A Never-Trumper’s 119th Nervous Breakdown
It’s an easy guess that Peter Wehner, a onetime conservative who served in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, clicked on one of his laptop folders, added a few paragraphs, and sent “The Politics of Fear Itself” to The Atlantic, which published his latest anti-Donald Trump position paper last week. One of the fascinating byproducts of Trump’s hold on a portion of the American electorate (and media) since 2015 is how four score and seven neocons are stuck in time—not dissimilar from MAGA zealots—their once-agile minds atrophied by hate for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. It’s a weird phenomenon—and I leave out Democrats who fervently agree with their new allies (and Liz Cheney) because they’re Democrats and that’s expected—since so many of these men and women were, until Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, the “Big Thinker” and public policy base of the Republican Party, blasting Barack Obama during his two unremarkable terms and looking forward to reclaiming their “seat at the table.” Wehner wrote, before the “end times,” that Barack Obama “has undermined American’s moral self-confidence.”
As I’ve noted many times, Joe Biden won the 2020 Covid election—I phrase it that way because the lockdowns and masks prevented a “normal” presidential campaign, to the incumbent’s benefit since he didn’t have to campaign and inevitably make up stories or rip off passages from Jack London—by a solid margin, and Trump’s abominable behavior, which resulted in the January 6th 2021 “attempted coup,” “rally,” “melee,” whatever you want to label it, made him look like a fool, even if the “threat to American democracy” bleat, was overstated but repeated every week since by people like Wehner.
Like Griffin Dunne’s character in Martin Scorsese’s underrated After Hours (1985), Wehner and his like-minded compatriots are glued on the streets of horror; every time it appears there’s an opening, another Trump blimp appears in the sky. Wehner stretches: “For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the ‘smoking gun’ tapes.”
I know that another phase of Nixon revisionism is currently in fashion, but did Trump continue to send American soldiers to an ill-begotten foreign war; did he order break-ins of political opponents and illegally disburse “slush” funds for “dirty tricks.” Granted, Nixon’s “misdeeds” might seem “quaint” today, or status quo (JFK, LBJ, FDR, Wilson, Reagan), but aside from J6—a trifle compared to Watergate—and presenting himself as the most personally obnoxious and narcissistic president in history, Trump doesn’t compare with Nixon. Politicians aren’t shy about seeking attention—Calvin Coolidge would be the 20th century’s exception—but most are more guarded than Trump, who just says what’s on his mind at any given moment. His honesty, always gauche, is still refreshing in a Beltway full of miscreants who don’t give a hoot about their constituents.
Wehner says that since 2015, Trump has “almost every day selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf.” Hasn’t Wehner (63) learned the lesson that most Americans now take for granted: don’t believe everything, if anything, that you read on the internet?
Here’s a puzzler: Citing Jonathan Haidt, who said that sharing anger can be very pleasurable, Wehner writes: “For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.”
Apparently, Wehner wasn’t so put off by Gingrich and Buchanan in the 1990s—and Bill Clinton, egged by on James Carville, was no stranger to blood-sport politics—that he turned down a job as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. And Bush, let alone the conspiracy theories about his father and grandfather, was a certified member of the “cultural elite.”
I assume Wehner will either vote for Biden or an off-the-wall third-party candidate, although it’ll be curious to see in subsequent Atlantic dispatches how he feels about Biden’s herky-jerky Israel policies. He’s an unabashed hawk, so perhaps that leaves him in a quandary. But probably not: he’s completely consumed by Trump.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023