{"id":110225,"date":"2016-12-07T12:55:34","date_gmt":"2016-12-07T20:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110225"},"modified":"2016-12-07T12:56:37","modified_gmt":"2016-12-07T20:56:37","slug":"why-have-conservative-pundits-fallen-in-behind-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=110225","title":{"rendered":"Why Have Conservative Pundits Fallen In Behind Trump?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker<\/a>: 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\u2019d execrated and denounced had shocked the world\u2014not just by being his shocking self but by winning; nobody expected him to win!\u2014and 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\u2019s reactions, mainly those of \u201cthe left.\u201d If you read National Review in the days after the election, you\u2019d have thought that the big news of the week wasn\u2019t the world-jolting victory of a candidate whom the magazine had itself denounced as \u201ca menace,\u201d a man so foul that it would not endorse him against Hillary freakin\u2019 Clinton, but that liberals were upset enough about this outcome to do some post-election protesting.<\/p>\n

But we know they have their misgivings, or did. We know the folks at The Weekly Standard think Trump\u2019s current business entanglements pose troubling conflicts, because in April the magazine ran an article arguing, convincingly, that such conflicts\u2014contrary to Trump\u2019s recent claims\u2014would 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\u2019t like General Michael Flynn, Trump\u2019s choice for national-security adviser, because, in a post-election podcast (18:40), Noah Rothman offhandedly said, \u201cOh, he\u2019s awful,\u201d and the other podcasters, Podhoretz and Abe Greenwald, agreed. But what you won\u2019t find on the Web site of The Weekly Standard or National Review is an article or blog post saying \u201cMichael Flynn is awful.\u201d (Rothman, writing for Commentary, called his selection \u201cdeeply unsettling.\u201d)<\/p>\n

National Review did run a piece by Tom Rogan admitting that Flynn is the \u201cwrong pick\u201d for national-security adviser, but its gentle, equivocal, occasionally laudatory language cut weirdly against the evidence it contained\u2014which 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\u2019s best friend. Rogan outlines a record of lying and r\u00e9sum\u00e9-padding as well as terrible management and scary judgment, and then summarizes it as \u201ca complex picture\u201d of someone who \u201cevidently served the nation with honor.\u201d The title of the article, by the way, is \u201cWhy Mike Flynn is the Wrong Pick for National-Security Adviser.\u201d Mike. Buddy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110225"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110227,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110225\/revisions\/110227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}