On August 29, The American Spectator published an article by Melissa Mackenzie titled “The Magical Thinking of NeverTrump,” asking why “they” supposedly “believe the problems he has faced will miraculously disappear for their preferred candidate.” It’s been promoted by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Joy Pullmann, Breitbart’s John Nolte, and American Majority’s Ned Ryun, among others. Which goes to show one thing: the state of conservative argument isn’t what it used to be.

The article is primarily a response to a piece published the day before by Spectator associate editor Luther Ray Abel, a writer with whom I’m unfamiliar but whose title makes me slightly jealous I didn’t think of it: “Trump Is Political Fentanyl.”

His piece, responding to previous commentary by Mackenzie and another Spectator writer, unfortunately begins with promotion of some undeserving candidates (the most egregious being Tim Scott). But while every one of them but Ron DeSantis is a distraction, the underlying point is sound: any one of them is more electable than Trump, regardless of their merits as potential presidents. Abel also undermines himself by going out on the January 6 impeachment limb (abuse of the impeachment process is intolerable no matter how tempting the immediate result). But the gist is dead-on:

Trump is fentanyl: He promises to take away all the evil things while insisting that there can be no success without him. This is a lie, and it has always been a lie. Like mustard gas that is found to kill cancer cells, his contributions to exposing D.C. corruption are acknowledged but don’t merit absolution. Those who champion Trump are addicts to ego who have given up on America’s ordered strength, its economic dynamism, and the possibility of adult leadership.

Mackenzie begins her response by asking:

Why does the Never-Trump crowd, the earnest viewers of the Republican primary debate, believe that the tactics used against Donald Trump won’t be used against their preferred candidate?

The first tell that we’re not dealing with good-faith analysis here is the frequent references to “the Never-Trump crowd.” The term Never-Trump was never just a label for anyone who dislikes him, even stridently so; it refers specifically to those who oppose him in general elections even at the cost of Democrat presidents. Yet Mackenzie now uses it as a catchall for conservatives who want a different primary candidate.

Or how does Ron DeSantis overcome the structural fraud problems in every state with a Soros secretary of state?

Simple: by employing ballot harvesting himself in states where the law allows Democrats to do it (which DeSantis has already said, repeatedly), by not actively repulsing enough voters to put the real vote within stealing distance (or making stealing unnecessary), and by being able to judge and retain competent representation for whatever fraud arises (due to being a lawyer himself, not being a moron, and not being a client from hell).

To answer the last question first: Because to acknowledge that the Democrat machine is utterly efficient and capable of manufacturing just enough votes to beat any Republican (including Donald Trump) is to acknowledge that Donald Trump and his supporters have legitimate concerns. For Never-Trump voters to face that would mean extending grace and giving credence to disturbing systemic problems.

Pretending everyone who opposes renominating Trump is Never-Trump enables Mackenzie to smear movement conservatives with establishment sins that we’ve condemned all along. Of course vote fraud is a major problem. That’s why we’re supporting a candidate who worked to stop it in his state, who recognizes the problems with the 2020 election as well as Trump’s contribution to those problems, and who didn’t spend an entire presidential term doing nothing useful about it and a post-presidency making everything worse.

Let’s start with Ron DeSantis. It’s helpful to examine the media’s treatment of him. He is “worse than Trump.” He is, according to the media, to the right of Donald Trump and more effective. DeSantis is a demon and deserves demonization. It’s already happened. How does DeSantis, rhetorically tarred and feathered, win over women across the country, especially in all the swingy of swing states, with his record on abortion? (A stance that this writer whole-heartedly supports, by the way.) Does Ron DeSantis win Arizona? Georgia? How?

First, “according to the media” DeSantis is “to the right of Donald Trump and more effective”? Not according to Melissa’s own two eyes? Any suggestion that it’s anything other than obviously true, or that it’s not enough to make him the clearly preferable option, is a massive red flag.   

Another red flag: how often defending Trump against “Republican elites” seems to entail echoing those elites’ very same concern-trolling about the alleged political toxicity of being strongly pro-life, as if it’s something that hasn’t been addressed thousands of times.

Republicans have always been branded as scary extremists no matter what exceptions they might support, and it’s never been the political Kryptonite it’s presented as. Abortion was at most a marginal boon to Democrats in 2022, but nothing massive or insurmountable; most incumbents kept their seats regardless of their stance, and no governor’s mansion or legislature to have banned abortion flipped. If the GOP had fixed any number of unrelated problems and screw-ups, the midterms would have been far more successful without handling abortion any differently.

Hell, Trump won in 2016 despite Democrats having him on video saying women should get “some form of punishment” for abortion, a soundbite they’d sell their grandmothers to have on any Republican in any election. It didn’t help, certainly, and Trump’s mountain of other defects helped make 2016 close and 2020 a loss, but it tells us the issue on its own should not terrify candidates who do not have mountains of other defects.

Inasmuch as DeSantis is not burdened by such a mountain, he navigates the issue in a general pretty much by continuing to do what he’s doing: focus on the electorate’s primary concerns and his ability to handle them, and when the subject comes up focus on Democrats’ extremism while compassionately highlighting the humanity of abortion’s victims. (Indeed, DeSantis’s only problem in that area right now is being too cautious toward abortion squishes.)

Even more absurd is the fretting about how DeSantis could possibly win Arizona, Georgia, or other swing states when he polls better than Trump among swing voters and independent voters, and in every swing state that Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020.

