Done with never Trump

World view - It's been more than nine years since I first denounced Donald Trump as a "loud-mouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians." I've called myself a Never Trump conservative ever since, even when I agreed with his policies from time to time. I also opposed him throughout his run this year.

- Bret Stephens The New York Times

Could his second term be as bad as his most fervent critics fear? Yes. Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement — and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse? Yes, please.

Who, and what, is Trump? He's a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic — and angry.

Some of that anger is intensely bigoted and some of it misplaced. That side of the anger gets most of the media's attention. But some of it, too, is correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn't, whether the subject is COVID restrictions, immigration policy or how to get our allies to pay more for their defense.

It's Trump's sulfurous contempt for that elite — his refusal to be shaped by their norms or shamed by their scorn and his willingness to call out their hypocrisy — that makes him a hero to his followers. Cases in point: How come so many who denounce Trump as a sexual predator were, 20 years earlier, Bill Clinton's steadfast defenders? Why were the same people who demanded investigations into every corner of the Trump family's business dealings so incurious about the Biden family's dealings, like the curiously high prices for Hunter's paintings?