George Will — the bow-tied Washington Post columnist who left the Republican Party over Donald Trump in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and pulled the lever for Kamala Harris just fifteen months ago — wrote a column admitting that President Trump’s Iran strategy restored American credibility on the world stage.

Quick, somebody check his pulse. The man just praised a Trump foreign policy outcome and the resulting seizure must have been spectacular.

Will’s column, titled “At last, the credibility of U.S. deterrence is being restored,” praised the “precision munitions, directed by spectacular intelligence” that enabled the “decapitation strategy” behind Operation Epic Fury. He called it a “necessity for beginning to reestablish a precondition for a more peaceable world.” He even swatted down critics calling it a “war of choice” as using a phrase “too casually bandied” that “rarely fits untidy reality.”

That’s George Will — the man who urged voters to “help Trump lose 50 states” in 2016 — now defending the most decisive military operation since Desert Storm.

Pinch yourself. It’s real.

Will spent a decade building his entire brand on the idea that Donald Trump was temperamentally unfit for the presidency. He left the Republican Party over it. He wrote a 600-page book called The Conservative Sensibility that never once mentioned Trump by name. Six hundred pages. Not one mention. The man treated the President of the United States like a literary restraining order.

And now he’s praising the results while performing the most elaborate “I’m not saying his name” routine since Hogwarts banned the V-word.

(He praised the operation the way a restaurant critic compliments a meal while refusing to name the chef. “The soufflé was exquisite! Who made it? Irrelevant! The oven did it!”)

When Will left the GOP at a Federalist Society luncheon in 2016 — a Federalist Society luncheon, because where else would the bow-tie crowd stage a dramatic exit — he declared “This is not my party.” He compared himself to Reagan, saying he was leaving for the same reason he joined: because he was a conservative.

Reagan’s ghost would like a word, George. It was Reagan’s “peace through strength” philosophy that Trump just vindicated by turning 43 Iranian warships into artificial reefs and sending the Supreme Leader to his eternal reward.

Will laid out the prosecution’s case against his own decade of Trump criticism — without even realizing it. He cited the fall of Saigon in 1975, Obama’s humiliating Syria “red line” that Assad crossed without consequence, and Biden’s catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal. Three catastrophic failures that destroyed American deterrence. And who restored it? The guy Will voted against. Twice.

The 30,000 Iranian protesters Will wrote about — the ones who “did not die in vain” — died under a regime that Obama’s “landmark” nuclear deal enriched and Biden’s weakness emboldened. The man who actually ended the regime is the one Will spent a decade telling us was unfit for the job.

As HotAir’s David Strom put it, Will is “the geek with a bowtie who often found Reagan beneath him.” If Reagan was beneath George Will, imagine the physical pain of admitting Trump was right.

To his credit — and we’re being generous — Will didn’t go full Max Boot and become a liberal. He didn’t pull a Jennifer Rubin and start writing Democratic Party talking points. He just quietly admitted the policy worked while doing verbal gymnastics to avoid crediting the guy who made the call.

But George Will eating crow is not the real story here. The real story is what his concession tells you about where the entire Never-Trump “movement” is headed — and the answer is the dustbin.

There’s a pattern, and it’s been building for years. Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ house conservative, called Trump “a loudmouth vulgarian” in 2015. By 2024, he was writing that Trump was “crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive” and admitting that MAGA voters’ anger about “Covid restrictions, immigration policy, and how to get our allies to pay more for their defense” was justified. That’s not a man defending a position. That’s a man negotiating the terms of surrender.

And now Will. The most prestigious Never-Trumper in American journalism — the Pulitzer Prize winner, the Reagan-era intellectual, the man who got invited to prep Reagan for his presidential debate — just conceded that Trump’s foreign policy instincts were correct on the single most consequential military decision in a generation.

You know what that kills? The last intellectual argument Never-Trumpism had.

Think about it. They already lost the “he can’t win” argument — twice. They lost the “the economy will collapse” argument when wages went up and inflation came down. They lost the “our allies will abandon us” argument when NATO countries started actually paying their bills. (France is building new nuclear warheads and Germany is frantically looking for real guns to replace the broomsticks. You’re welcome, Europe.)

The one argument they had left — the only card remaining in the deck — was “Trump is temperamentally unfit for life-and-death foreign policy decisions.” That was it. That was the final fortress. And George Will just handed over the keys.

Mark my words: within a year, the only Never-Trumpers still standing will be the ones who went full liberal — the Max Boots and Jennifer Rubins who crossed over entirely. The ones who stayed conservative, like Will and Stephens, are going to keep writing these “the policy worked but I still don’t like his tweets” columns until they just quietly stop writing them altogether.

Never-Trumpism as an intellectual movement required one foundational belief: that Trump’s judgment was too dangerous to trust with real power. When the arch-Never-Trumper himself admits the judgment was sound on Iran — the highest-stakes call a president can make — the foundation cracks. And buildings don’t stand long on cracked foundations.

The media is going to keep booking Never-Trumpers on cable news for a while, the same way they kept booking Blockbuster executives after Netflix killed them. “Tell us, George, why was Trump wrong about the thing he was just proven right about?”

We’ll take it, George. We know it hurt. We know you voted for the lady who wanted to stop this from happening. And we know that bow tie is feeling a little tight right now — because the crow goes down rough when you’ve been wrong for a decade.