My latest subscriber-exclusive column is up at Substack. A lot of conservatives hoped overturning Roe v. Wade meant abortion could be relegated to the states. But the Ohio abortion referendum should be a wakeup call that there’s no getting around the need for a national solution for restoring the right to life. Click here to read more.

My latest column is published at Substack, taking a look at the facts behind anti-DeSantis spin from people who seem more interested in selling outrage than they do actually getting targets of weaponized government out of prison. Click here to read it!

After weeks of preparation, I am thrilled to announce that I have launched a Substack! This new outlet will be dedicated to the same kind of commentary I’ve been publishing here on the health, sanity, tactics, principles, effectiveness, and future of conservatism in America, without sugarcoating or sacred cows, now on a regular schedule. The page looks pretty bare right now, but the first exclusive commentary is set to go out to subscribers at 5PM Central Time Tuesday, October 3.

For $5 a month, subscribers will get four exclusive commentaries a week, published every Tuesday through Friday at 5PM Central and delivered right to your inbox, and the ability to participate in comment sections. Subscribing for a year in advance at $50 will give you a discount of two months free. From time to time I will also publish shorter, simpler posts that are free to everyone, which could be anything from making a standalone point or observation, highlighting a notable story or exchange somewhere else online, or promoting commentary by others who get it. (Regular exclusive columns will not go out on Good Friday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Thursday & Friday, and Christmas Eve through New Years Day, although I do hope to offer some holiday content that will be free to everybody.)

Click here to go to the Substack’s About Page, which includes a mission statement, more details, and links to representative samples of my writing. As for what all this means for the website you’re viewing right now, ConservativeStandards.com will remain as an exhaustive archive for my past work, hub for wherever else I can be found on the web, informational resource, etc.

Thank you so much for following me all this time, and here’s hoping we can provide a model of what conservative punditry is missing and what the Right needs if it’s going to save America.

Donald Trump’s atrocious abortion comments on Meet the Press over the weekend present the perfect case study of why responsible voices do not exaggerate an officeholder’s good deeds or downplay his bad ones: because eventually it will give that officeholder the idea that his supporters will let him get away with anything.

If any other Republican had said half of what Trump told Kirsten Welker, he’d have been universally recognized and disavowed as a laughable fool and irredeemable RINO by now. Protecting babies with detectable heartbeats is “terrible”? Not committing to at least sign a 15-week ban? Refusing to say the preborn have constitutional rights? Making a quick deal for some babies so we can forget about the rest and “go on to other things”? Democrats who’ve spent the last three presidencies fanatically opposing any limits on abortion (to the point that they won’t even protect babies after birth) are suddenly going to agree to ban it at a number of weeks that has yet to be revealed, but would have to be later than 20 since Democrats have rejected that cutoff point for years?

If any of those exact same statements had Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, Mitch Daniels (the original social-issues compromiser), or Jeff Flake’s name attached to them, the vast majority would respond that of course the speaker was a dirty establishment squish who didn’t know the first thing about standing firm—unlike our man Donald!

No sir, our man Donald can do whatever he wants—propose utterly absurd compromises that won’t go anywhere, set abandoning the vast majority of the preborn as some aspirational goal (over 90% of abortions occur before 15 weeks), use the megaphone of an ex-president to actively denigrate and undermine pro-lifers who are accomplishing more comprehensive protections at the state level than Congress is ready for, preemptively acquiesce to the very sentiments we’re supposed to be working to change, refuse to commit to signing a law that would stop less than 10% of abortions, and refuse to even affirm the preborn’s basic inalienable rights under the Constitution—and still get called a pro-life hero. A fighter. The man who shows all those ineffectual moderate squares how to get real results.