How does any Republican candidate beat the universal mail-in ballot debacle in Oregon, Nevada, and Colorado? The not-Trump candidates on the stage at the Republican debate will have to address these issues too. This is not a problem for Trump alone. Since the Republican National Committee is worthless, how will each candidate address this?

See above for the answer to how DeSantis addresses it (which strikes me as the sort of information that professional writers are supposed to look up before publishing articles treating the question like a mystery). And note well that “how will others do X?” is in no way a substitute for explaining how Trump will. Yet Mackenzie projects her own side’s “quiet about actual means and methods of winning” and “mystical faith that it will all just work out” onto those taking the election seriously.

Trump, by the way, has also claimed his campaign will become “masters of ballot harvesting”; too bad that claim is preposterious on its face given his history of general incompetence and unkept promises, the unlikelihood he’ll have the money for such an operation, and the fact that he already seems to have forgotten the promise, let alone any need for it.

Abel gives short shrift to these lawsuits, breezily acknowledging that they’re troublesome but somehow blaming the victim for the inconvenience. The injustices against Trump, he implies, are Trump’s alone. No other Republican will face such malice. This, of course, is the opinion of one who has amnesia of the Bush years when Bush and Cheney were threatened with lawsuits for their nerve to enact policies that the Left and the media disagreed with. With Trump, the threats from the left came to fruition.

Here is one of the MAGA Grift Industry’s central lies: the idea that non-Trumpy Republicans think Democrats would treat any other Republican with kid gloves.

Virtually nobody thinks that; Trump apologists never produce examples of anyone saying it. It’s a strawman invented for fanboys to repeat ad nauseam in lieu of making the effort to formulate or grapple with actual arguments. What people do say is that Democrats have a much easier time hanging people who hand them rope first.

There’s a reason “Don’t Say Gay,” “DeathSantis,” etc. were totally ineffective in Florida. There’s a reason that leftists who hated George W. Bush every bit as much as they hate Trump (notably with some of the same talking points MAGA themselves now say about Bush and “neocons”) never got impeachment off the ground. And there’s a reason Democrats are now getting the opportunity to do to Trump what they dreamed of doing to Bush.

Yes, the charges against Trump are a politically-motivated collection of things that either aren’t crimes at all or are at worst technical violations that pale in comparison to what Democrats routinely get away with. Yes, they are disgraceful abuses of power that need to be opposed and punished. No, that doesn’t mean we play dumb about who gave them the opening.

Try as one might, there is simply no escaping the reality that most Republicans don’t pay porn stars to keep quiet about alleged affairs, tell state officials that they “just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” after elections, gather angry and naïve supporters in one place and fill them with false hope of reversing an election at the last minute, or show off “highly confidential” documents they admit they didn’t declassify just to vent about former subordinates. Just because these acts are not everything prosecutors say they are doesn’t mean they aren’t monumentally reckless and self-destructive for their own sake, or that prosecutors could have launched these cases without them.

As for the inevitable rejoinder that the Left would have simply fabricated some other pretext for prosecuting Trump had Trump not “embraced his inner retard after losing” (as Taki’s David Cole put it in a fantastic article last month), that’s speculation at best. Reality tells us that as evil as the Left is, their capacity to act out their worst desires on Republican candidates still requires those candidates to give them something to work with. Without the incomparably fertile ground of Trump’s behavior, nothing they tried would be nearly as successful—see, for instance, how the Russia Hoax investigation and quid-pro-quo impeachment ultimately turned out.

The Never-Trump crowd […are] blind to the fact that once the Democrats succeed in their mission to destroy Trump, that template will be used for any Republican. Those Republicans do not have the vast resources and internal fortitude of Trump. They’ll simply be destroyed and discarded.

The gaslighting here is nothing short of obscene. As noted above, Trump’s “vast resources” are being drained at an alarming rate, and it’s still an open question how much he’s willing to dig into his own pockets to win (note well that he decided to pay for his legal fees by depleting money that was donated to win an election before touching his personal wealth). And “internal fortitude”? Really? There’s no fortitude to spending a presidency constantly being led around by the nose, no courageous discipline exhibited by self-pitying rants, no inner strength behind obsessively clinging to hope of being president again, not because it’s good for the country but because you want the glory and the validation, consequences of near-certain Democrat victory be damned.

At the heart of the arguments about Trump is a visceral contempt for Trump voters […] The premise is that American voters are too stupid to vote in their own interests.

I recognize that playing to the masses’ egos is central to populism, but back in the world of conservatism we’re supposed to keep a more realistic understanding of human nature in mind. I’m sorry, but voting for Trump in a primary (as opposed to a general election) objectively is stupid and contrary to voters’ interests, because it will result in the Democrat becoming president, and any professional conservative unwilling to level with their readers about that does not have their best interests at heart—particularly when much of that vote comes not from deep emotional connection to Trump, but from their primary sources of political news withholding information that would lead them to think twice.

Not only have the Democrats changed the rules, but they’ve created a playing field where only they win, and the Republicans, should the Trump haters get their way, end up a regional party winning nothing and governing their own pointless squabbling.

That’s what Democrats are aiming for, all right, but to make it happen they need the Trump lovers to get their way in the primary, to deliver to them a general-election opponent tailor-made to lose. If that happens, here’s hoping the DNC remembers to drop Melissa a thank-you card for getting her readers to play right into their hands.