The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Still A Foe, Despite Turning on Trump
Shared Contempt for Trump Is Not the Same as Shared Values
We need to stop celebrating every conservative who turns on Trump. The impulse is understandable. Trump has spent nearly a decade torching democratic norms, and when someone from his own political universe turns around and calls him a fraud, a grifter, or a threat to the republic, it feels like vindication.
It feels like progress. It feels like allies materializing from thin air. We have to resist that feeling. It is a trap.
The anti-Trump coalition has become a refuge for people who spent years building the exact political conditions that made Trump possible, who profited from that work, and who, stripped of their MAGA veneer, still hold views hostile to the interests of working people, women, minorities, and democracy itself.
Sharing an enemy does not make someone a friend. A quick survey of the most prominent anti-Trump conservatives proves the point brutally well, and we owe it to ourselves to look closely.
The Rogues’ Gallery
Joe Walsh is Exhibit One.
He rode the 2010 Tea Party wave into Congress, representing Illinois’s 8th District from 2011 to 2013. He lost his reelection bid and retreated into conservative talk radio, where he spent years stoking the rage and resentment that fed directly into Trumpism.
He has since declared himself a Democrat, a conversion that would be more credible if he had not spent decades doing the opposite of everything Democrats claim to stand for.
Walsh’s political transformation tracks exactly as far as his personal antagonism toward Trump, and not an inch further. What we are watching is a rebrand, not a reckoning.
Michael Cohen is Exhibit Two.
His situation is almost too perfect to believe. Cohen served as Trump’s personal attorney and self-described “fixer,” the man who handled the dirty work and looked the other way when the law got inconvenient.
He became a prominent anti-Trump voice after his legal troubles caught up with him, a conversion that conveniently coincided with prison.
Yesterday, Cohen told CNN that he and Trump had buried the hatchet several months ago. The relationship, Cohen said, was “cordial and growing.”
We should read that again. The man who spent years warning the country about Trump’s criminality quietly reconciled with him. That is not principled opposition. That is a leveraged negotiation.
Liz Cheney gets held up as the gold standard of Republican anti-Trumpism.
She stood in the well of the House after January 6 and called out what happened for what it was. She served on the January 6 Select Committee. She got primaried out of her seat for it. People who should know better have called her a hero.
What those people rarely mention is her voting record. Cheney voted with Trump 93 percent of the time during his presidency: tax cuts for the wealthy, rollbacks of environmental protections, positions on immigration that would make hardliners nod.
Her objection to Trump is specific. She drew the line at a violent assault on the constitutional transfer of power. Everything before and after that line, Cheney is a Cheney, daughter of Dick, defender of a conservatism that has been quietly waging its own war on American democracy for decades.
Opposing the most theatrical symptom of a disease is not the same as opposing the disease.
The Lincoln Project, for its part, made a lot of great television/social media.
Its ads were sharp, its social media presence was relentless, and its Republican credentials gave it a kind of credibility that a progressive PAC could never claim.
What sat underneath all of that was an organization that paid lavishly, burned through cash at a rate that raised serious questions about financial stewardship, and harbored a serious harassment scandal involving one of its co-founders.
The Lincoln Project is not a pro-democracy organization that happens to have a conservative aesthetic. It is a fundraising machine that found a profitable lane in anti-Trump sentiment and drove it hard.
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The Pattern Behind the Pattern
None of this is accidental or coincidental. There is a logic to it.
When Trump broke with Republican orthodoxy on personal style, alliances, and the procedural norms of power transfer, he created a class of conservatives with personal, professional, or legal reasons to oppose him specifically.
That opposition is real. But it is also bounded, transactional, and self-interested.
Walsh turned on Trump because Trump co-opted and then eclipsed the exact political crusade Walsh once championed.
Cohen is anti-Trump until Trump becomes useful again, as his CNN interview makes clear.
Cheney is anti-Trump because he tried to blow up the machinery of government that her family and class have operated for generations.
The Lincoln Project is anti-Trump because anti-Trump became a revenue stream.
None of them are anti-MAGA in any meaningful sense. None of them have repudiated the policy agenda that gutted unions, hollowed out the social safety net, stoked racial panic, and built the conditions that allowed someone like Trump to seize a major American political party and nearly end the republic.
They oppose the man. They are largely fine with the wreckage.
What It Costs to Forget This
Coalitions built on shared enemies are fragile. They crack the moment the shared enemy weakens, or the moment one side decides the enemy is useful again.
Cohen already showed us how quickly that can happen. Walsh’s reinvention is as much a career move as a moral awakening. Cheney will not be fighting for reproductive rights or labor protections in whatever comes next for her. The Lincoln Project will find another product.
Progressive politics cannot survive on the terms of its most convenient allies. Rehabilitation stories make for good television, but they make for terrible strategy.
Vetting matters. Values matter. A person who spent their career building the house that Trump moved into is not our partner because they suddenly hate the tenant.
The enemy of our enemy is not our friend. They are, at best, someone who wants the same thing we want right now, for completely different reasons, and will want something very different from us tomorrow.
We need to keep our eyes open.
Bottom Line:
We deserve better allies than opportunists and rebranders. Shared opposition to one man is not a coalition. It’s a coincidence.
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Important point to remember in the coming months.
Brilliant analysis!! Well written: articulated and accessible. But most importantly, it states the not so evident, but unquestionable truth.