UPDATE: Several months after this interview, Trump reiterated the main points in a Fox News town hall, while actually intensifying his opposition to heartbeat laws. While apologists downplayed the previous “terrible” label as purely about political strategy, on Fox’s stage he progressed to attacking heartbeat laws on the merits, saying, “A lot of people say, if you talk five or six weeks, a lot of women don’t know if they’re pregnant in five or six weeks.” This is a common talking point among pro-abortion activists and liberal mainstream media. Pro-life doctors dispute the claim, but for a real pro-life candidate it wouldn’t matter whether parents retain or miss a brief window in which to have their children killed. [End Update]

In a professional pro-life movement that wasn’t corrupted by politics or grift and actually took its mission seriously, this interview would have already conclusively ended Trump’s candidacy (then again, such a movement also would have ditched Trump in January at the absolute latest when he scapegoated us for the GOP’s midterm underperformance). In the actual pro-life establishment, however (let’s call it Big Life), the reaction is decidedly more mixed.

As compiled in my LifeSiteNews report on the mess (linked at the top), several pro-life leaders have responded with the appropriate condemnation, including Abby Johnson, Kristan Hawkins, and my old boss Lila Rose. But the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life have ignored it so far, and Susan B. Anthony List leader Marjorie Dannenfelser (last seen giving Trump a pass for flouting her own line in the sand) refused to criticize Trump across multiple statements on the subject. Indeed, Big Life has fallen so far that one can literally head a group called Priests for Life and still “continue to support [Trump] 100%” after Trump tosses the cause to the wolves.

Why? Much of it has to do with the incessant crap during Trump’s term about him being the “most pro-life president ever,” which far too many people who knew better let slide. A little exaggeration and oversimplification might not have seemed like such a big deal when he was in office—things are going (relatively) well and he’s mostly doing what we want, so what’s the harm?

We’re living the harm right now. Things stopped going relatively well in 2020, Trump lost and made a colossal mess for himself and the rest of us on his way out, and he’s currently on track to give Democrats another White House victory—and the efforts of sane conservatives to change tracks before the train hurtles off the cliff are stymied in large part by an emotional attachment reinforced by years of being told by pro-life voices in positions of trust that the man was something he wasn’t.

Yes, Trump’s presidency was a net positive for pro-life policy. He made a lot of appointments and signed a lot of executive actions that cut off numerous avenues of public funding to the abortion industry, protected conscience rights, and affirmed pro-life principles. Most importantly, his three Supreme Court nominees all voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, which was massive. All of that was more than enough to prefer him to a Democrat president, which is why I voted for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, and why I spent the years in between doing battle with the NeverTrump movement and defending the honor of pro-life Christians who supported Trump despite his abysmal character.

But “better than the alternative,” “better than he could have turned out,” and “better than Bush” (who also got the “best pro-life president” moniker) are far cries from actually being the best ever or best possible.

The truth is that Trump’s presidency only turned out as well as it did for the pro-life cause because of the overwhelming distrust, skepticism, and hostility he faced for his history as a “very pro-choice” New York Democrat who in early 2016 was still saying Planned Parenthood did “wonderful things,” who knew so little about how to act pro-life that he initially thought we wanted to hear that women deserve “some form of punishment” for abortion, and who people were worried would name his pro-abortion sister to the Supreme Court.

Once it was clear Trump would be the nominee, there was very real panic among pro-lifers (and conservatives more generally) over what to do about it. Whether we could possibly support a man who for all we knew might still be a pro-abortion liberal was an open question. That question was ultimately resolved by the Trump campaign signing a list of specific pro-life policies to commit to, convening a group of leading pro-life figures to vouch for him and act as his “brain trust,” and having the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation compile his famous list of potential Supreme Court picks. Once in office, figures such Mike Pence, Roger Severino, and Kellyanne Conway were there to ensure a pro-life direction (Conway was the one who proposed the Title X Protect Life Rule).

It cannot be stressed enough that all of this was a direct result of nobody trusting Trump to do it himself. It was broadly recognized at the time that Trump probably didn’t have the beliefs and definitely didn’t have the competence of a worthy pro-life leader, so we forced him to outsource these decisions to people who did (well, mostly—more on that in a minute). How much strength, courage, belief, understanding, or ability does it really take to endorse positions a key constituency demands, sign executive orders other people draft, or announce judges literally handed to you by outside groups? How much credit does a president get for the good fortune of seeing three Supreme Court vacancies coincide with his time in office? How much weight should decisions that can be done entirely in-house, with like-minded subordinates, without having to worry about resistance from other branches of government—and can be undone just as easily by a successor—be given in a final grade?

