The GOP 'Has Become the Caricature the Left Always Said It Was'

Jennifer Rubin has become a leading voice for a group of conservative intellectuals who don’t fit comfortably in either political party—and sees the party she left behind as ‘immoral’ and ‘anti-American.’

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE April 17, 2018

Hours after Paul Ryan announced his retirement last week, President Donald Trump tweeted a photo of the House speaker and the rest of the GOP congressional leadership at dinner together at the White House. All did the traditional Trump-style smiling thumbs-up—a big show of unity to rebut anxiety about the party collapsing.

What Jennifer Rubin saw while looking at that photo: a Republican Party that “has become the caricature the left always said it was—the party of old white men. And that has become more so in the age of Donald Trump, when he is actively courting and stoking white resentment.”

Trump’s use of identity politics, Rubin told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is a dead end for the party. It’s a dead end because it’s immoral and anti-American to base an entire political movement on one racial group and it’s a dead end because that’s not America and [what America] is becoming.”

For Rubin, the author of the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, it’s been a fast trip from conservative apostle to apostate.

Rubin was hired in late 2010 to be a forceful conservative presence, the counterpart on the right to the Post’s liberal blogger, Greg Sargent. But since Trump’s election, she’s been one of the president’s most strident critics, attacking him multiple times a day as an “arrogant fool” and “flat-out racist.” In the process, she’s becoming a leading voice for a group of conservative intellectuals who don’t fit comfortably in either political party.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/17/jennifer-rubin-conservative-never-trump-republican-218002