'How democracies fail': Ex-Republican strategist takes on attack on 'Never Trump' activism

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson unloaded on one-time "Never Trump" conservative Bret Stephens after he declared this week that he was "done" with the anti-Trump movement.

Writing on his Substack page, Wilson hammered Stephens for dismissing the concerns expressed by anti-Trump conservatives about the president-elect's threat to democratic institutions.

"Stephens suggests we move on because 'ordinary people' care more about inflation or immigration than our fragile democracy. So what?" Wilson wrote. "Moral leadership isn’t about polling. Edmund Burke understood the perils of letting the mob’s impulses run free. History doesn’t look kindly on those who dismiss existential threats simply because they’ve grown tiresome."

He then shredded Stephens for simply pretending the threat posed by Trump doesn't exist.

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"We sounded the alarm early and often. Trump hasn’t changed; what’s changed is his courtiers' obsequiousness and his enablers' brazenness," he charged. "Stephens’s genteel shrug—his holiday wish to look away—is how democracies fall: not through a single cataclysm but through a slow erosion, aided by polite excuses and reluctant nods."

He concluded by reaffirming the reasons why he refused to go along with the MAGA movement nine years ago when Trump launched his first presidential bid.

"Never Trump matters because it refuses to normalize the absurd and the abhorrent," he argued. "To abandon the fight now, simply because it’s taxing or unpopular, is a surrender no serious defender of our nation and our values should contemplate. Let the apologists contort themselves. For me, never means never. If I am the last priest of a dead religion, so be it."