I was and proudly remain what the Navy calls a plank owner'a member of the first crew of a new vessel'of the good ship National Security Never Trump. I see no reason to unsay anything I have said about Donald Trump's character or the risks he poses to the United States, but I also do not see any reason to restate those claims. Either you already believe those things or you have, for whatever reason, chosen to ignore them. The issue now is what to expect from a second Trump presidency, how to judge it, and what to do. Having studied a lot of military history and visited a few war zones, I learned long ago that hysteria is unhelpful; catastrophism gets in the way of diagnosis. In this case, it distracts from understanding how we got here, beginning with the ways in which elites disregarded the woes of those who found themselves whipsawed by inflation. And it risks obscuring the extent to which the culture wars of the past decade or so have bred a furious reaction against identity...
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