The road out of nowhere

2. Along those lines, I owe the Never Trumpers an apology. They were right all along. I was not a pro-Trumper, but I believed — and still believe — that the Republican Party needed to be shaken up badly because of its many failures in the past — the Iraq War most of all — and because of its failure to attend to serious structural problems with the economy, and within our culture. I did not vote for Trump, but I was pleased to see conservative populism rising within the party, and was grateful for the federal judges Trump gave us. The president was frequently embarrassing and foolish, but I figured that if the only choices were Trump, the old-line GOP, or the increasingly extreme Democratic Party, then we could tolerate his boobery. The system was strong enough to contain him, I figured. Besides, he was far too indisciplined and narcissistic to become the dictator that the Left feared…

What I did not foresee is that Trump would normalize cult thinking on the Right. Donald Trump did not make people lose their minds. Nobody held a gun to people’s head and force them to espouse crazy things on Trump’s behalf. But a lot of people did go that far. I regret not taking the Never Trump folks more seriously back in the day. I am not saying that the Republican Party should return to the status quo — it couldn’t if it wanted to, but it shouldn’t want to — but I am saying that the things that the Never Trumpers said about not making a deal with this devil were true, or at the very least more truthful than I gave them credit for at the time. And for that, I am sorry.