The New Yorker: Since the election, though, few, if any, blog posts or articles have appeared in the main conservative outlets straightforwardly arguing, conceding, or lamenting that the election of this unfit demagogue is a bad thing. This man they’d execrated and denounced had shocked the world—not just by being his shocking self but by winning; nobody expected him to win!—and yet from them this evoked no reaction. No articles about the Caesarist threat. No articles about a Trump-defiled common culture. No articles about how our ship of state will soon have at its helm the notorious Captain Id. With everyone else flung into various states of surprise and alarm, the conservative magazines went meta. They reacted to other people’s reactions, mainly those of “the left.” If you read National Review in the days after the election, you’d have thought that the big news of the week wasn’t the world-jolting victory of a candidate whom the magazine had itself denounced as “a menace,” a man so foul that it would not endorse him against Hillary freakin’ Clinton, but that liberals were upset enough about this outcome to do some post-election protesting.
But we know they have their misgivings, or did. We know the folks at The Weekly Standard think Trump’s current business entanglements pose troubling conflicts, because in April the magazine ran an article arguing, convincingly, that such conflicts—contrary to Trump’s recent claims—would put his Presidency in legal as well as ethical and political jeopardy. Since the election, though, with these conflicts becoming a bigger and sleazier story every week, The Weekly Standard (like Commentary and National Review) has had nothing to say on the topic. And we know that the folks at Commentary don’t like General Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice for national-security adviser, because, in a post-election podcast (18:40), Noah Rothman offhandedly said, “Oh, he’s awful,” and the other podcasters, Podhoretz and Abe Greenwald, agreed. But what you won’t find on the Web site of The Weekly Standard or National Review is an article or blog post saying “Michael Flynn is awful.” (Rothman, writing for Commentary, called his selection “deeply unsettling.”)
National Review did run a piece by Tom Rogan admitting that Flynn is the “wrong pick” for national-security adviser, but its gentle, equivocal, occasionally laudatory language cut weirdly against the evidence it contained—which added up to a portrait of, well, someone awful. It read like a damning, incontrovertible takedown of Flynn given a vigorous line edit by Flynn’s best friend. Rogan outlines a record of lying and résumé-padding as well as terrible management and scary judgment, and then summarizes it as “a complex picture” of someone who “evidently served the nation with honor.” The title of the article, by the way, is “Why Mike Flynn is the Wrong Pick for National-Security Adviser.” Mike. Buddy.
