Former NeverTrumper Realizes Trump Far Better Than Expected

As I have stated multiple times in the past, what is perhaps my biggest gripe with NeverTrumpers, aside from the fact that they are NeverTrumpers, is the fact that, for years leading up to Donald Trump’s nomination and eventual election, the people that would become NeverTrumpers were supposedly staunch conservatives. They always spoke against the damage Obama was causing to the country, noted that Leftism is generally a horrible thing and that socialism would be the death of our nation.
 
For years, they had been clamoring for a Republican who could beat just about any Democrat and run the country very much in a conservative manner, opting for conservative policies that would bolster the economy, pick the right battles internationally while making sure we both defend ourselves and our allies without going into needless wars, speak of his or her love and reverence for the Lord and the Constitution and not ever cave to the actually insane Leftist mob no matter what.
 
For years, these people were hoping for the second coming of Reagan, so to speak, and yet, when we basically got that in Donald Trump, they abhorred it and even worse, began siding with THE LEFT.
 
And I could relatively understand their doubts before Trump was POTUS. Sure, he would say the right things about conservatism and the country, but he was not proven just quite yet. I still argued back then, as I do now, that it was far better to take a chance on someone we don’t know if they will be conservative than to allow for someone we know will be a SOCIALIST in Hillary Clinton to run the country. We didn’t know what kind of president Trump would have been back then, but just about many knew roughly what kind of president Hillary would have been, which is why I was angry with the notion of being a NeverTrumper. Those people, I felt, were betraying not only the conservative movement but the country itself.
 
But still, I could understand the doubt. What I refused to try and understand, however, because there really was no understanding it, was the ferocity and viciousness these same people had regarding Trump even AFTER he has proven he is the real deal. Again, for years, these people were clamoring for another Ronald Reagan – a conservative who won’t bend the knee – and when one showed up, they rejected him in favor of either Hillary Clinton (practically a cardinal sin, in my opinion) or a candidate who never had any chance of becoming POTUS like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
 
I could understand the doubts before Trump was POTUS, but I simply could not understand the adamant denial of reality – the reality that Donald Trump is a conservative. Maybe he’s not the typical conservative, and definitely not the typical Republican (which is only a good thing), but he is a conservative nonetheless and his policies show that to be true. And yet, these NeverTrumpers have, for the past four years, insisted that he is a fascist and have begun to clamor instead for the approval of the fake news media which insulted, mocked and hated them just a few years before.
 
They abandoned their conservative principles in favor of appeasing the Left, showing themselves to have never truly been conservatives at all. Conservatives don’t bow to the mob; we don’t bend the knee; we don’t clamor for the approval of the Left. We either stand on our principles or we don’t stand at all, and these NeverTrumpers chose not to stand at all, allowing themselves to fall for the Leftist cult of insanity.
 
However, over some time, whether short or long, some NeverTrumpers have come around to actually being “MaybeTrumpers”, if you will. Meaning that, while they still have issues with Trump’s style (they call it his "character", which is different, but they use that word anyway to make him look worse than he is because he does not have major character flaws), they recognize that they have to take him for what he is if we are to actually be conservative and keep the Left from being in power at all. Trump has proven to be a conservative, and even if people have issues with his style and mannerisms, that shouldn’t stand in the way of at the very least voting for him, particularly knowing the extremely dangerous alternative of communism.
 
So when I read Daniel Pipes’ op-ed on Newsweek, I was rather happy to see this development. In his piece, “A Reluctant but Unhesitating Vote for Donald Trump”, Pipes explains that, ever since Trump ran for office on the Republican ticket, he has had issues with his style and mannerisms.
 
Pipes admits that he “watched in dismay as I helped the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, seeing Republican primary voters select Donald Trump out of a field of 16 viable candidates and make him president-elect. I signed an open letter committing to ‘working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted’ to the presidency and wrote many articles lambasting Trump. I left the Republican Party on his nomination and voted for Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson in the general election. After the election, I hoped for Trump’s impeachment and President Mike Pence.”
 
Suffice to say that he was staunchly a NeverTrumper at the time. He further explains that his reasons for it are the same as most NeverTrumpers’ back in 2016: Trump’s style and policies. Pipes had issues with what he called “unethical business practices” in Trump University (which is just a claim as Trump never had to pay any sort of punishment for such "unethical business practices", other than a settlement under questionable circumstances led by a Left-wing activist Judge after he became President), with his “egotism”, the legal troubles he has had in the past (namely the amount of them), his supposed bigotry and his vulgarity. When it came to policies, Pipes explains, he believed he was even worse, believing Trump to be impulsive and a potential neo-fascist. Trump’s 2004 statement saying he probably identifies “more as Democrat” also worried him, believing that to mean that Trump would basically be going back and forth between Republican and Democrat policies.
 
