Never Trump Media Pundits: Robert Kagan

Never Trump Media Pundits and the Bridges They’ve Burned (full series)
David Frum | Robert Kagan
Jennifer Rubin | David French

---

Robert Kagan

Turning trees to cringe wasn’t always what readers expected from The Atlantic. Just prior to Trump’s first run for office, it was still a serious ideas journal.

“If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy,” the November 2015 cover story, was a prescient warning from novelist/journalist Walter Kirn about the dangers of government surveillance. “We Will Never Run Out of Oil,” the May 2013 cover feature, described the development of methane hydrates, a potentially limitless supply of natural gas within the oceans. “Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal,” a cover headline that would be unthinkable in today’s woke Atlantic, introduced the December 2010 issue.

While DC was still debating the merits of ObamaCare, The Atlantic’s September 2009 cover feature was about a market-driven, low-cost, high-quality, universal coverage health care system that has served Singapore for decades. Singapore puts patients in charge of their health care dollars and shoves aside government and insurance bureaucrats.

Written by David Goldhill, it was a proposal that deserved our attention—and still does.

That was the old Atlantic. A subscriber (and I was one) could sometimes go at least a year without seeing cover stories referencing the president and even entire issues without ever learning who the president was, let alone how much he reminded one of the magazine’s writers of Hitler.

Since then, The Atlantic has been stocking up on fragile souls who do this relentlessly.

Robert Kagan, yet another NeoCon who once wrote for the Weekly Standard, is a recent arrival to the rhetorical shores of The Atlantic. No stranger to Republican politics, during the Reagan administration he wrote speeches for former Secretary of State George Schultz.

In 2016, Kagan announced he was leaving the Republican Party and voting for Hillary Clinton.

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” he claimed at the time.

Here are four of the headlines for the five essays Kagan wrote during his last full year as an editor-at-large for the Washington Post:

• “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” (November 2023)

• “The Trump dictatorship: How to stop it.” (December 2023)

• “Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?” (March 2024)

• “We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?” (April 2024)

Kagan is supposedly a serious person who holds a senior fellowship at the Brookings Institution think tank. Brookings has been the home office of Russiagate hoax players such as Igor Danchenko, later the main source for many of the fables in the Steele dossier.

Kagan also writes books, the last of which was written in 2024. It is about . . . well, if you’ve read this far then you already know.

In late October 2024, the Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate in the presidential election. If the newspaper had decided to endorse Kamala Harris, as was widely expected, then it would have influenced the vote of somewhere between zero and maybe one person in all of America.

But even that false validation was important for Kagan, who promptly resigned. He has since moved his Never Trump screeds to The Atlantic.

---

In the next installment, Jennifer Rubin leaves the Washington Post over its refusal to endorse Kamala Harris for president.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/never-trump-media-pundits-part-2/