An understated dynamic regarding the pathetic cuckery from turncoats like David French and Erick Erickson (and many others, including Jonah Goldberg) is that their heel turn was driven more by resentment and a desperate need for secular approval than it was by ideology or political partisanship or any sort of actual concern for the country or its people. Both saw themselves as national thought leaders with huge fame and notoriety and influence. Neither was true, but that fiction was key to their core identities. And then Trump arrived, embarrassed them, and showed them to be powerless and irrelevant. He became president, they faded away, and worst of all: nobody really noticed that they were gone. Trump, and by extension his voters, defrocked them and showed their entire sense of self to be fraudulent. They reacted and lashed out in the same utterly broken and delusional way a transgendered kook responds when being told you can’t change your sex and no you’re not a woman. There is no greater crime in the eyes of a delusional person than to expose the delusion. And no one in politics is better at brutally unmasking people than Donald Trump. Both French and Erickson have always been desperate to be feted as celebrity political figures. Erickson looked in the mirror and saw Rush Limbaugh. French looked in the mirror and saw a president staring back at him. Trump so thoroughly and publicly crushed their dreams and exposed their impotence that they have never forgiven him, or anyone who voted for him and made him president. Twice. And so now their lives revolve entirely around a man they detest to the point where their personal compasses direct them not to a fixed point, but to the opposite direction of wherever Trump or his supporters are headed. Their hatred of him has made them so deranged that their lives are now directed entirely by him, if only by inversion. But they have now finally found their precious, the One True Ring that gives them what they always desires: head pats and retweets from Jake Tapper and the New York Times. There is nothing more intoxicating to the conservative turncoat than Strange New Respect. To the extent they’re even aware of how they’re being used, they don’t care. The high of finally getting patted on the bottom and told they’re special by the same media elite who quietly smirked when Charlie Kirk was killed is too much to resist. And that’s how you end up with Erick Erickson using the same rhetoric and tactics that Antifa uses to target violence against white Christians, and with David French defending perverted sexual deviants twerking on children in libraries as “a blessing of liberty.” Ideology was only ever their vehicle for fame and notoriety, which is why they were so easily able to do a 180 on what they had sworn were their core values. The only core value they ever had was a desire for attention and approval. It’s so obvious in hindsight that you almost have to kick yourself for not seeing it at the time. Once Donald Trump shut down the avenue for any of that fame and positive reinforcement from the Right, they turned right around and begged for it from the Left. Because it was never about ideology or core beliefs. All they ever wanted was attention.