Plutot Trump que le Wokisme
By 
John Ganz is sharp on on many points here, including most nominally anti-Trump reactionaries going MAGA with various levels of enthusiasm:
If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic. A regime of national humiliation pretending to be a regime of restoration of national honor. It claims to be at once a national revolution and a national restoration. It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives. Even some disaffected socialists and leftists for whom liberalism was always the main enemy want to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a regime of collaboration and sympathy: the #resistance may have dominated the political style of the first Trump administration, but now, as Trump says, everyone wants to be his friend.
People are quickly discovering what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad. And it will be felt as a relief. No longer will they have to echo bien-pensant hypocrisies, they can engage in frank, honest assertions of their self-interest. Maybe refugees are not so welcome here after all. In this house, maybe we believe in nothing but our property values. “Plutot Trump que le Wokisme” seems to be the slogan of the center-right that once whinged about the Constitution and our sacred norms. It will be a regime of bad faith: it will attract all those who do one thing while pretending to do another. Afterward, when the full shame of the situation is revealed, the collaborators will claim to have been secret resistants.
One of my favorite examples of “what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad” is this pre-election piece of whataboutism that is a clear endorsement of Trump even if he lacked the courage to admit it from Ross Douthat. (I think my favorite part is the assertion that the increase in homicide rates under Trump that declined throughout the Biden administration are a good reason to vote for Trump.) There was no reason for Trump not to issue a democracy-crushing across-the-board pardon for 1/6 — Trump’s attempted autogolpe barely mentions a sentence when faced with the unspeakable horrors of a Tim Walz vice presidency. And he has the message discipling not to mention what is presumably the most important reason he’s come around to Trump — Dobbs — at all. A regime of bad faith indeed.