In the spirit of spreading culpability for the GOP’s meltdown as thin as possible, The Daily Beast recently served up a new theory that lays blame for Donald Trump at the feet of liberal commentators in general, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in particular. The argument is that overheated liberal denunciations of past Republican standard-bearers desensitized conservative and independent voters to the kind of criticism that should’ve been reserved for a uniquely menacing figure like Trump.



“He was frequently called a ‘bully,’ ‘anti-immigrant,’ ‘racist,’ ‘stupid,’ and ‘unfit’ to be president,” complained Karol Markowicz in a piece that received wide acclaim on the anti-Trump right. “I’m referring, obviously, to the terrifying Mitt Romney.”

As the full horror of Donald Trump’s takeover of their party has dawned on them, conservatives have attempted, with greater or lesser sophistication, to pass off partial responsibility for his rise to liberals, from Barack Obama to liberal PC culture to Al Franken. Markowicz’s argument has proven more durable than its predecessors, because in addition to being convenient buck-passing, it also feels right. In the same way that Trump’s off-putting manner has seemingly helped to lift President Obama’s climbing favorability, it has belatedly encircled Romney in a halo. Trump’s offenses against basic decency burn so hot and so proximate that they occlude distant liberal complaints about Romney the way sunlight makes the stars invisible until nightfall.

But it is just as illusory to claim that liberals manufactured panic about Romney, and in turn inured Republican voters to similar complaints about Trump, as it is to claim the stars cease to exist each morning at sunrise. In reality, liberal complaints about Romney four years ago were mostly in proper proportion to current, graver warnings about Trump today. Just as liberals were more apt than conservatives to be clear-eyed about Trump’s appeal to Republican voters, liberal misgivings about Romney’s politics were prescient and accurate. And if conservatives had heeded them at the time, they might’ve been equipped to preempt Trumpism before it destroyed their movement.

Markowicz plucks the above, one-word descriptors liberals used in 2012 because from the vantage point of today, they fit Trump much better than Romney. But when you unearth the context in which liberals used those terms, you find they were being perfectly fair-minded, and the lustrous halo around Romney begins to fade.