Remember how the NeverTrumpers who controlled the legacy institutions of the once-influential right spent the years between 2016 and 2020 pretending to be on our side, claiming the mantle of “principled conservatism” while actually helping the deep state and the mainstream media cripple President Donald Trump during his first term and then later saying nothing as Biden put Trump’s supporters in prison? Remember National Review? It’s still publishing. (No, really. Google it and you’ll see. One must give those people credit for persistence. If they keep on carping at Donald Trump from the center-left long enough, perhaps they really will get invited to some cool liberal parties in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Someday—you wait and see.)

Some NeverTrumpers have tried to reinvent themselves as MAGA supporters with a difference: They (unlike the rest of us Neanderthals) are nuanced, prudent, and philosophical. They’re here to protect us from ourselves, to keep us from lurching into bilious overreaction that destroys the wondrous norms of decent civic life and the blessings of liberty guaranteed by the Constitution—a document which means whatever federal judges appointed by Obama and confirmed by Lindsay Graham decide it means. And there’s nothing you can do about it, since impeaching federal judges is essentially impossible.

So, it turns out, the authority of these judges is final. Elections mean nothing. If the left can’t steal them it will nullify them, and your job is to grit your teeth and deal with it, peasant. Unless you want to end up in solitary confinement, like one of those Jan. 6 “insurrectionists.”

Here I’m thinking of journals like The Free Press and writers like Rod Dreher. He was perhaps the shrillest NeverTrumper on Earth until the day Trump picked Dreher’s personal friend, JD Vance, to be his vice presidential candidate. At that point, Dreher decided to shift from slandering Trump to flattering him. 

Now Rod is stepping forward as a supposed loyal MAGA supporter to warn the rest of us that Trump is violating moral and legal norms and endangering his own agenda by aggressively using presidential power to deport illegal immigrants (which he promised to do during his campaign). You could argue back and forth the merits of Dreher’s message.

But Dreher is the wrong messenger, and we shouldn’t trust his motives.

Why not? Just look at his track record.

In 2015, Dreher de facto endorsed Hillary Clinton, writing in Newsweek that Christians should give up on “voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies.”

In 2019, Dreher effectively came out for Biden, warning America that Trump had unleashed literal “demons” of racism by mocking Ilhan Omar and others in the congressional “Squad.” In that 3,000-word meltdown, Dreher summoned the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, pedophile Catholic priests, and (I swear I’m not making this up) the boys who pantsed him in high school as historical parallels for the evil Trump was unleashing. But hey, go ahead and vote for the candidate of the demons, if you insist. 

In 2020, Dreher gleefully mocked evangelical Christians including Eric Metaxas, who questioned the honesty of the presidential election, and oozed delight when leftist reporter Jake Tapper retweeted his scornful reporting. Dreher repeatedly defended David French and other NeverTrumpers, who would go on to endorse Kamala Harris and defend the presence of drag queens in instructing elementary school children. He was silent on the persecution of election integrity protestors from Jan. 6, 2021 (for whom I spoke up within 48 hours).

Then, after having done all he could do to help Democrats gain the power to persecute Christians, Dreher published a book, Live Not By Lies, warning about the persecution of Christians. It’s now a film. I think I’ll give it a miss. Dreher borrows the title from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which is outrageous. Then again, I would have skipped The Gulag Archipelago if that author had spent most of his career discouraging dissidents from resisting the Soviet Communist Party.