(Trump was also the first sitting president to address the March for Life in-person, which was a lovely symbolic gesture, but symbolic nonetheless—the fact that attending an event and giving a speech is so often cited as an example of Trump’s Herculean support for the cause is the movement’s entire diminished-expectations problem in miniature.)

And that only covers the aspects of Trump’s abortion record that went well. It ignores all of the messier aspects Big Life never talks about…like the fact that Planned Parenthood’s overall taxpayer funding increased year after year after year partly because he signed most of the Swamp’s budgets without a fight (but sure, he can totally negotiate abortion laws with Congress). Or that his Justice Department ultimately did nothing to bring Planned Parenthood to justice for fetal organ trafficking. Or that by his own admission he had no idea how his justices would rule on Roe because the Swamp told him he wasn’t supposed to ask before nominating them to nigh-irrevocable positions of lifetime power. Or that his lower-court appointees included at least two outright pro-aborts that we know of (among other flavors of liberal).

Trump’s abortion record, far from being that of an exceptionally effective pro-life true believer, is exactly what one would expect from an incompetent opportunist without authentic conservative convictions, one preoccupied with what he can take credit for while largely uninterested in the details. He generally followed the advice of those around him, for better and for worse, and the abortion advice he was forced to accept happened to be mostly decent. He generally delivered on things that could be done entirely within the White House, with minimal difficulty, complexity, or resistance. And he generally disappointed on anything that required the more complicated, more important work of wrangling with Congress, holding firm on spending priorities, responsibly vetting judges to ensure they really were judicial conservatives (a problem that manifested in numerous areas beyond SCOTUS and abortion), cleaning out and staffing a proper Justice Department with a proper mission, and sustaining any of these tasks through a web of Democrat hostility, Republican weakness, media manipulation, and internal resistance.

The Trump administration was decent on the easy stuff thanks to outside pressure from a pro-life movement that still had standards. But it never improved on the harder parts of the job because that pressure later dissipated into nothingness, replaced by unconditional promotion of Trump as a heroic promise keeper (which was doubly galling considering less than a month after winning election he was openly joking about ditching one of his most famous promises). Trump could do no wrong in the eyes of Big Life—or in his own mind.

As a result, now we have a Donald Trump who is unleashed from any perceived need to continue earning the support of a constituency he not only believes is firmly in his pocket, but which he openly rants about being in his debt. Now he’s moved on to what he really cares about: his narcissistic fantasies about securing his legacy as the ultimate dealmaker (the same force animating Trump’s refusal to abandon his rushed Covid vaccines, one of his only deeds that the establishment still views positively).

Most importantly, as explained Tuesday by The Federalist’s Nathaniel Blake, once elected to a second term there would be absolutely nothing left to incentivize or pressure Trump to keep any of his promises. With no more elections to worry about, he would be completely liberated to do whatever he felt would get him the most praise. He just got done demonstrating that his sense of obligation to the pro-life cause already at an all-time low; who in their right mind would bet on it going up?

Of course, all that assumes the hypothetical scenario of Trump actually getting elected president again, which is almost certainly not going to happen. We are being asked to rationalize and ignore the indefensible for the sake of a man whose nomination would most likely guarantee another four years of the most grotesquely pro-abortion presidency in American history. All because pandering to a conman’s idolizers was easier and more lucrative than telling the truth.

The truth is that the pro-life cause means nothing to Donald Trump. Not understanding it, not serving it, not even refraining from actively harming it and undermining those more committed to it than he is. It never did, and now he’s done putting effort into at least pretending otherwise. In no meaningful sense can Donald Trump still be classified as pro-life. What we do with that truth will determine whether we deserve the label any more than he does.

Mitt Romney announced this week he plans to retire from the Senate at the end of his current term, marking the end of one of the most wasted careers in modern political history. Wasted, but highly illustrative—his time on the national stage, and the reactions to him both positive and negative, previewed more than a few defects, miscalculations, and bad habits that would go on to plague us to this day.

