I am on record many times as finding Donald Trump contemptible, but the reason I have never identified with the Never Trumpers is because I believe Trump’s greatest accomplishment was destroying the Republican Party establishment. Today’s Ross Douthat column, a review of the new book by former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens, is a vindication of Trump’s worthiness for having accomplished that good deed. Douthat points out that in Stevens’s account, the GOP was led by good and decent people, but then the real heart of the Republican Party — the bigots — emerged to smite them. Douthat characterizes Stevens’s argument like this:

Sure, Stevens and his Lincoln Project friends might have notionally been in charge of G.O.P. campaigns in the pre-Trump years, but you can’t really blame any of their strategic choices for bringing the party to this pass, because a race-baiting reality-TV huckster was what the party’s voters had always really wanted.

But Douthat is not having this self-exoneration by the consultant. Douthat goes on:

There is another way of reading this history, though, that’s suggested by a passage where Stevens is emphasizing the fundamental emptiness of G.O.P. rhetoric on deficits and taxes. “But still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass,” he writes, “as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.” And then, pushing the analogy further: “Being against ‘out-of-control federal spending,’ a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.”

Except that in point of fact, many communicants at a Catholic Mass do believe that they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. And this is particularly true among the conservative Catholics whose votes were essential to the Republican politicians Stuart Stevens tried to get elected president.

For Stevens to either not realize this or sweep away a pretty important religious conviction with a nobody actually believes that wave makes me somewhat doubtful of his larger claim to expert knowledge about all the people who voted for Bush, for Romney or for Trump.

It suggests, instead, that at some level Stevens and his fellow Republican strategists regarded their own voters in exactly the way certain populist conservatives always claimed the Republican establishment regarded its supporters — as useful foot soldiers, provincials to be mobilized with culture-war appeals, religious weirdos who required certain rhetorical nods so that the grown-ups could get on with the more important work of governing.

Read the whole thing. 

Douthat goes on to say that reading Stevens’s book makes it clear that in the eyes of the GOP elites Trump knocked over, the GOP elites did not fail, they were failed. This, says Douthat, reveals that the old school Republican elites have no comprehension of how their failures created Trump. If you would like a refresher on that, read Tucker Carlson’s January 2016 Politico essay, written at the start of the GOP primary season. Carlson said that Trump is shocking, and vulgar — and right. It’s a piece about the failures of the Republican elites, and how Trump has these guys nailed.

The other day on Twitter, there was a thread going around in which people were asked, “What radicalized you?” It wasn’t a left or right question — just a query about which events made you wake up and realize that things were not what you thought they were.

I answered something like: “The Iraq War, the Catholic abuse scandal, the fact that nobody was held to account for the 2008 financial crash — and the fact that none of these elites are ever held responsible for anything.” I quit being a Republican, formally, in 2008, over this, even though I generally vote GOP in national elections. Everything that happened subsequent to 2008 confirmed my disgust with the Republican Party. It wasn’t that they failed — that was bad, but everybody fails at some point — but that they learned absolutely nothing from the failure.

I remember where I was — in a hotel room in rural Virginia — on the night Donald Trump, in the 2016 South Carolina presidential debate, said that the Iraq War was a mistake. People in the audience booed, and Jeb Bush pulled a “how dare you insult my brother!”face. But Trump was right. To my knowledge, that was the first time I had ever heard a senior Republican politician admit that the war had been wrong — this, 13 years after it had been launched! Whatever else Trump does, or has done, I will always be grateful to him for having said those words.

Stuart Stevens still doesn’t get it. All of Trump’s sins and failures do not redeem Stuart Stevens’s bad judgment. I’m with Douthat: until and unless those elites show some sign of understanding what they did wrong, and repenting of it, “it’s hard to imagine any case for ever giving them political responsibility again.”