Never: 1) Trump 2) Look in the Mirror

Over on Twitter there's another iteration of "liberals are why we have Trump" that's getting a lot of praise from "never Trump" frauds like David French. Liberated from Twitter formatting, here's the gist of his argument:

One of the most frustrating things for a movement conservative is that it feels impossible to publicly make the [accurate] case that the reason we have Trump - the reason so many on the right embraced him despite all his obvious shortcomings, vulgarities, & inadequacies is because of the way the left has treated the right in this country for DECADES - without sounding like I am defending it. And I am not. I believe all at once that the right’s embracing of Trump is a by-product of the tyrannical and bad faith treatment perpetrated on the right culturally and politically and economically by the left, and at the same time that the right will deeply regret (deeply) its choice of Trump as the antidote.

Then he gets down to cases:

4 - when I think of the way they have treated Kavanaugh, Romney, Bork, Ryan (granny wheelchair), and too many more to count, I get a guttural impulse that sounds like a Trumpkin for two seconds. When I think about their blame-America response to 9/11, I want to be sick.

— David L. Bahnsen (@DavidBahnsen) July 20, 2019

Okay, Thing One? The word "guttural" does not mean what he thinks it means.

That aside, it's an interesting set of examples. Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault and still wound up with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Romney actually said the things he was nailed for saying. Bork was rejected on a bipartisan vote because of the extremity of his positions (a point that his subsequent writing made all the more obvious). I had to google the thing about Ryan; it's an attack ad that's arguably unfair but undeniably hilarious...and no worse than any number of GOP attack ads over the years. And speaking of attack ads, his line about "their blame-America response to 9/11" is exactly the sort of dishonest smear we saw from Republicans throughout the Bush era. (I only recall two national political figures blaming 9/11 on America, and they weren't Democrats.)

So his beef with liberals is that they don't simply defer to conservatives on all matters. But the weakness (or outright falsity) of his examples illustrates the bogus nature of all conservative complaints. And even if we accept his whole argument, liberal attacks didn't elect Trump; the conservative response to those attacks did. So in arguing that liberals are responsible for Trump, he inadvertently makes a much truer point: what gave us Trump was in part the conservative culture of victimhood.

This is what fraudulent Never Trumpers like this guy and David French (who spends a lot of time sobbing about the mistreatment of Christians) will never understand: they bear as much responsibility for Trump as anyone.