Romney’s history of flipping from liberal positions to conservative ones meant he was never an ideal standard-bearer for the Right, but as hard as it might be for younger readers to believe, he was legitimately the best conservative option in the 2008 primary—the alternatives being pro-abortion Rudy Giuliani, nanny-statist Mike Huckabee, more-talk-and-zealous-fans-than-substance Fred Thompson (sound familiar?), and John McCain who was, well, John McCain. Major conservative personalities eventually came to the same conclusion, but not soon enough to deny McCain the nomination, and we all remember how that worked out.

The 2012 Republican field was a mess in which there was no clear conservative choice (no, despite the bleating of his fans, not even Rick Perry). The primary was largely a series of auditions for a suitable “Not Romney,” during which I temporarily backed Michelle Bachmann (yeah, I’m a little embarrassed about that, but like I said, it was a lousy field), withdrew the endorsement a month later, supported Rick Santorum when he caught momentum, soured as he stumbled, and ultimately settled for Romney just to help end that miserable primary and shift focus to beating Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen either—primarily because of Romney’s own weaknesses (letting Obama get away with too many outrages, campaign team incompetence, and a weak and tone-deaf running mate among them), but also due to a rabid “NeverRomney” sentiment that led some to say removing Obama wasn’t worth a Mitt vote. The pervasive meme that 3-4 million conservatives stayed home in 2012 (which I bought too in the immediate aftermath) might not have been true, but Romney’s actual popular vote—1.4 million fewer than George W. Bush in 2004, less than 700,000 more than McCain—did not indicate an especially motivated base.

After that, Romney was largely a non-factor until Donald Trump burst on the scene, prompting him to go public with a dramatic speech declaring, “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” Which was absolutely true, but committed the same mistake that doomed all of 2016’s Stop Trump efforts: singling him out as the only major problem in the primary field, without recognizing the legitimate grievances with establishment Republicans that gave Trump his opening or offering a healthier alternative for channeling their discontent.

Fast-forward another few years, and Romney was in the Senate, where he turned out to be pretty much what you’d expect: a disappointment more interested in pandering to Beltway sensitivities than being of any genuine use to the nation or learning from his mistakes.

And now, with a departure announcement confirming that he will leave politics the same way he entered—as a moderate too beholden to “respectable” consensus to ever attain greatness—all that’s left is to review the lessons we can glean from his ultimately-wasted career. There are more than one might initially expect.

The first is the most obvious: squishes can’t go the distance. As the 2012 nominee, Romney simply didn’t have it in him to channel and maintain true outrage for Obama’s worst offenses, such as defending infanticide. He treated politics too much like a gentlemen’s contest, and paid the price. And by and large, the congressional GOP has the same problem in dealing with today’s Democrats.

The second: there are no substitutes for authentic conservatism. For all the hostility between Romney and Trump’s respective camps, it is an under-recognized irony that both men have far more in common than they would ever admit. Both are liberal-leaning businessmen who touted their mastery of the corporate world as political assets, who shifted rightward to help their presidential ambitions but never really understood or internalized conservatism, and who were ultimately chewed up and spat out by the systems they challenged. They simply picked opposite styles that played to their respective strengths, but at the end of the day neither men’s strengths were enough to make up for not truly, deeply understanding what America needs and why.

The third is yet another similarity, not in themselves but in their presidential primaries. Their debut contests were both defined by the Right’s failure to unite early around the most conservative viable option (Romney in 2008, Ted Cruz in 2016) enabling someone far worse to cruise to the nomination (McCain in 2008, Trump in 2016). For their second contests, each man had become the default to whom serious conservatives pined to find an alternative. In 2012 we didn’t really have one (though Santorum came closest); today that alternative is indisputably Ron DeSantis.

Unfortunately, the Right—at least its most influential members in the best position to actually influence things—has learned none of these lessons.

