Lifetime Republican horrified as conservative friends get 'absorbed into' Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up while boarding Air Force One, as he departs for Israel, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 12, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum and conservative commentator Mona Charen bemoaned the killing blow to conservatism dealt by President Donald Trump.

“With the rise of Trump, I saw the destruction of pretty much everything [conservative,” Charen told Frum in an interview for the Atlantic. “ … [H]e was also the antithesis of what I regarded as conservative virtues. So for example, he encouraged people to believe that he personally, through force of will, could solve huge problems that face us as a country. I thought that was the antithesis of everything that conservatism believed; it was Caesarism.”

“And then, of course, all of his various heresies, like his attacks on free trade and his racism, which, again, I thought was the fulfillment of every fever dream of the left that thought conservatives were all racists underneath, that if you scratched them, you’d find that they were really racist. And here, along comes Trump, who confirms this. So I resented that as well,” Charen added.

Yet Charen said she watched with horror as respected comrades embraced an obscenity.

“[National Review Editor] Jonah Goldberg put it best many, years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people, they just were absorbed into this thing,” said Charen. “And so I watched one after another, and for a long time, it was a subject of grief for me that I watched these people that I respected bend the knee. It was an ongoing process that took years, and during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.”

Charen said she remains the conservative champion she always was. She stands for fiscal discipline, she worries about the debt and remains “a believer in tradition and procedure and law and respect for tradition.”

“So, that’s one of the things that I find most horrifying about this populist era that we’re in, is that, going back to … why I became a conservative, it’s the institutions, the procedures, the protections in law that it took hundreds and hundreds of years to enshrine in our system are critical,” Charen said. “So the idea that President Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who are … destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they’re destroying our international posture.”

“[T]here are many other issues that I think conservatives were right about. But the world has changed,” Charen added. “The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There’s no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement, far less a party, now that is recognizable.”

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