Plenty of people have spent the past decade criticizing Donald Trump, but Gerard Baker has rarely joined them. That is precisely why Baker’s latest Wall Street Journal column carries more weight than another broadside from one of Trump’s usual critics.

Baker is the Journal’s former editor in chief and currently serves as its editor at large and a weekly opinion writer. During a 30 year journalism career, he has written for the Financial Times, The Times of London, and the BBC.

His political evolution also matters here. After moving from left wing politics during his university years toward conservative views, Baker playfully described himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon.”

The author of the original commentary says Baker’s columns have offered a window into how establishment voices rationalize and defend support for Trump. Baker’s latest piece, “Help—I Feel a Bad Case of TDS Coming On,” therefore arrived with a striking change in tone.

Baker made clear that he had never considered himself vulnerable to what Trump supporters call “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or TDS. He often found Trump’s character and rhetoric repellent, but that discomfort did not prevent him from embracing Trump’s political project.

In 2016, Baker concluded that years of political failure demanded radical change. He accepted Trump as a disruptive force, calculating that the possible benefits of political upheaval outweighed the risks he recognized.

Even Jan. 6 did not completely transform Baker’s judgment. Although he acknowledged that the day revealed threats to constitutional norms, he concluded that American institutions had held firm.

During the 2024 election cycle, Baker still judged the risks posed by a second Trump term as preferable to another Democratic administration. That long record of accepting Trump’s liabilities makes his growing skepticism especially notable.

Baker’s Sept. 21 column paired its wry headline with an unusually direct subtitle about the party’s squandered moment: “After 2024, Republicans blew a great opportunity to set the country back onto the right track.”

The criticism did not appear from nowhere. Earlier this year, Baker published another column asking what had happened to the supposedly “pragmatic” approach of Trump’s first term, a description that prompted open laughter from the original commentator.

In Baker’s assessment, the administration had largely abandoned pragmatism as a governing principle. His criticism broadened during the Iran conflict, when he argued that Trump’s primary foreign policy initiative appeared poorly planned, poorly executed, and unsuccessful.

Other columns took aim at Trump’s communication, with Baker arguing that the president routinely undermined his own policy goals through ineffective messaging. The familiar promise that Trump’s chaos would eventually produce worthwhile results was becoming harder for Baker to sustain.

The shift became unmistakable during a Republican gathering in Dallas earlier this month. Appearing on the podcast The State of It: USA, Baker reacted to audience members taking an oath that called Trump “the greatest president in the history of the United States.”

His response was blunt and left little room for polite conservative euphemisms: “It is a cult. I mean, it is literally a cult.”

Baker’s progression has been steady. He moved from viewing Trump as a necessary disruptor to questioning the disappearance of first term pragmatism, highlighting foreign policy failures, condemning the movement’s spectacle as a cult, and joking that he might finally be developing TDS.

That progression matters because Baker understood Trump’s appeal, supported his objectives, and believed the movement could deliver results. He was aware of Trump’s style and temperament, recognized the implications of Jan. 6, and repeatedly decided that potential policy achievements made the tradeoff acceptable.

His focus has now moved beyond acknowledging Trump’s familiar flaws. Baker is increasingly questioning whether the political results justify those flaws at all, which represents a far more serious rupture than criticism from someone who opposed Trump from the beginning.

When Trump’s regular critics condemn him, the political terrain rarely changes. When a conservative commentator who spent years defending the rationale for supporting Trump begins calling the movement a cult and publicly wondering whether TDS has come for him, something inside the conservative establishment has plainly shifted.

The opinions expressed by contributors and/or content partners are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LeftScoop.news. Contact us for guidelines on submitting your own commentary.