Conscience of an Unreformed NeverTrumper

I like educated centrists. We live in world where content is written by first picking a side then picking arguments that best support the side. Centrists do the reverse, pick the best argument first, regardless of which side it serves. Centrist arguments are sincere in ways partisan arguments are not.

Sadly, though, a lot of centrists have become seduced by Trumpism. A good example is the centrist Ilya Shapiro, who recently blogged about his transition from a NeverTrumper to voting for Trump.

This is not me. This can never be me. In much the same way I’ll never be seduced by wokism, I’ll never get seduced by Trumpism. I thought I’d write a blogpost why.

Lawfare

The reason I say “seduced by Trumpism” is because Shapiro has switched to choosing sides first, then insincere arguments second.

An example of this is criticizing the lawsuits against Trump as “lawfare”, meaning that Democrats abused the legal system in order to achieve anti-Trump political goals.

It’s partly true, but the primary wielder of “lawfare” has always been Trump. He’s constantly abusing the legal system to his favor, such as refusing to pay contractors in his construction projects because it would take them too much money and time to challenge Trump in court.

A more recent example is his nuisance lawsuit against CBS because he didn’t like how they edited their interview with Kamala Harris. There are few better examples of abuse of the legal system than that suit.

In the 2020 election, Trump’s strategy was first to encourage supporters to avoid mail-in ballots (so they’d contain mostly Democrat votes), then try to get courts to throw out mail-in ballots after the election. It’s a well known abuse of the legal system (“laches”) that it had little chance of succeeding, but he tried anyway, because lawfare. Trump complains that his 60+ election challenges were thrown out on technicalities (“standing”) rather than merit, but the reality that had nothing close to merit. They were almost all obvious abuses of the legal system.

Many of the cases against Trump have merit. His civil fraud was huge, he stole classified documents, refused to return them, and lied about returning them.

Sure, I agree that Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis were motivated by politics, appealing to left-wing voters by going after Trump. Several of the cases look like abuse of the legal system.

But at the same time, his civil fraud case shows a breathtaking amount of fraud in his businesses. He claimed to have built 2500 luxury homes as collateral for a loan to reduce the interest rate in half. His punishment is simply to return the profits of this fraud, which seems fair.

It’s not “lawfare” that makes them prosecute that now, it was “lawfare” that prevented the case from being prosecuted in the past. Trump’s position as a famous billionaire made any prosecution a political risk with little political benefit. He had fixers who could destroy the career of any prosecutor. This changed when Trump became president.

In other words, politics didn’t enable illegitimate prosecutions against Trump so much as finally make legitimate prosecutions possible.

As for the future, Trump repeatedly promised politicizing the DoJ on the campaign trail. He failed last time because Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr had a limit, a point at which they said Trump’s requests were “wrong”. He’s appointing those that have no such limit, first Gaetz, and now Bondi, who is knee-deep in Trumps “lawfare”.

The point is simply that I don’t think Shapiro’s “lawfare” comments are sincere. I don’t think he’s rationally looking at all sides, how Trump’s “lawfare” is vastly worse than anything Democrats are doing. I think he’s just repeating talking points.

Illiberal takeover of the Democratic Party

Shapiro rightly identifies the fight is about our western liberal traditions, but he wrongly claims the Democrats are the danger. He repeats common partisan claims rather than being critical about the accusations.

Both sides have been eroding the filibuster, you can’t say one party has been worse. In any case, whether it’s a liberal institution is hotly debated. Protecting minority rights certainly is, but the filibuster is mostly just an impediment to governing. The entire point of pluralistic democracy is to let one party govern fully, and when citizens don’t like the results, vote them out. This is broken in America, where we have a two Party system where neither party is allow to fully govern.

Shapiro claims that Democrats will challenge electoral votes this coming Jan 6. He’s probably right, and it’s definitely an illiberal attack on democratic institutions. But this pales in comparison to what Republicans did in the 2020 election. Their challenges were broader, and more importantly, Trump pressured VP Pence himself to count electoral votes in a way that would. We have now elected a VP who believes a VP could’ve given the electoral votes to Trump.

In short, it’s laughable that Shapiro would even bring up this issue after what Trump tried. We have a very big worry that in 2028 Vance will attempt to do what Pence refused.

Shapiro pretends the Democrats want to pack the court. This is certainly evil, but Republican have also proposed it. But of course, the reason it’s even politically viable is because of the illiberal attack on nominations in the first place, namely how Republicans successfully squashed the Merric Garland nomination to the court. Shapiro has a theory what the Democrats might do while ignoring the very real thing the Republicans did do.

In any case, it’s a wrong measure of which party defends liberal institutions more. It’s cherry picking a scenario that affects only one Party. If the positions were reversed, Republicans would be talking about packing courts as well. We can’t say which party is more oppposed to packing courts in general, only where they stand on packing the current court.

