In their hearts they know David French is right

Because in their guts they know Donald Trump is nuts.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not people who are completely, irrevocably, 100% dead wrong who drive us crazy.

I mean, they can drive us crazy if they’re doing something like running up to us in public and confronting us for not having really walked on the moon. But if you know you walked on the moon and some idiots tries to argue with you about the point, you at least have complete confidence in your position.

From my own experience, I get most defensive when dealing with an issue about which I do not have confidence in my own position. And I believe most people are the same way.

Which might explain why David French, a conservative Republican whose anti-Trump heresy has made him a MAGA-world target since 2016, drives so many of his fellow right-wingers so crazy.

French’s latest New York Times, column, which goes beyond denouncing Trump and making the argument for voting for Kamala Harris, on the understanding that the GOP in its present form must be destroyed and something competent built from its ruins, is his latest blasphemy:

Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”

What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?

Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.

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Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.

At the same time, we should make the argument — firmly but respectfully — that this is no ordinary race and that the old political categories no longer apply.

For example, how many Republicans would have predicted that voting for a Democrat would be the best way to confront violent Russian aggression and that the Republican would probably yield to a Russian advance? In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin. By voting for pro-life politicians down ballot, I can help prevent federal liberalization of abortion law. But if a president decides to abandon Ukraine and cripple NATO, there is little anyone can do.

While there are voters who are experiencing a degree of Trump nostalgia, remembering American life pre-Covid as a time of full employment and low inflation, there is a different and darker story to tell about Trump’s first term. Our social fabric frayed. It’s not just that abortions increased: The murder rate skyrocketed; drug overdose deaths hit new highs; marriage rates fell; and birthrates continued their long decline. Americans ended his term more divided than when it began.

I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.

The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.

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Unsurprisingly, this column resulted in a lot of online mockery from pro-Trump and anti-anti-Trump commentators.

Meanwhile, here is what the great Republican conservative standard-bearer was posting on his Truth Social account: