrassed Trump also believes it. And this is what passes for our intellectual wing. And then there’s a follow-up to this. Another blogger wrote, quote — and this is the nub of it — “For some of us, it’s not that we changed our position, it’s that we don’t want this administration trying to do important and complicated things it doesn’t understand.”
Folks, this is it! That little two-line sentence explains 90% of the conservative intellectual Never Trumper movement. They simply cannot accept the notion that the things they believe in are in the hands of somebody so incompetent and rude and barbarian as Donald Trump. “We don’t want this administration trying to do important, complicated things it doesn’t understand.” In other words, “We’re the smart people, we are the experts, and this guy Trump and his mad cabinet and his bunch of no competent fools, they got no business implementing what we believe.”
Now, stop and think of that for a minute. In a fight for the soul of America, these people are willing to sell out their ideas and abandon the objective of advancing them simply because they think the guy implementing their ideas isn’t fit to do so because he’s a boob, he’s a narcissist, he’s a pig, he’s a misogynist, whatever it is. And this is what passes for intellectual thought and application.
Imagine if this were the norm after every election. Imagine if it were permissible and laudable to oppose the implementation of the very things you believe because you believe whoever was elected isn’t qualified or sophisticated enough to handle all of these very complicated things.
Well, then there would be no reason for elections, because there wouldn’t be anybody qualified enough to implement what you believe in. And if you can abandon your own principles simply ’cause you don’t like the people implementing them, what does that say about the results of elections? And I don’t see these people throwing their hat in the ring trying to get elected. I don’t see them willing to head down the road that you have to head down to get elected in order to acquire the power and the opportunity to implement your ideas.
You sit there from the sidelines and you judge who’s fit and who’s unfit and then if you decide somebody’s unfit, and not because of policy, he’s unfit because of his hair, he’s unfit because of his tweets, he’s unfit because he insults women, he’s unfit because he does personal attacks on Twitter, he’s unfit because he brags, he’s unfit because he hosted Celebrity Apprentice, he’s unfit because of Omarosa, he’s unfit because we don’t like Ivanka, he’s unfit ’cause he shouldn’t a won. It never ends.
And at the end of it all you are superior, you’re the expert, only you should have the right to determine who has the power to influence, implement your ideas. And yet you haven’t taken a step yet to go down the road that would get you elected with the power to implement the agenda that you so deeply believe in, which obviously you don’t deeply believe in it.
I hope you’ve been able to keep up with this. If you haven’t, I don’t blame you. Angelo Codevilla wrote about this when he talked about the ruling class and their tight-knit associations. By the way, these are the same people — I’ll never forget this. When I moved to New York — same kind of people — when I moved to New York in 1988, I had the idea, you know, I was gonna do a serious show. It was gonna be responsible. Meaning, I wasn’t gonna say things just to make people mad. I wasn’t gonna be outrageous just to be outrageous. I wasn’t gonna lie. I wasn’t gonna say things I didn’t believe.
My purpose was not to be controversial and stir people up. It was to be honest, but it was to stand out, it was gonna be a good show. I go to this cocktail party at Lew Lehrman’s house, and a bunch of people who think and act like I’ve just described, and they just love the Morton Downey Jr. show. Now, Morton Downey Jr.’s spitting on his guests, he’s blowing smoke in their faces, he’s calling ’em names, he’s kicking them off the show, he’s throwing sawdust in their hair, and these pseudointellectuals, “Oh, man, are you gonna be like that?”
This is typical think tank thinking. So Trump’s the guy that went out and did what you had to do to get elected. Trump’s the guy that’s getting beat up by everybody in the world just because he wakes up every day. He’s not qualified, he’s not sophisticated enough, he’s not educated enough. He’s not proper enough. “For some of us, it’s not that we changed our position.” And Jennifer Rubin did. Jennifer Rubin denied believing in what she previously said she believed simply because Trump believes the same stuff. And she’s so embarrassed that she has to abandon her beliefs in order to stay pure with the people who were Never Trumpers.
What mental torture these people must put themselves through each day. It’s obviously not enough to be guided and rooted in what you believe. All of this, all of this is based on what other people think of them. And what other people think of them apparently is superior and more important than the core principles that they claim to have.
Now, Geraghty, National Review, writing about this, this is interesting, says, “Stuck with a president that they didn’t vote for and cannot stand, a vocal chunk of Trump’s critics insist he must be removed from office — until they debate whether Pence would be worse, revealing that the core of their objection is less that Trump is a uniquely unqualified and bad Republican than the fact that he’s a Republican.”
The second strike against — these people are Republicans and so is Trump, and that embarrasses ’em. How many people like that do you know, by the way, who are not intellectual think tank bloggers? Do you know Republicans who are embarrassed to be Republicans now because Trump is? I do. Do you know any, Snerdley? Yeah, a couple. Yeah, they’re Never Trumper haters. It’s irrational. This is how irrational it is. And it’s deeply personal.
In other words, Geraghty is saying, where were all of you when the left was out destroying other Republicans that you didn’t oppose like George W. Bush? Where were you speaking out then? And he’s exactly right. In other words, these people will never criticize liberals and Democrats like they will people in their own party or movement!
Where were you guys when Bush was Hitler and Bush lied, people died and all this other garbage that Bush didn’t care about black people and the assassination movies and books that were written about Bush that we were encouraged to read, where were all of you savaging all the Obamaites and Clintonites who were saying all that stuff? Why weren’t they objectionable to you?
You would still go to cocktail parties with them. You would still have your intellectual exchanges and back-and-forth with them. But now that it’s Trump and he agrees with you and he’s implementing what you believe, you’re beside yourself because you don’t think he’s qualified to be dealing with the things you care about. It’s just amazing, folks.
It’s flat-out amazing because at the heart of all this is the notion that Trump is so ignorant and he’s so oblivious, he’s so self-absorbed, he’s so narcissistic, he’s so piggish, that he’s not even really president. He’s not even entitled to the powers of the presidency. We reject the fact that Trump was elected. We simply don’t accept it. He’s not qualified. This are people who believe in the same things Trump believes in. And that’s another thing that drives ’em nuts. There you have it my friends. That’s a pretty good description of your average Never Trumper community.
Related Links