Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump

Confession being good for the soul, it is always a good thing to offer a confession for a bad part of one’s past. It is aggravating, though, if, having written a confession, you then go around insisting that everybody else sign it, too. The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”