Mona Charen shook this year’s Trumpified CPAC by the shoulders.
She’s a stalwart conservative thinker, a writer who got her start right out of college at National Review, who wrote speeches for Nancy Reagan and hundreds of newspaper columns and three books—the latest of which, Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense,is out this June.
Somehow, unlike some other conservatives, she stayed off the Trump train. And at CPAC, where per a straw poll of attendees indicated 93 percent are enthusiastic supporters of the president, she took to the stage for a panel about conservative women’s place, or lack of one, in the #MeToo movement—and changed the subject a bit: “I’m disappointed in the people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women,” Charen challenged. “And because he happens to have an ‘R’ after his name, we look the other way, we don’t complain.” And then she called Marion Le Pen’s invitation to speak at CPAC a “disgrace.”
As for the reaction to her remarks at CPAC—a mix of booing and applause, but mostly booing, from the audience—she has this to say: “It’s clear that just seeing someone say what everybody knows to be true was bracing.”
I emailed Charen this week to check in on the fallout from her big moment. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.
Was there one moment that made you decide someone had to call out the Republican party on its moral corruption, or was it a series of events that built up? What was the tipping point?
Many conservative Republicans agree with me that the past two years have been like living in a world of fun-house mirrors. The program CPAC had assembled was illustrative of this weird new reality. When it was not a creepy cheering section for Trump (Sebastian Gorka, Sheriff Joe Clarke), it offered a hero’s welcome to Marion Le Pen, granddaughter and acolyte of anti-Semite, racist, blood-and-soil nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
When did you decide it should be you, at CPAC 2018?
CPAC issued the invitation. Maybe someone blundered. My views on Trump, Bannon, etc., are no secret.
You wrote in a recent NYT opinion piece that “there’s nothing more freeing than telling the truth.” Why do you suppose no one else had done it?
I don’t think it’s the case that no one else has spoken the truth about Trump. But I suppose it’s more dramatic to do so before an audience of his ardent fans.
Have you been surprised by any of the responses you’ve received?
I’ve been overwhelmed by the scale of the reaction. My phone has been buzzing like 100 cicadas. This is not about me. It’s clear that just seeing someone say what everybody knows to be true was bracing. On Twitter, there were many references to emperors and clothes.
TWS: Anti-Trump conservatives like yourself gain a “strange new respect” from the left at times like this. How can you make that last? Will NYT readers and MSNBC viewers — those with the most to gain from your ideas, I’d argue — read Sex Matters, for instance?
It doesn’t surprise me that MSNBC and NY Times readers are open to what I said. But just because it suits their purposes doesn’t make it wrong. I haven’t changed. I’m far more right-wing than, just to take one example, Donald J. Trump. On the other hand, long before this episode, I had become convinced that the polarization of our country was insane and dangerous. I pushed back against the hysterical “Flight 93 election” nonsense. Liberals are opponents, not enemies. The shrill and apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides is terrible – not to mention completely out of sync with the state of our nation and the nature of our problems. So I’m not going to apologize to anyone for talking respectfully to liberals. I have been a conservative stalwart for 30 years, but I’ve also thought for myself. I don’t have to prove my bona fides to anyone.
When I was on CNN’s New Day on Monday, I took them to task for their excessively partisan tone too.
TWS: Kellyanne Conway’s husband retweeted TWS’s story about your remarks. She’s been said to complain, behind the scenes, about how degrading it feels to stump for Trump, and yet she continues to work in the White House and remains one of his fiercest defenders. Do you worry about the message Trump-supporting women’s uncritical deference sends to young conservatives?
Kellyanne Conway will have to answer for herself.
TWS: What will it take for the Republican party to recover its principles?
Maybe just stick to them and stop acting like a Trump cult?