In Trump we have a candidate who isn’t stylistically squishy, but he’s also not what we need in its place: clear-eyed, forcefully-expressed moral candor focused on what matters most and proportionate to its severity. He’s just clumsy, juvenile belligerence tossed at whatever personally offends him. And on policy, it turned out he could be squished in all sorts of ways, because he’s not grounded in authentic conservative understanding or belief—which seems not to matter to the “conservative influencer” class, as long as his fans remain so tantalizingly marketable.

With his 2016 nomination, Trump secured the hostage grip on the Right he maintains today in large part because the Right forgot (or ignored) how McCain got nominated eight years before. Now the motives may be different, but the Right still isn’t uniting around the conservative. This primary is far from over—we’re still months away from casting the first primary votes—but if the trends so far hold once the voting starts, our failure to learn from any of this will land us in a new normal against which Mitt Romney or Donald Trump presidencies would seem like a dream.

Noted mediocrity Michael Knowles took a victory lap Tuesday over Donald’s Trump commanding lead in national Republican primary polls holding despite his decision to not participate in the first presidential primary debate, which he had defended as politically smart. That this is where his analysis begins and ends once again puts the lie to Jeremy Boreing’s hilarious suggestion last year that the Daily Wire is a place of exceptional standards (just in case employing Candace Owens wasn’t enough of a clue).

Knowles simply ignores the main problem with Trump not debating, which has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with merit. Given how much Trump horrifically botched during his presidency, he owes it to conservative and Republican voters—both the ones he’s trying to convince to vote for him, and the ones who could be stuck with him as their nominee through no fault of their own—to answer real questions about how a second term would be any different, and how he plans to win the general election despite everything weighing against him. After all, it’s clear by now that nobody in conservative media in a position to land an interview with him is interested in asking.

An entire primary without any venues where the frontrunner has to face scrutiny is a farce that leaves Republicans no standing to talk about the DNC rigging their primaries against Bernie Sanders or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., superdelegates, coronations, any of it.

Knowles pretty plainly doesn’t care about any of that, but there was one challenge he saw fit to answer: the fact that in not debating, Trump has given Joe Biden a ready-made excuse to not debate either if Trump is his opponent. Knowles dismissed the point on the grounds that: “He’ll do it if it’s in his interest. That is and always has been a fundamental rule for any competent political campaign.”

Of course Biden would most likely refuse to debate regardless of what Trump does (assuming Biden is the Democrat nominee). And on the off chance he does step up, of course Trump would decide whether or not to meet him on stage based on whatever his campaign determines is best for him then, regardless of the precedent set in the primary. None of that has anything to do with why this is a problem.

Political opponents refusing to face each other in person before the American people is not normal, yet it’s something that nominee Biden very much needs. The 80-year-old president’s mental frailty is his biggest weakness, and a major public episode is one of the few things that could deliver a Trump victory. So it’s imperative that his handlers keep him out of as many uncontrolled public appearances as possible.

If Trump goes through the entire primary without debating once and still gets the nomination, it will make it vastly easier for Biden to spin his own decision not to debate, and seriously weaken whatever mileage Republicans might have otherwise gotten out of his inability or unwillingness to face his challenger.

It’s been a recurring theme of MAGA grift punditry to take these questions as if they begin and end with the primary. Trump’s doing fine now without debating, so who cares? The indictments are only making him stronger among Republicans; why wouldn’t the general electorate feel the same way? But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it ever worked. Choices have long-term consequences as well as short-term ones…including the choice to gin up an audience with superficial analysis and overconfidence that sets them up for disappointment—and the country up for disaster.

Twenty years ago, one of the defining distinctions between Left and Right was whether one believed in appeasing or confronting the evils beyond America’s shores. Tragically, the dominant rhetoric surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made clear that this is no longer the case.

Back then, galvanized by the September 11 attacks and George W. Bush’s strong initial response against al-Qaeda, conservatives were overwhelmingly unified, with the only real exception being the isolationist fringe of libertarians and paleoconservatives behind doddering demagogue Ron Paul. But that began to change when, after swiftly toppling Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration refused to commit enough troops to stabilize the occupation of Iraq until after years of unnecessary chaos and bloodshed cost Republicans control of Congress in 2006.

