NYT Writer: 'I Was Wrong' About Trump Supporters, And 'Bogus' Collusion
Unless you have a subscription to the New York Times you probably haven't seen the recent change of heart amount their writers. One columnist, in particular, wrote a series of articles about how he was wrong to believe Democrats that Trump supporters were horrible.
Specifically he says he feels remorseful for calling Trump supporters "appalling". Stephens said, "The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit" was the first he ever wrote about Trump: "If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling."
"This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals, and the world itself," he continued.
Stephens sustains that he still hates Trump and those close to him but that "the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me."
"It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds," he continued. "What were they seeing that I wasn’t?" he pondered.
"What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo," he asserted.
"I was blind to this," Stephens admitted. "I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected’," he said and acknowledged his own financial luxuries.
"Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called ‘the unprotected.’ Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure," he wrote. "Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways."
"It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to ‘guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,'" Stephens wrote.
"No wonder they were angry."
Stephens went on to note that he gets why people were outrages. He even explained that he sees now that Trump supporters were right to be angry.
"Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites," Stephens conceded. "First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts," he wrote.
"Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out," he continued. "Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without."
Stephens also noted that around 2010 the culture shifted and suddenly people couldn't mingle with anyone who held different beliefs—AKA the birth of canceled culture and the wedge it drives.
"It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying," Stephens remarked.
Perhaps the best part about Stephens's revelation he came to realize that "the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it" - that marred Trump's presidency was an "elaborate hoax" and that "there’s just no other word for it".
In the end, he maintains his hate for Trump and claims to have the 'moral' high ground there but realized that the game was rigged against him and his supporters.