What the Respectable Right Fears Most About a Trump Win: Angry Libs

Liberals lately have been imagining, with some trepidation, what a second Donald Trump administration might look like. The Atlantic devoted its January/February issue to the subject. The New York Times editorial board warned in January that“Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world.” In this magazine, Alexander Nazaryan took a lighter approach, inviting readers to chuckle at the possibility of Michael Flynn as defense secretary, Kid Rock as interior secretary, and Elise Stefanik as vice president—then brought the laughter to a halt by reporting these are all very real possibilities in a second Trump term.

In a well-ordered universe, liberals wouldn’t be the only ones scared out of their wits that Trump may return to power. Conservatives would be too. I don’t mean MAGA conservatives, whom I don’t count as real conservatives because, really, they’re just Trump cultists. I mean the respectable right, as represented by, say, National Review. In a January 2016 editorial the magazine denounced Trump as “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist” who “would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.” Of the Trump-encouraged MAGA insurrection on January 6, 2021, a National Review editorial said, one year later, “Trump’s recklessness disgraced the office of the presidency.”