A better measure of who supports liberal institutions is one that impacts both equally. A good example is conceding elections. Trump made it clear in 2016, 2022, and 2024 that he wouldn’t concede a loss. In contrast, Hillary, Biden, and Harris did concede. We had dual concessions from both Biden and Harris this last election, each declaring Trump’s win legitimate, each promising a peaceful transfer of power. Trump promised to whip up his supporters into another performance of Jan 6.

Shapiro hates “wokeism” in the “commanding heights of culture, media, and higher education”. He’s got good reason to, he being fired from Georgetown for a tweet critical of Biden’s DEI supreme court pick. But his experience comes from the extreme wokeness of universities, which is unrelated to whoever is President.

Biden did not call Trump supporters garbage. I’m usually a defender of what Trump did not say, not “Nazis are find people” and not “drink bleach”, and I’m applying the same logic here. The people Biden called garbase are those who said Puerto Ricans are garbage, not Trumpists as a whole.

What we see here is the bizarreness of Trump reflection, putting his own evils onto his opponents. It’s Trump who violates the liberal institution of respect and manners by the name calling and denigration of opponents. It’s absurd claiming that Biden is anywhere in that league.

Harris didn’t call Trump “Hitler”, but there are parallels, and everyone can see them. We aren’t talking about the Evil-of-All-Evils that killed 6 million Jews. We are talking about the person who came to power by denying liberal institutions.

Of course Shapiro can’t see this if he thinks that somehow Trump is a better defender of our liberal institutions than Biden. It’s tautological.

I studied prewar Germany in college. I can’t help but see the analogies. No, it’s not about Hitler’s caricature of being the height of evil. Instead, it’s about how an otherwise educated and prosperous country with liberal institutions can devolve into the brutality that was fascism. In college, these reasons were inexplicable. Now with Shapiro’s post, I can see how such things can happen, as good people convince themselves of something else.

It’s like Trump’s brutish promise to deport all illegal immigrants by declaring a state of emergency, using the military as a domestic police, and suspending due process. He appeals to the brutes that cheers that sort of thing, while educated people convince themselves Trump doesn’t mean what he says. No, Trump doesn’t want to kill the jews, and he’s not going to gas immigrants. But nonetheless, his policies are a repudiation of our liberal institutions in favor of brutality.

Somehow Shapiro has convinced himself that the Lügenpresse is real, that because the press doesn’t tell stories how he wants, that the problem is in the press.

But Trump receives overwhelming negative coverage in the press because he deserves it. Sure, journalists have a left-wing bias, but it’s not why Trump receives such negative coverage. Only the blind fails to see the reason for Trump’s negative coverage is Trump himself.

For example, consider his picks for AG (Matt Gaetz) and HHS (RFKjr). The reason these picks get such negative press is because they deserve it. If anything, the press isn’t negative enough, calling RFKjr a “vaccine activist” rather than the objective truth “wackjob anti-vaxx conspiracy-theorist”. But since such nonsense is the norm of Trump, people think it’s the press’s fault for continuing to criticize things that his supports no longer find objectionable. Anybody who thinks Gaetz was a reasonable pick for AG would of course think it’s the press who is wrong for criticizing it.

Populist thug

Shapiro claims some “as-yet-unformulated metaphor awaits to explain Donald Trump and his place in the nation’s history”.

No, we’ve already formulated the explanation: Trump is just the “populist strongman”. Just ask an AI to list populist strongmen and they’ll include Trump alongside Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Chávez, etc.

And, of course, Hitler. That link shows the comparison between Hitler and Trump: such a strongman blames outsiders for problems, promises to make the nation great again, promises to be strong leader who can fix problems through the sheer force of personality, exploits economic unrest, uses oratory and personal magnetism to sway crowds.

I mean, Trump isn’t Hitler, whose oratory was mostly screaming hate into a microphone. Trump’s skill was rambling off script into a microphone and dancing to the disco song YMCA. But still, his biggest cheers during campaign speeches come from either the grievances about how MAGA has been wronged, or how he’s going to be a strongman, such as ejecting all immigrants without due-process.

The point is, we don’t need some future history to judge what Trump is. Those who know history know how to place him right now. They just don’t want to repeat history.

Conclusion

I’m a #NeverTrumper because I studied pre-war German history and have kept abreast of current events. I support the western liberal tradition, which means opposing wokism and Trumpism. Trump is a simple strongman populist who appeals to the least educated, most thuggish elements of our society, the type who cheers every time he insults and denigrates others. He’s not exactly Hitler, he’s not Putin, he’s not Chávez. But he’s the same class of leader.

He’s only gotten worse since his first term. Then, he was surrounded by those who would defend liberal institutions, including even Bill Barr. In the next term, he promises to nominate those who have no such guard rails.

We’ll survive a second Trump term, we won’t become Nazi Germany, but many of our liberal institutions will be in tatters.