Because the backlash was largely (and understandably) an emotional response rather than a sober reevaluation of specific bad assumptions (like that modern democracy could be easily grafted onto theocratic Islamic cultures) and strategic decisions (such as that a light force would be sufficient to pacify the post-Saddam insurgency), a segment of the Right didn’t just turn against a disastrous president’s costly misjudgments; it ran to the opposite extreme of what Bush seemed to represent, and to varying degrees embraced isolationists’ core narratives that America taking any interest in foreign conflicts was the root of all evil, and that trading a global footprint for closed borders would suffice to protect us from threats beyond our shores.

While isolationism is not yet the majority among elected Republicans, its uneasy standing is actually taken in some quarters as vindication of populists’ narrative that they represent the “true conservatism” of Republican base voters against an out-of-touch party establishment dominated by sinister “neocons” (a term tossed around in much the same way as leftists use “fascist,” unmoored from its actual historical or ideological meanings). While isolationists’ application of that disconnect to foreign policy is an oversimplification, it must be admitted that the disconnect itself is very real, driven by the lack of any real reckoning for the actual wrongs Bush committed, as well as GOP leaders’ obstinate disregard for the base’s concerns and priorities on unrelated issues such as immigration.

And then, of course, there’s the Donald Trump factor. For the most part he didn’t govern as one, but the 45th president’s rhetorical pandering to isolationists (from peddling the debunked meme that Bush lied about Iraq’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, to accusing his own generals of wanting “endless wars”) helped solidify their views’ association with so-called America-first populism, thereby turning what was once a fringe into a faction with enough sway that even Ron DeSantis’s first instinct was to tell them what they wanted to hear about Ukraine rather than reiterate the substantive understanding of the conflict he expertly articulated while in Congress.

Add it all up, and we have a political climate in which part of the Right is afflicted with a zeal to avoid conflict so overpowering that it will latch onto any crackpot, contortion, or conspiracy that affirms their desire—even when, as with Ukraine, nobody of consequence is actually advocating U.S. military action, or when there’s a case to be made that aiding others who are fighting now might prevent our having to personally fight in the future.

Joe Biden—the same president whose Russian “reset” emboldened Vladimir Putin to act, who only started talking tough after his natural impulse to downplay a potential “minor incursion” caused consternation among European leaders, who has urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to signal willingness to negotiate with the invaders, and who has prolonged the war by excessive fear of escalation, not zeal for it—is preposterously accused of trying to instigate World War III for convoluted reasons vaguely tied to a New World Order. At the same time, the murderous, oppressive KGB tyrant with dreams of restoring the Soviet empire is, even more grotesquely, recast as some sort of Christian bulwark against wokeness and globalism.

All of this is egged on by voices like former primetime sensation-turned-Twitter video gadfly Tucker Carlson and his recurring “expert” guests like Army Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), whose cartoonishly-sycophantic predictions of easy Russian victory and insistence that the West is “demoniz[ing]” Putin invite natural speculation as to what ulterior motives might really be driving him.

Drumbeats have consequences. In January 2023, Pew Research found that the share of Republicans who think America is doing “too much” for Ukraine grew to 40%, from just 9% in March 2022. That only rose slightly by mid-June (44%), but Gallup found that number had reached 50% by the end of the month, and the most recent polls, CNN/SRSS in August and CBS/YouGov in September, find 71% opposed to additional and 56% believing the administration should be “doing less.” Whatever else the GOP may be, it’s hard to say with a straight face that it’s Ronald Reagan’s party anymore.

Despite what isolationists think they know about the conflict, for less than two percent of 2022’s federal spending and no risk to American troops, aiding Ukraine has substantially depleted and embarrassed the military of a major enemy, one who has no intention of stopping with Ukraine, and if victorious could hold hostage the world’s already-strained semiconductor supply (Ukraine exports 90% of America’s neon gas, which is vital to making them), among other resources. And anyone who doesn’t think North Korea, Iran, and China (which, contrary to what you might have heard on the internet, was allied with Russia since the start of the invasion) will be taking notes on how much America lets Putin get away with is deluding himself.

