No Passes

By Abe Greenwald

 Monday, August 17, 2026

 

There are still many people on the right who get mad when one of their own calls out Donald Trump for anything. It’s not that the diehard Trump supporters continue to believe that he can do no wrong. Everyone has finally been disabused of that notion. Rather, it’s that they can’t imagine why someone on the right wouldn’t simply be thankful for the good he’s done and shut up about the rest.  

 

I know this firsthand: Whenever I criticize Trump, readers fire off emails and social media messages reminding me that he secured the border, rolled back woke initiatives, cracked down on campus anti-Semitism, and took action against the Iranian regime. Just imagine, they usually add, where we’d be if Kamala Harris had won.   

 

Yeah, I get it. You really don’t need to remind me. I remain grateful for the same achievements. But if you think that means Trump deserves a pass for his excesses and outright failures, don’t be surprised when those achievements start to break down. Standing up to the regime in Iran, for example, is laudable only if you intend to defeat it. According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, Iranian leaders have used Trump’s misbegotten cease-fire to extensively rebuild, rearm, and reorganize for a larger, deadlier war against the U.S.—a showdown that they want. To cite another example, the tragic theatrics of ICE seem to have diminished the public’s sense of vigilance around immigration, illegals, and border enforcement. Gallup reports that Americans are once again immigration squishes.

 

Sometimes it seems as if Trump has a need to risk or gamble away his wins. There’s no sense in the right encouraging him to blow it all. If you shudder to think of what the country would look like under a Harris administration, don’t summon one.  

 

But there’s a more important reason to hold Trump accountable for his mistakes. We know what it looks like when politicians get a pass on their most egregious transgressions, when their constituents so appreciate having their pet concerns addressed that they’ll let everything else slide. It looks like the left.

 

In Democratic circles, you can be a sociopath, a Communist, a Nazi, an Islamist, or any combination of these. A candidate or politician can do his best to turn the country into an unrecognizable dystopia, and his supporters won’t say a word against him so long as he vows to take on Donald Trump.   

 

But if you’re so grateful for Trump’s accomplishments that you want to give him a pass on his many errors, you can’t honestly be stunned by liberals’ failure to address the dangerous extremism on their side. In fact, you’re contributing to the kind of politics that you simultaneously consider to be a national emergency. No, Trump isn’t the right-wing equivalent of Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani. But there are figures waiting in the wings who just might be. Which means that this would be an especially bad time to adopt the left’s penchant for selective accountability.

 

And now, I’ll wait for the emails.