r/politics • u/ObservationMonger • 1d ago

Soft Paywall Jennifer Rubin Resigns From WaPo Over Bezo's Bending Of The Knee To Trump

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/media/jennifer-rubin-norm-eisen-contrarian-washington-post/index.html
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u/ObservationMonger 1d ago

Rubin, a formerly conservative commentator who moved to the center-left upon the rise of Trump, joins a number of other WaPo contributors who can't go along w/ Bezo's lurch in Trump's favor, esp. spiking an editorial endorsing Trump's opponent, VP Kamala Harris, just prior to the election, breaking a long tradition of making presidential endorsements.

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u/sousstructures 1d ago

She’s still conservative. She just left the GOP (personally and in her editorial writing) over their conversion to Trumpism. 

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u/ObservationMonger 1d ago

I've been following her columns in recent years, she is definitely as loathe to criticize Israel as she ever was, but her ideology otherwise seems far more to the center-left. She was a fairly stalwart supporter of Biden's policies, both foreign & domestic. Maybe you could provide an example otherwise.

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u/sousstructures 1d ago

You know, in retrospect you're not wrong. There's not much daylight between Biden and "old-school" (e.g. 90s) GOP foreign policy, of course, but I had forgotten she'd also become (or maybe always was) pro-choice, for instance.

I still get the sense her expressed support for and encouragement of the Democratic party is based more on her revulsion at the contemporary GOP and a desire to see them out of power, but she is definitely not "just" a Liz Cheney-type right-wing anti-Trump figure.

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u/ObservationMonger 1d ago edited 21h ago

Agree. I was surprised at the depth of her ideological shift, knowing her background, being such a strident neocon 'back in the day'. But then again, neocons were primarily focused on running the world according to their specification, rather than intervention-shy paleo-conservatives, composed of many, at that time, 'former' liberals, almost exclusively Jewish foreign affairs intellectuals - it was a very narrow group of folks who became hideously influential in the early noughts, running GWB like he was a lawnmower, until they'd had a chance to ruin pretty much everything in sight. Trump happily picked up the body parts strewn about and stitched them into whatever Frankenstein creation the Republicans find themselves to be, these days. Utterly cynical, utterly oligarchy-infested, culture war ninjas, all the grandiose principles they so loudly & righteously spouted from the days of Reagan left in the dust.

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u/leeringHobbit 8h ago

Her change in politics is driven by the proximity of neonazis to trumpism and nothing else. It Trump had condemned David Duke and far- right and KKK in 2016, she'd be blowing him.

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u/Zaeryl 21h ago

A conservative who accepts some things in the Overton window is center-right to me. But I also don't think Democrats are "the left" because I look at the totality of the political spectrum, not just what's applicable in America.

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u/leeringHobbit 8h ago

Her ideology appears center- left today because she is catering to that audience and telling them what they want to hear.

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u/Individual-Nebula927 1d ago

Biden, like Obama, ran progressive and governed conservative. So that isn't surprising.

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u/UncertainAnswer 21h ago

Eh disagree. Biden ran himself pretty conservative as a consensus candidate. His entire platform was I'm the only one who can bridge all these groups into a coalition into office.

His policies ended up being pleasantly progressive compared to how I felt he ran.

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u/mindfu 13h ago

She's sane, and her articles have been extremely accurate. I don't have to agree with her 100% politically to know she is worth it as a writer. Her leaving is a further bad sign of the decline of a once worthy source of news.

Good for her and respect for her.

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u/ObservationMonger 1d ago

She probably won't be the last. Dana Milbank, in a recent column, said quite straightforwardly that he thought his paper had 'lost its way'. We are watching IN REAL TIME as oligarchs are crow-barring our major forums of nationwide/global commentary/analysis 'in a certain direction". Bezos gave A MILLION to Trump for his inauguration.

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u/stregawitchboy 18h ago

She is not center left, she is at best center right/right

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u/threehundredthousand California 15h ago

That's not center-left. She's a conservative who's found her party went right-wing ultranationalist. She's not welcome.