Donald Trump would be a strong candidate in the 2024 election because he got the big issues right in 2016, says a startling article by a New York Times‘ foremost Never Trumper, Bret Stephens.
The January 11 article was posted under the headline: “The case for Trump … by someone who wants him to lose.”
Stephens wrote that “you can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable [and] too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal.”
On immigration, Stephens wrote:
Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his presidential candidacy in 2015 …
It said something about the self-deluded state of Western politics when Trump came on the scene that his assertion of the obvious was treated as a moral scandal, at least by the stratum of society that had the least to lose from mass migration. To millions of other Americans, his message, however crudely he may have expressed it, sounded like plain common sense.
“Enforcing control at the border — whether through a wall, a fence or some other mechanism — isn’t racism,” Stephens wrote. “It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.”
People camp as they wait to cross the border between Mexico and the United States in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on December 27, 2023. (Christian Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Trump also caught the public’s mood of decline and pessimism, Stephens wrote. “Far too little has changed since then … If anything, Trump’s thesis may be truer today than it was the first time he ran on it,” Stephens admitted.
Trump also amplified the public’s falling trust in experts, professionals, and merit institutions that were supposed to be independent of politics, Stephens wrote. “We should be more honest with ourselves and admit that those institutions did their own work in squandering, through partisanship or incompetence, the esteem in which they had once been widely held,” he wrote, adding:
Brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government. At best, they have become shells of their former selves. And there’s a palpable sense that the autopilot that America’s institutions and their leaders are on — brain-dead and smug — can’t continue.
Many voters in 20224 will remember Trump’s first term fondly, he said. “Americans have reasons to remember the Trump years as good ones … Wages outpaced inflation, something they have just begun to do under Biden.”
Watch: NYT’s Stephens Says Many People Will Say They’re Worse Off than They Were Four Years Ago Due to Inflation
Breitbart News has often covered Stephen’s op-ed columns, in part, because he has been a reliable voice for his globalist peers over ordinary Americans, conservatives, or Trump supporters.
“We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out,” the foreign-born columnist wrote in 2017.
“The phenomenon of [population] replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice,” he wrote in 2022. “What the far right calls ‘replacement’ is better described as renewal.”
Stephens spent his childhood in Mexico as the son of a top chemical company executive and has worked as a top editor at the Wall Street Journal.
His new column has prompted an overwhelming rejection from the New York Times readers. So Stephens deserves some applause for the courage to think outside his peers’ globalist box, even though he wants to help President Joe Biden stay in office, and even though his new vision comes as a new wave of migrants garishly destroyed comfortable assumptions about the much-claimed Nation of Immigrants narrative.
