The New Never Trumpers

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

It’s a tribute to the protean nature of Donald Trump that the new Never Trumpers are some of his most fervent former supporters.

 

Tucker Carlson thinks Donald Trump might be the Antichrist and had his brother Buckley on for a recent episode of his podcast where they lambasted Trump the man and president. Meanwhile, Sohrab Ahmari, who co-wrote an essay in 2022 declaring of Trump, “He’s Still the One,” now thinks that “Trump Was Never the One.”

 

The proximate cause of the disaffection is, of course, the Iran war, but the erstwhile MAGA acolytes also pronounce themselves appalled at Trump’s character.

 

“I always felt like there are things wrong with Trump, have always been. I overlooked most of them or just tried to ignore them or whatever,” Tucker Carlson said on his podcast.

 

Well, of course he did, but this is a big admission. During the period when Carlson was most determinedly ignoring the obvious, he was congratulating himself as a brave truth-teller and attacking those people who had the elemental honesty to notice Trump’s flaws.

 

It’s never seemed particularly difficult to acknowledge Trump’s shortcomings, at the same time as realizing that he’s been better than the alternative and done many important things.

 

For years, though, Carlson failed the Orwell test — of seeing what’s directly in front of one’s nose — and now has lurched all the way to believing thar Trump might be the figure of pure evil foretold in biblical prophecy. It’s a pretty big mistake to constantly puff up, spend time with, and help staff the administration of someone you’ve decided could well be bringing about the literal End Times, but this is the burden that Tucker Carlson now bears.

 

Ahmari, too, confesses to looking past Trump’s character flaws. In fact, he refers to “the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter.” I guess David French gets the last laugh.

 

Ahmari’s explanation of what’s become of Trump conveniently pins the blame on the other side.

 

He notes how “psychoanalysis speaks of ‘determination by the signifier’: the way people end up inhabiting the picture of them inscribed by others (parents, social institutions, and the like). You become what they say you are.”

 

This is what happened to our 47th president: “Just so, Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent.”

 

So we were supposed to believe that Trump descended the golden escalator a man of politeness, equanimity, constancy, and discretion, who never had an eye on the main chance or cared about getting glory or credit, and after more than a decade of people saying the opposite about him, his character radically changed to confirm all the smears made of him?

 

I’m exaggerating for effect, but you get the point. If we are going to grasp for these sorts of explanations, it might make more sense to say that Trump concluded that his cadre of supporters was willing to look past anything he said or did, so he became more brazen.

 

The truth is that Trump has always been Trump, and always will be Trump. We haven’t learned much new about him — good or bad — since his bout of controversies during his first year or so in national politics.

 

If that wasn’t enough, we had his attempt to overturn the 2020 election result and, in his second term, his dubious military attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, his illegal imposition of sweeping tariffs, and his attempted prosecutions of his political enemies.

 

All of this also made no meaningful impression on Trump’s regretful former boosters, who apparently became very adept at ignoring things.

 

Now, we shouldn’t begrudge them their dismay with Trump over the Iran war, when they thought they were guaranteed no more major wars in the Middle East. Unlike many other things he’s done, Trump didn’t talk about this in the campaign. It shouldn’t be a complete shocker, however, that a president who bombed ISIS and killed Soleimani with evident relish in his first term, who is headstrong, who loves wielding power, who has long hated the Iranian regime, and who was highly impressed with the proficiency of the Venezuela operation might conclude he could topple or bend to his will the Islamic Republic with a thunderous assault from the air.

 

The war isn’t about spreading democracy, and it doesn’t involve occupying Iran with tens of thousands of ground troops. Trump has been careful to try to limit his commitment and maintain his flexibility while keeping on the pressure via a relatively low-risk naval operation.

 

Of course, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz has made this a costlier and more drawn-out affair than Trump expected. It turns out that he was overly optimistic and launched the operation without sufficient public or private deliberation. Are Carlson and Ahmari surprised by this as well?

 

Amid all the shock, President Trump might register some surprise of his own — that people who had given every indication they’d be on board whatever he did have now, suddenly and despite their past attacks on anyone upholding a consistent standard for how we judge politicians, jumped ship.