NYT columnist throws in towel on 'Never Trump' label: We 'never quite got the point' of the MAGA movement

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : I also opposed him throughout his run this year," Stephens began his column, "Done With Never Trump," Tuesday.
42% : "Why did Trump -- so often deprecated by his critics as a fortunate fool -- understand this so well while we fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation?"
32% : "In this we weren't wrong: There's plenty to dislike and fear about Trump from a traditionally conservative standpoint.
29% : We also thought that Trump represented a form of illiberalism that was antithetical to our 'free people, free markets, free world' brand of conservatism and that was bound to take the Republican Party down a dark road," Stephens wrote.
20% : It's that we thought Trump degraded the values that conservatives were supposed to stand for.
19% : That, as much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether it's higher education or the F.B.I., many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.
14% : "It's been more than nine years since I first denounced Donald Trump as a 'loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians.'
9% : That, as much as Trump might lie, Americans also felt lied to by the left -- particularly when it came to the White House-cover-up of Biden's physical and mental decline.
3% : AT PRESSER, EVEN WHILE SLAMMING THE MEDIAThe Times columnist went on to list several concessions, like his failed prediction that Trump "might stumble into World War III" as president, how the Russia collusion allegations "were a smear" and that Trump was "much tougher" on the Kremlin than the Obama and Biden administrations before the Ukraine war.

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