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Washington Post’s ‘Conservative’ Writer Is Now Just Beyond Parody After Her Last Tweet About Trump

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  April 10, 2020 4:15 PM

I mean, this is now just parody. If not, it’s now confirmed as one of the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome thus far. This was a long time coming, but The Washington Post’s so-called “conservative” writer, Jennifer Rubin, is back at it again, blaming Trump for the death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus. 

“Biden must say it: Trump will get more people killed” is the headline of her column. It’s just absurd. First, no one will ever convince me that the only way to save the Republican Party or conservatism is to vote for a Democrat, especially one that’s called Joe Biden. For those who are opposed to ‘destroying the village to save it’ logic, this is it in its most pure form. What the hell are people thinking? And this goes double for the Republicans who voted for Hillary Clinton, the ultimate traitors to the cause. Now, granted, I will give some latitude here; Rubin does make a good point that going back to normal too soon will lead to a resurgence in infections, but it’s also true that some major companies and scores of small businesses cannot survive a lockdown for another 4-6 weeks. 

Trump shut down travel from China and Europe. And if there is someone to blame, blame Democrats, Ms. Rubin. I’m sure you know that the NYC health commissioner presented New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio with evidence of an outbreak and the need to shut down the city to prevent its spread. he refused. He also auctioned off the ventilators that former Mayor Mike Bloomberg stored for these types of scenarios. All of this while he has the stones to slam Trump on MSNBC, who luckily pressed him on his incompetent response. 

But hey, he says he did his best, so it’s okay, right. New York City only accounts for most of the 480,000+Wuhan cases in the country, but it’s Trump’s fault or something. We’re dealing with a virus. Trump didn’t create it. China’s idiocy allowed this plague to be unleashed on the world with shoddy containment measures, coupled with the strong-arming and forced disappearances of doctors who tried to raise the alarm that a pneumonia-like virus was present in the country back in December. China ordered scientists to destroy samples containing the evidence. It kept its medical crews in the dark and through the World Health Organization, where they have set up their puppet after buying the 2017 director-general election, they lied to the world saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But blame Trump, right? 

Also, let’s not forget that Rubin held many of the positions that Trump has on policy before the 2016 election. National Review’s Charles Cooke ripped her to shreds to these flip-flops back in 2017:

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Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene, Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well. Since the summer of 2015, the many acolytes of “MAGA!” have agreed to subordinate their true views to whatever expediency is required to sustain Donald Trump’s ego. Out has gone their judgement, and in has come their fealty; where once there were thriving minds, now there are just frayed red hats. During the same period, Jennifer Rubin has done much the same thing. If Trump likes something, Rubin doesn’t. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hers—as anyone’s is wont to do from time to time—she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay it. The result is farcical and sad; a comprehensive and self-inflicted airbrushing of the mind. How, I have long wondered, could Trump’s unprincipled acolytes do what they do and still sleep at night? How can Jen Rubin?

If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind. And how potent is the control he exerts over Rubin’s. So sharp and so sudden are her reversals as to make effective parody impossible. When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was “ephemeral,” “a piece of paper,” “a group wish,” a “nonsense” that would achieve “nothing.” That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so “devoid of substance,” she added, illustrated the “fantasy world” in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for “phony accomplishments,” his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any “bill of goods” they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a “senseless act,” a “political act,” “a dog whistle to the far right,” and “a snub to ‘elites’” that had been calibrated to please the “climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy” (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the “ephemeral” “piece of paper,” Rubin submitted, would “materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness” and represent conduct unbecoming of “the leader of the free world.” One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.

Or, rather, one is left concluding that Rubin doesn’t have policy positions so much as she has protean cheerleading instructions, the details of which are set by whoever happens at that moment to be her coach. Take Jerusalem, a subject on which Rubin has rather run the gamut. In 2010, she praised Marco Rubio for arguing that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, as the U.S. Congress has repeatedly recognized” and lauded the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 as the concrete on which Republicans should walk. Two years later, in the midst of her self-appointed tenure as the president of Mitt Romney’s fan club, she reversed herself, hitting Newt Gingrich for holding precisely the view she had previously recommended, while endorsing Romney for his relative “judgment, restraint and . . . good sense” in opposing her. “It really is time,” she submitted, “to stop promising something that the U.S. can’t and shouldn’t deliver unilaterally.” A few weeks later, when Romney began to sound more hawkish, she endorsed his new position, too, holding it up as “a blow to the Obama campaign’s frantic efforts to defend the president’s hostile stance toward the Jewish state…”

[…]

This stance lasted into the Trump era. In June [2017], Rubin complained angrily that the White House was “delaying its move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” a delay, Rubin wrote, that was not only pointless—“presidents come to believe that the move would somehow prejudice peace talks (of which there are none presently) or inflame Palestinians, perhaps causing an increase in violence,” she caviled—but that was indicative of Trump’s tendency never “to keep his word.” “The world,” Rubin advised, “is learning to disregard everything this president does and says” — a habit that “will adversely affect everything from the war against Islamist extremists to trade opportunities.” Trump, she concluded, “looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat.”

…Trump announced that the United States would finally be recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and, in time, moving its embassy there. And what did Rubin say? That it was “a foreign policy move without purpose,“ “indicative of a non-policy-based foreign policy.”

Oh, and let’s not forget that Rubin thought that more Republicans would die than Democrats because they watch Fox News essentially. Yeah, sure, Jan. First, who the hell thinks this way? Oh right, that would be a liberal.