Finally, while it is admittedly remote, there is a nonzero chance that forcing Putin to back down would so weaken him at home that his war-weary comrades feel emboldened to oust him themselves. But whether overthrown or simply contained, either outcome of successfully helping defend Ukraine would demonstrate that the chief lesson isolationists took away from Iraq—we either roll over for evil or send young Americans to kill and die indefinitely—was always a false choice.

Donald Trump may have a full plate between campaign business, legal drama, and golf these days, but he can always be counted on to make time for the things that matter most: grudges.

On Wednesday, Trump fired off a pair of Truth Social posts at a former supporter who turned on him once it became clear the guy we elected in 2016 was exactly who we thought he was. First:

Ann Coulter, the washed up political “pundit” who predicted my win in 2016, then went unbearably crazy with her demands and wanting to be a part of everything, to the consternation of all, has gone hostile and angry with every bit of her very “nervous” energy. Like many others, I just didn’t want her around – She wasn’t worth the trouble!

45 minutes later:

Page 2: Has been Ann Coulter is a Stone Cold Loser!!!

So presidential. Real finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-nation stuff.

That evening, Coulter responded:  

Trump begged me to come to Bedminster this week, I said only if I could record a substack with him, but the GIGANTIC PUSSY is too afraid of me, so instead he did this.

For good measure, Trump 2016 campaign alum AJ Delgado chimed in:

Just fyi – I was a Senior Advisor on the transition team in 2016. He’s lying. @annCoulter never demanded a role or to be part of anything

This is ironic on so many levels, starting with the fact that Trump might never have been nominated for the presidency if not for Ann Coulter. Her 2016 immigration book Adios America shaped the immigration message that was key to his victory, and Coulter returned the favor by destroying her own credibility and self-respect to support him. She absurdly claimed 2016’s best conservative option, Ted Cruz, wasn’t constitutionally eligible for the presidency, lied about Trump being trustworthy on immigration while gaslighting readers about Cruz’s sterling record on the subject, ignored a mountain of evidence for Trump’s pro-amnesty history, and went so far as to publish what may be the most unfortunately-titled book in the history of the English language: In Trump We Trust.

Even so, one thing separated Coulter from most of the conservative personalities who became MAGA shills: she was doing it for a set of policy goals, not for more fame, money, or access. Coulter had (and still has) plenty of issues, but unlike the talk radio set, for her the issue of immigration really was bigger than the man.

Which this particular man simply could not abide—a fatal character flaw that clearly hasn’t changed since departing the White House in disgrace.

Trump’s narcissism renders him incapable of appreciating not only that presidential politics are not and should not be all about him for his sake, but also that it was in his own best interests to accept tough criticism of his unsatisfactory performance. Trump’s failure to deliver on his immigration promises came from the same root causes as his rampant spending, his letting weaponized justice run rampant, and his submission to medical tyranny: having no real principles or independent understanding to guide him through issues or immunize him against bad advice from bad people. If Trump had been able to get over himself long enough to let disgruntled supporters like Coulter help him, it’s entirely possible he would be in his second term right now.

But he wasn’t, so he isn’t. And judging by the fact that even after all his defects have cost him he still takes anything less than unquestioning worship like a spoiled brat, he never will be.

One of the most transparently-insincere and dishonest talking points leveled by The Failure’s acolytes against Ron DeSantis and his campaign is the idea that people who would be open to supporting DeSantis are driven away by the alleged hostility of his online surrogates. As preposterous as it may seem, the likes of JD Vance, Dan Bongino, Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, Tim Pool, Cassandra MacDonald, and the legion of anonymous trolls to whom they pander would have you believe the thing most keeping them in the Trump camp is an aversion to mean tweets.