All things that I am not surprised a NeverTrumper of the time would be worried about. Again, for myself, I scarcely cared about his style because I was more interested in simply beating the Left no matter what.
 
But that’s just his style. What about his policies? The ones that Pipes believed to be either potentially neo-fascist or somewhere in between Democrat and Republican? Well, Pipes has come to the same realization any logical person ought to have after the last four years: Trump is a very good conservative president.
 
“[T]o my unending surprise, [Trump] has governed as a resolute conservative. His policies in the areas of education, taxes, deregulation and the environment have been bolder than Ronald Reagan’s. His judicial appointments are the best of the past century… His unprecedented assault on the administrative state proceeds apace, ignoring predictable howls from the Washington establishment. Even his foreign policy has been conservative: demanding that allies contribute their fair share, confronting China and Iran and singularly supporting Israel. Ironically, as David Harsanyi notes, a potential character flaw actually works to out advantage: ‘Trump’s obstinacy seems to have made him less susceptible to the pressures that traditionally induce GOP presidents to capitulate.’”
 
In other words, Trump’s stubbornness keeps him from caving to the insufferable Leftist mob that tries to rule by fear and pressure. Where other Republican presidents would bend the knee (as RINOs tend to do), Trump doubles, triples and quadruples-down, never apologizing to people who deserve no such grace.
 
While there are things that Pipes disagrees with Trump on policy-wise, such as Trump’s “hostility toward allies” (which they hardly can be considered allies when they make under-the-table deals with the Chinese and the Russians) and his “dangerous meetings with Kim Jong-un” (which I don’t consider to be dangerous really, since anyone sane still knows that North Korea is no friend to the U.S. and no conservative has ever even come close to forgiving the acts against God that he commits on a daily basis, but Trump is trying to weaken the power the Chinese have), he does ultimately “agree with 80 percent of Trump’s actions” which is “a higher percentage than any of his predecessors, going back to Lyndon Johnson.”
 
In sum, while he still finds Trump’s style to be repulsive (again, don’t really care what people think about his style and mannerisms) and while he still finds things to disagree with Trump on policy-wise, Pipes has come to understand that Trump has been solidly conservative for the most part in his presidency and that the alternative, that being Joe Biden, is the same dangerous socialist nonsense the Left has been screaming about for the past few years. Allowing Joe Biden to win would present a clear danger to this country and Trump, despite his perceived style short-comings, is a FAR better alternative to anything the Left props up as their nominee.
 
Pipes concludes that he “will do my small part to help Trump get re-elected by writing, giving and voting.” He also says that he will vote for Trump as “the politician who represents my conservative views” and even urges other reluctant conservatives to do the same.
 
The question is just how many are there? Many former NeverTrumpers had the same issues that Pipes had and came around to supporting, or at least tolerating, Trump because of his conservative policies, which are the same ones they had been wanting a president to enact for years and years before. The vast majority of NeverTrumpers today are faux-conservatives who have decided to abandon the movement in favor of appeasing the Left (not to mention they side with people who actually tried to rig an election and stage a silent coup against the duly-elected president – people who present a clear and present danger to liberty and justice itself).
 
That much was particularly evident when NeverTrumper and *chuckles* 2020 GOP Primary opponent to Donald Trump (I really can’t keep a straight face), Joe Walsh said that he’d “rather have a socialist in the White House than a dictator.” In other words, he supports socialism now, which goes to show he never was truly a conservative, since Trump is FAR from a dictator and SOCIALISM NATURALLY LEADS TO A DICTATORSHIP AS EVIDENCED BY LITERALLY THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVEN TO TODAY.
 
I do hope that people who would have once considered themselves to be NeverTrumpers realize the existential threat that the Left poses and that the idea of supporting any one of them should repel them to the core. I hope they come to reconsider their position of not supporting Trump, or at least not voting for the guy, simply due to the peril that socialism brings to this country; the type that the Left is entirely enamored by.
 
True conservatives, at this point, recognize the good things Trump has done policy-wise, even if they can hardly stand the guy on a personal basis. I don’t care if they wouldn’t want to have a beer with the guy, all that matters in the end is who they end up voting for.
 
To paraphrase a certain racist Democrat, if you are on the fence about whether you are for Trump or Biden, then you ain’t conservative.
 
Proverbs 18:15
“An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”