One of the most irritating things about being a professional pundit is having random strangers hold you accountable for every column, tweet, and post you’ve ever written. Needless to say, I’ve accumulated plenty of bad takes over the past 20 years. An industrious critic with lots of time on his hands could, no doubt, rifle through millions of my words and unearth a number of contradictions. 

These days, a popular way that Trump critics try to embarrass former “Never Trumpers” such as I is to point out that we’ve failed to embrace an appropriately adversarial attitude toward the presidency of Donald …