The shamelessness at work here is worthy of any Democrat, from the fact that “surrogates” usually means anyone online who happens to support DeSantis but isn’t affiliated with his campaign, to the “meanness” usually meaning as little as pointing out the awfulness of Trump and his supporters or speaking bluntly about the foolishness of giving him another shot, to the hypocrisy of whining about tough criticism while shilling for a candidate who tells bald-faced lies about his opponent while he and his campaign promote some of the vilest smear merchants in the business.

The biggest irony to this gaslighting, however, is that if anything the DeSantis campaign has suffered from treating Trump and MAGA too delicately.

He’s not afraid to mention Trump’s mountain of betrayals, screwups, and weaknesses, like listening to Fauci, not draining the swamp, signing the CARES Act, signing the First Step Act, and being unlikely to beat Joe Biden, but it never seems to go much beyond mentioning. The tone is rarely stronger than “Trump didn’t do X, or shouldn’t have done Y,” or “I would be better at Z,” and it’s not the focus of his messaging; Biden and Florida are. Hell, during the first primary debate, he barely even mentioned Trump.

You can tell people ‘till you’re blue in the face to wait for the ground game to deliver a surprise in Iowa that turns everything around, but all the information we have now, including the trendlines in Iowa, indicates that it’s not working.

As incomparably bold a governor as DeSantis has been, this approach smacks of a campaign mentality that is painfully conventional, beholden to the standard GOP mindset that voters want a “positive vision” instead of “divisiveness” and “negativity,” with perhaps an assumption that Trump’s defects would be more obvious to primary voters, or at least more responsibly covered by conservative media—and fear of being too rough on Trump lest they alienate his supporters. His campaign’s most potent attacks are largely relegated to his social media operation, which simply doesn’t reach the people he most needs to reach: the ones who aren’t proactively following the campaigns and their output.

This approach misdiagnoses basically everything important about the electorate and the information environment shaping their thinking. As we’ve been over recently, most GOP primary voters, including those currently picking Trump in polls, are not emotionally attached or intractably devoted to him; they’re open to being convinced of a better option. But they’re not deciding who’s better by actively comparing how DeSantis talks about Biden to how Trump does. Hell, judging by how many Republicans ignorantly assume Trump is the most electable option, they aren’t even aware it’s a question. And they certainly aren’t being informed by mainstream conservative media of the reasons he isn’t, let alone the reasons he’d still be an inferior president even if he was.

Case in point: at one point during an interview this week with Dave Rubin, DeSantis suggests that Trump’s most ridiculous smears, like that Andrew Cuomo handled Covid-19 better than he did, are so transparently ridiculous that they actually help him, not Trump. But a few moments later, DeSantis himself hits on the reason such an effect hasn’t weakened Trump more: because such ravings are so often confined to Truth Social. Team DeSantis needs to understand that the big talk radio names and online outlets in a similar vein aren’t telling their audiences about Trump’s most self-discrediting words or actions.

More fundamentally, they need to understand that Biden’s badness isn’t at issue within a Republican primary, and that ability to summarize that badness isn’t what will make an impression on the people who need to be woken up. The guy standing in the way of the nomination to take on Biden needs to be the focus. Force a serious, grown-up conversation about why he can’t be the nominee—both because of what a disastrous president he was and because he’s nearly certain to lose an election with so much at stake.

Take two of Reagan’s gravest speeches (Time for Choosing and Encroaching Control) as models for leveling with people about the gravity of what’s in store for us if we make the wrong choice. Don’t be afraid to be blunt, to speak the uncomfortable, even if people don’t want to hear it. Because you know what? The people who can’t handle the truth about Trump are never voting for you anyway, and if there really are enough of them to decide the primary, then you aren’t getting nominated either way—and the Right is too far gone for any of this to matter.

This is the most important Republican primary of our lives. It will decide whether conservatives are going to claw back enough sanity and responsibility to make this movement worth a damn to the country’s future, or if the Right is well and truly content to die as a combination circus freakshow, marketing scam, and personality cult. Acolytes for the latter arrangement may be obsessed with projecting their sins onto those standing in their way, but unless Team DeSantis recognizes the need to drag that question into the center of the stage, it shouldn’t be surprised Republican voters ultimately choose to keep entertaining themselves at the price of the country.