1. Since this thread got dropped at length in my mentions while I was out yesterday and revived today, it seems to demand a response. It represents a persistent effort to excuse your failings as an advocate onto me, and that is wrong.
2. You are trying to justify the notion that a responsible advocate could argue for Trump as a preferable POTUS to Rubio or Cruz in February 2016. This was not justifiable in good faith at the time, and we all knew that, by then.
3. Indeed, I would argue that we all knew it decades earlier, at least those of us in New York - and a writer for New York magazine should know this. Very little new was revealed of Trump's character after that point. This was long after many of his most deplorable incidents.
4. I've noted in my column on this that you later sought to excuse this, implausibly, by pointing to just one of Trump's many flaws - flattering & praising Putin & other tyrants. This was not unknown in February, at all. Nor Putin's backing:
5. And if this was the deal-breaker, well, it seems like an implausible one for a hagiographer of this guy
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6. Your excuse that you turned on Trump by March 13 seems convenient, since this was *after* Super Tuesday, after Kansas finished Rubio - after even I called on Rubio to get out nymag.com/daily/intellig…
7. I plead guilty to suspecting that this was bad-faith concern trolling. My basis for thinking so is that so many leading progressive writers (eg Yglesias, Bouie, Marcotte) were making the same argument at the same time. This suggests, at minimum, implicit consensus.
8. I very much doubt that consensus was actually a belief that Trump would be a better President than Rubio or Cruz. It was simply an effort to use him as a club against more effective, genuine conservatives.
9. Your serial return to this point suggests you are stung by the exposure of bad faith. But I leave that to the readers to judge. However, the charge of bad faith against *me* should not be left unchallenged.
10. For 17 years, I have always advocated in public only things I actually believe. Longtime readers know this. So do the many conservatives I've corresponded with in private, who know my views to be unchanging in private & public.
11. The fact that you, Yeselson, Marshall & Buetler have deployed nearly verbatim the charge that I'm seeing my own bad faith in pointing out yours suggests at least a collective case of projection, at worst a deliberately coordinated smear. We both know it is made without basis.
12. Anyway, those of us who spoke out far earlier against nominating Trump have, I think, earned the right to judge those of you who - for whatever reasons, willed ignorance or bad faith - chose not to. No amount of post hoc rationalization cures that.
