Never Trump Media Pundits and the Bridges They’ve Burned (full series)
David Frum | Robert Kagan
Jennifer Rubin | David French
Jennifer Rubin
Former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin also concluded she couldn’t endure working there after the newspaper’s non-endorsement.
“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” wrote Rubin in a January 2025 resignation statement. “The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders.”
As with Frum, Rubin is another Never Trumper whose ideology was never quite what it seemed.
Back in December 2017, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, also no stranger to criticizing Trump, located a deeply disingenuous trend in Rubin’s work.
“If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind,” wrote Cooke. “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.”
During the Obama administration, Rubin criticized the president for signing on to the Paris Climate Accord, Cooke explained. But when Trump removed us from the agreement, Rubin memory holed her old self and criticized him as well.
A similar about face occurred on the placement of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which became a bad idea to Rubin only after Trump did what she had previously supported.
And that was just Trump’s first year in office.
In a September 2020 columns, she managed to accuse others of being exactly the sort of hypocrite Cooke had shown her to be three years earlier.
“Let’s be honest: There is no conservative movement or party today,” wrote Rubin. “There is a Republican Party thoroughly infused with racism and intellectually corrupted by right-wing nationalism. But there is no party that believes in less or small government (though expect the GOP to hypocritically resume singing that tune as soon as a Democrat steps into the Oval Office).”
The headline on that missive was this: “Why I dropped ‘conservative’ from my Twitter profile.”
At some point, decades from now, will Never Trumpers gather at conferences and discuss where they were standing and what they were doing when Jen took this bold step?
After ditching the Post, Rubin announced that she had teamed up on a new media project with Norm Eisen, a veteran of multiple Democratic Party and left-leaning projects. Now parked at a page on the subscriber-supported Substack platform, this seamless fusion of conventional regime opinionating is named . . . The Contrarian.
Their non-pretentious-at-all slogan is “Unflinching journalism in defense of democracy.” The meaning is easier to interpret if the reader replaces “democracy” with “bureaucracy.”
“A plain spoken, fearless politician with a twinkle in his eye,” is the headline of March 2025 Rubin column in The Contrarian. Her profile in fearlessness began with this: “Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois is among the boldest critics of Donald Trump.”
Jen Rubin is now clearly a woman of the Left. But has anything really changed?
Rubin was considered right-leaning when hired by the Washington Post in 2010. By that time, she had written for many right-sided publications. Similar to many of today’s Never Trumpers, she has history with the Weekly Standard. She credits it with providing her first publishing opportunity in 2007 and has estimated that she wrote 20 more missives for the neoconservative journal through 2011.
Before getting that break, Rubin was an entertainment industry attorney.
In 2013 the left-wing Media Matters found a former coworker from her lawyering days who remembered a different Jennifer Rubin:
Steve Hulett, who says he knew Rubin well from 2000 to 2005 when he was president of the Animation Guild, a labor union representing animation and visual effects artists, says her politics were those of a mainstream California Democrat right through the 2004 election. “She talked like a straight-ahead Hollywood liberal,” Hulett told Media Matters. “We used to chew the fat all the time in her office and over at lunch at Café del Sol near Dreamworks. She supported Kerry in 2004 and worked closely with [Jeffrey] Katzenberg, who is a big time Democratic donor. I didn’t know what to think when she moved east and started blogging like mad as a conservative. I don’t know if it’s a marketing pose, or if she really believes it, or what. But it is odd.”
If this account is to be believed, then the 60-something Rubin spent all of just a dozen years of her life identified as a conservative of any sort. Her defining professional feature isn’t so much Never Trump as never consistent.
In the next installment, David French’s columns betray an obsession with Donald Trump.
