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Some conservatives can wake from the delusion. This is a lot of text but worth at least a skim. Hanania is still conservative, he just realized that Trump was NOT a true conservative but rather just a grifting demagogue.

Richard Hanania: Richard Hanania (born August 28, 1985) is an American political scientist[3] and right-wing online personality.[4] He is the founder and president of the think tank Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI).

"The night of the 2024 election, I was a guest on the stream of liberal influencer Steve Bonnell, better known as Destiny. We were both critical of the populist turn in the GOP but, being more conservative than him, I had nonetheless voted for Trump. Speaking after it was clear that Trump had likely won, I said that if RFK were appointed to an important position, I would know that I had made a mistake.

A few weeks later, Trump nominated the most prominent vaccine skeptic in the country to the top position in the public health bureaucracy. I criticized that decision, but held out hope that maybe he wouldn’t be confirmed. This hope was soon dashed too.

I had also said Trump’s tariffs wouldn’t be so bad. After all, I thought, the U.S. effective tariff rate reached a high of just 3.5 percent in the first term. I argued about this with the writer Matthew Yglesias and others, and even made a prediction market to bet money that the number would not reach 6 percent in 2025. It became clear I would lose that bet during Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” speech, in which he announced tariffs that immediately tanked the stock market.

To predict the second term based on what happened during the first was a mistake, I realized. After January 6, 2021, in particular, Trump had surrounded himself more and more with sycophants and true believers rather than establishment figures who were able to check his worst impulses.

Upon realizing that I had failed in forecasting the second Trump term, I faced a decision.

Having observed political writers for years, I have no doubt that most of those in my situation would have found a way to excuse what had happened, or even double down. Okay, they might have said, Trump may have done this thing I was sure he wouldn’t do. But he also did other things that were a lot better, and perhaps that original thing still had some logic to it given the circumstances. Maybe the tariffs were just a negotiating position. The art of the deal!

To predict the second term based on what happened during the first was a mistake, I realized.

Or I could fess up. Trump hasn’t governed as I thought he would. The warning signs were there, the information was available, but I was too optimistic.

Acknowledging my mistake was not a comfortable experience. People had put a lot of stock in my support for Trump. My post saying I would vote for him got 22 million views on X, and was reposted by Elon Musk, among thousands of others. Admitting I had been wrong was going to both make the right angry, and also give Destiny and other liberals the chance to say “I told you so.”

Nonetheless, on Liberation Day, I declared that I’d had enough. In a post that received over two million views, I told the world that I regretted my vote.

“For those asking: yes, voting for Trump was a mistake,” I wrote. “I thought we’d get a repeat of the first administration, but we didn’t. The signs were there, I just did not take my own ideas about the awfulness of Trump and MAGA seriously enough.”

This did not result in my being universally welcomed by the left. A recurring battle on the Destiny subreddit has been over whether I am redeemable at all given that I voted for Trump in the first place. According to one commenter there, “how the fuck did any thinking person think Trump was just. . . not Trump. I feel so gaslit.” Another calls me a “lying grifter.” The charge of insincerity in service of some unspecified personal gain also comes from jilted MAGAs, who declare that I’ve sold out to liberal elites.

Trump hasn’t governed as I thought he would. The warning signs were there, the information was available, but I was too optimistic.

But while many will attack you for publicly changing your mind, my experience has taught me that others will respect you more for it. Moreover, the people who think more highly of me for changing my mind are generally those whose opinions I value most. Those who got angriest, on the other hand, were mostly misinformed partisans—whose opinions I couldn’t care less about.

Throughout the years, I’ve been an extremely polarizing figure. In 2023, it was revealed that I had been part of the original alt-right and wrote racist and sexist articles under a pseudonym about a decade and a half earlier. Though I’d disavowed my earlier views, many on the left remained upset at my continuing opposition to DEI and race-conscious politics, which to many of them is, in substance, no different from white nationalism.

Throughout these last several years, I’ve noticed a clear pattern regarding who does or doesn’t value my work—one that does not break down clearly along ideological lines. Casual observers, social media bomb-throwers, and influencers who don’t read serious journalism or books tend to find me puzzling or infuriating. At the same time, I’ve been delighted to learn that dozens of intellectuals whom I’ve read and respected for years are fans of my writing.

While many will attack you for publicly changing your mind, my experience has taught me that others will respect you more for it.
I’m confident that a willingness to change my mind is one of the main causes of this divide. If you want to gain the respect of smart people and trigger dumb ones, then no sentence does the job better than “I was wrong, and let me tell you why.”

The rationalist thinker Julia Galef distinguishes between a soldier mindset and a scout mindset. A soldier’s job is to defeat the enemy. He must kill those in front of him to take or defend territory. The scout, in contrast, is tasked with bringing relevant information to help superiors make the best possible decisions. He is not without opinions, as he may take a strong position on, say, whether to attack from the right or left flank. But in the end, the scout is committed to determining what is true.

People can approach intellectual life in either of these two ways. Most seem to take the first path, staking out positions based on the group they identify with. It has been remarkable to see people who I’ve known for being pro-life or skeptical of trans extremism predictably come out strongly in favor of the idea that the Renee Good shooting was justified. You would think that abortion rights or eligibility criteria for women’s sports would not have much to do with one’s views on the specifics of an encounter with law enforcement in which a woman ended up dead. Yet this kind of mindless tribalism is so ubiquitous now that it seems pointless to bring attention to it.

What I hope to do instead is to let people know that you don’t have to live like this. If you need to feel fellowship in a community, then there are people who will appreciate you for being thoughtful and honest. This goes both for writers and other public figures, and even those who discuss political and social issues only with family, friends, and co-workers, or in online comments sections.

Changing one’s mind is often not the best way to make the most money or build the largest possible audience. But if you do not like where society is headed and want to be part of the change, or something inside of you is simply repulsed by seeing human beings unable to overcome their worst instincts when purporting to engage with ideas, then the path of intellectual independence and honesty is the only one to take.

The world is a complicated place. There’s no shame in getting major questions wrong, even catastrophically so—as I did in supporting Trump.
But among those whose opinions are worth caring about, the true moral and intellectual failure is in not admitting it." -Richard Hanania

If you got this far, it is worth noting that Hanania still seems to hold racist views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hanania

I've never heard of Hanania.

I'm not an intellectual, don't like debating esoteric details,
try to be as down to earth and humble as possible irl.

Having typed all that, it is baffling to me that smart people
could have been taken in by Trump's rhetoric and promises.
Anybody with any street smarts has seen and heard con men trolling for victims. I recognized that in Trump as soon as he came into
my awareness, which was back in the 80s and 90s. And listening to smart people write that they want a good businessman in office, so they're voting for Trump, infuriated me. It did not take a whole lot of digging to know that Trump bankrupted casinos, and that Trump ran scam businesses, and Trump screwed over bluecollar people that worked for him. And he did it repeatedly.

So I guess I'm glad that Hanania has seen the light. But I'm sure as hell not impressed by it.

And listening to smart people write that they want a good businessman in office, so they're voting for Trump, infuriated me.

They are NOT "smart people".

Govt and business are not run the same. "Smart people" would KNOW WHY that is true.

Irrefutable proof they are NOT "smart people". Their bloviating does not change facts.

The only mistake is to engage these non-serious people. Certainly don't bait them in their own thread.

"Destiny" is a conservative role model for exactly no one.

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