academics, and elite news organizations defended the rise of the Soviet Union as it tightened its iron grip. Their boosterism lasted until beyond the end of the Cold War.1
American liberals, the conservative influencer wrote, acted as “useful idiots” for a murderous ideology responsible for the death of tens of millions of people around the world and perpetuated the misery of hundreds of millions more.
The author of the book, entitled Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, is Mona Charen. Ironically, Charen, as a proud NeverTrumper, would give succor to the Trump-hating Left during his first term in office.
While her coddling of the Left obviously didn’t result in the execution and starvation of innocents, Charen and her fellow NeverTrumpers nonetheless reinforced the Left’s ranks during one of its most violent periods in modern American history and acted as the Trump era’s version of useful idiots for American liberals.
In even more idiotic fashion, NeverTrump did a 180-degree pivot from its very principled conservative perch. This is where NeverTrump’s useful idiots fare worse than Stalin’s: At least the Soviet Union’s American shills didn’t pretend to be something they never were.
As it became clear that Donald Trump intended to govern as a conservative, NeverTrump couldn’t in good faith, or even bad faith, continue their “principled” conservative crusade against the president. How could they object to tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judicial picks, climate policy rollback, updated trade agreements, and the like from a “conservative” standpoint?
As NeverTrumpers settled into left-wing news and opinion outlets, pleasing their anti-Trump pals at the Washington Post and CNN at any cost has been their top priority. This requires a reversal of their previous views on any number of policies and political strategies.
“One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with,” confessed MSNBC host Joy Reid in September 2017. “I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.”2
Shocked, you say?
In 2007, reporter David Corn, then at the Nation, vilified Kristol’s espousal of the Iraq War and declared (correctly) that Kristol “ought to have his pundit’s license yanked.”3 In 2013, Corn asked why people like Kristol hadn’t paid a price for promoting the war under false pretenses.4
Just a few years later, united in their common contempt for Donald Trump and everything he represents, Corn and Kristol would share the set as MSNBC pundits. Kristol, the man who excoriated Barack Obama for years, admitted in early 2017 that he would rather endure another four years of President Obama than one term of President Trump.5
Trump made strange people into bedfellows.
NeverTrump easily fooled its new followers on the Left to believe that, yes, they represented a large swath of the Republican Party who deep down hated Trump and only voted for him because Clinton was more objectionable. NeverTrumpers assured their distraught soul sisters on the Left that it was only a matter of time before the GOP would see things their way and dump Trump. It was chicken soup for the Trump-loathing soul.
“We have seen a number of people who have been friends and colleagues of ours go pretty strongly in the other direction [away from fundamental conservatism], just embrace big government liberalism because they don’t like Trump.” That observation, ironically, came from NeverTrumper Stephen Hayes in a podcast interview with Charlie Sykes.6
The leftward lurch of NeverTrump happened fast—and nowhere did it happen quicker than on the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, occupied by Jennifer Rubin.
RUBIN’S RANTINGS
Her anti-Trump tirades began in 2015.
Disguised as a conservative, Rubin offered Clinton pre-election advice on how to attract Republican voters; that counsel came one year after Rubin listed 20 reasons why Clinton’s campaign was on the ropes and possibly doomed to fail.7
She fantasized about what would happen to Trump after Clinton defeated him. “That’s the best part of this election—it will end and so will Trump’s domination of the news,” Rubin predicted a few weeks before Election Day.8 Her post-election ridicule extended to Trump’s cabinet picks—she referred to his early nominees as “ignoramuses, billionaires and a few generals”—and his base of support teeming with nativists, white nationalists, and bigots.9
One would assume that considering Rubin’s support for Hillary Clinton, her contempt for Trump and his conservative backers, and her broken political meter in general, the Post would have offered that coveted spot to a legitimate conservative, perhaps even a fair-minded columnist without an axe to grind against the Republican president. (Trump tweeted in December 2015 that Rubin was one of the Post’s “low IQ people” and “a real dummy.”)10
And since the Post made it clear that it would ratchet up its nonstop negative coverage of Trump during his presidency—the paper introduced its new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” in February 2017—giving yet another Trump hater prime real estate on the Post’s opinion page to rant about everything and everyone related to Trump seemed repetitive.
Except Rubin did not want to jeopardize her sweet spot at the Post yet again. In 2013, the paper’s former ombudsman advised Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder who had purchased the news organization, to fire Rubin. Disclosing that Rubin was the “#1 source of complaint mail” from Post readers, Patrick Pexton blasted Rubin’s poor writing skills, unoriginal analysis, and overall unprofessionalism. “Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable,” Pexton wrote. “Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.”11
Rubin has employed that same playbook against Trump since late 2015. Stroking Trump foes from the Right would protect her sinecure; she eagerly enlisted in #TheResistance.
Comparing Rubin’s views before Trump’s election and after his inauguration causes a major case of whiplash. A pitfall of being a political pundit is that there exists an electronic record of your past opinions available for the world to see. As I pointed out in a December 2017 article, Rubin flipped and flopped on a number of issues solely based on their favorability to Trump and his knuckle-dragging base.12
An advocate of tax cuts way back in 2013, Rubin criticized Obama’s stagnant economy and insisted that the country would “not get robust economic growth and significant job creation with the world’s highest corporate tax rate.”13 Four years later, channeling Bernie Sanders rather than Milton Freidman, Rubin called Trump’s tax cut proposal a “moral and economic monstrosity” aimed at enriching “the wealthy and big corporations” at the expense of the most vulnerable.14
Rubin sympathized with out-of-work coal workers as late as 2014. Correctly concluding that the Democratic Party had been taken hostage by the climate change cabal, Rubin warned that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to significantly reduce carbon emissions, jeopardized the party’s Senate majority in that year’s election. “Unfortunately for mainstream Democrats, the president and their party are
