Sohrab Amari, in March 2026, in a piece titled “Trump Was Never the One”:
Those of us reckoning with the scale of these failures must return to the character problem that first gave rise to the Never Trump movement. Among those of us who made our peace with Trump, it was too easy to praise his “animal instincts” — a phrase I often used in this context — by way of overlooking his lack of personal virtue. Sound instincts are, of course, part of leadership. But without the ballast of character and prudence, they can veer in any direction or fall under the sway of any whispered counsel, no matter how foolish.
Trump lacked that ballast. He was never the one.
That is Amari’s response to his own piece in 2022 titled “Trump’s Still the One.”
Just for some added context, here’s Amari in 2019, in a First Things piece I’ve referenced often:
With a kind of animal instinct, Trump understood what was missing from mainstream (more or less [David] French-ian) conservatism. His instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community—and not just the church, family, and individual—has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control.
(Yes, you read all that correctly and, yes, he was being serious.)
If it were up to me, that whole paragraph would be tattooed on Amari’s forehead. Or better, he would spend the rest of his writing career rewriting that paragraph, and nothing but that paragraph, on a chalk board.
He went on to described David French’s “character matters” approach as “a kind of airy, above-it-all mentality” that supplies “its own vain satisfactions,” and closing thusly:
But conservative Christians can’t afford these luxuries. Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.
What can one possibly say here?
I’m reminded of Al Mohler, another shameless talking head and outright hypocrite. Here he is in 2016:
Evangelicals are going to have to ask a huge question: Is it worth destroying our moral credibility to support someone who is beneath the baseline level of human decency? … Long term, I’m afraid people are going to remember evangelicals in this election for supporting the unsupportable and defending the absolutely indefensible.
Listen to Al just 4 years later, throw confabulatory horse shit at the ceiling fan for 10 minutes and pretend he’s making an honest, rational, and Christian argument for… just voting for the Republican nominee for the rest of his life.
You can listen to Mohler talk about the “character issue” here as well, a few months earlier in 2016, where he wisely says that being “single-issue dispositive” is not the same thing as being “single-issue sufficient,” meaning that the status of Roe v. Wade cannot determine everything that Christians vote for. This is immensely and obviously true to anyone who looks to Jesus, rather than the Republican Party, for even 5 minutes. Yet in 2020, this same Al Mohler said, and I quote, “I don’t apologize for saying that the life issue is determinative.”
What can one possibly say here?
Understand this: These attempts to retrace steps across a pure liquid manure pit, in either direction — that’s all this has ever been.
That is all this has ever been.