'Incredibly craven': Critics slam NYT columnist’s reversal on 'Never Trump'

Social media users came out swinging against a conservative New York Times columnist who this week declared he was “done with never Trump,” and suggested the movement defeated itself.

The online backlash came in response to a Tuesday opinion piece by Bret Stephens, who said he believes Trump’s second term could be “as bad as his most fervent critics fear,” but still urged readers to send warm wishes to the new administration and give his cabinetselections “the benefit of the doubt.”

“It is incredibly craven to pretend to take a principled stand against Trump only to rescind it when it becomes clear that Trump isn't actually going away and there is nothing to be personally gained from the ostentatious display of ‘principle,’" University of Texas at Austin professor Mike Boyla-Kolchin wrote on Bluesky.

“Peak bedbug. He bends his knee. #BrokenTimes #BrokenBret," Former CUNY professor and "This Week in Google" podcast host Jeff Jarvis posted on social media.

George Washington University professor David Karpf reacted to the column in a series of posts on Bluesky where he blasted the columnist: “What an extraordinary dim bulb.”

“Stephens was a semi-early Never Trump conservative because Trump himself was uncouth,” Karpf told his followers. “It has always been the style, not the substance, that Bret found appalling. And he assumed that the social order would, thus, reject Trumpism. And he said as much, in his own stilted manner.”

He added now that “Trumpism has been vindicated,” Stephens took away “one possible lesson” that “the problem can no longer be Trump; it must be his critics.”

Author and former New York Times reporter Diana B. Henriques wroteto her Bluesky followers that Stephens’ piece delivered a “jaw-dropping argument.”

“If a tiny majority of ‘ordinary people’ decide Jan6 and The Big Election Lie were fundamentally less important to the nation than the price of eggs and border control, it is so,” she wrote. “No, it isn't.”