In a very crowded field, Jennifer Rubin stands out as possibly the most extreme case of Trump Derangement Syndrome among the former conservatives driven mad (in my opinion) by Donald Trump’s presidency. Her hatred of Trump and the party that now is dominated by him and his supporters is so extreme that she wants the media to stop treating it as a legitimate representative of the roughly half the populace that votes for it.

Yesterday on MSNBC, she called for new “rules” that would require the media to essentially treat Republicans as pariahs. The video excerpt below is 3 minutes long and seems longer due to her tone of voice and demeanor. If you find her intolerable, skip ahead to the last 30 seconds.

.@JRubinBlogger calls for "rules" that would prohibit media outlets from treating Republicans as "normal" pic.twitter.com/iZVgMOd81I

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 13, 2021

Fred T of The Right Scoop nails it when he writes, “The new rule is ‘brag about it and act like it’s ethical.’”

Rubin’s decline has been notable for years now. A year and a half ago, Andrea Widburg wrote an essay on Rubin’s “death wish for Republicans” lamenting her transformation:

Once upon a time, Jennifer Rubin was an intelligent woman.  Things started to go downhill when she went to work for the Washington Post, but what really flipped the switch in her brain was seeing Donald Trump become president.  Not only did she lose perspective, but she also lost intelligence, self-restraint, and decency.

Even NeverTrumper Charles Cooke of The National Review was shocked by her descent into reflexive postures almost 5 years ago:

Rubin is not the only example of this president’s remarkable talent for corrupting his detractors as well as his devotees, but she is perhaps the best one. Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene, Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well. (snip) If Trump likes something, Rubin doesn’t. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hers—as anyone’s is wont to do from time to time—she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay it. The result is farcical and sad; a comprehensive and self-inflicted airbrushing of the mind. How, I have long wondered, could Trump’s unprincipled acolytes do what they do and still sleep at night? How can Jen Rubin? (snip)

When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was “ephemeral,” “a piece of paper,” “a group wish,” a “nonsense” that would achieve “nothing.” That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so “devoid of substance,” she added, illustrated the “fantasy world” in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for “phony accomplishments,” his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any “bill of goods” they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a “senseless act,” a “political act,” “a dog whistle to the far right,” and “a snub to ‘elites’” that had been calibrated to please the “climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy” (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the “ephemeral” “piece of paper,” Rubin submitted, would “materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness” and represent conduct unbecoming of “the leader of the free world.” One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.

Or, rather, one is left concluding that Rubin doesn’t have policy positions so much as she has protean cheerleading instructions, the details of which are set by whoever happens at that moment to be her coach. Take Jerusalem, a subject on which Rubin has rather run the gamut.  In 2010, she praised Marco Rubio for arguing that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, as the U.S. Congress has repeatedly recognized” and lauded the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (snip)

Last week, Trump announced that the United States would finally be recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and, in time, moving its embassy there. And what did Rubin say? That it was “a foreign policy move without purpose,“ “indicative of a non-policy-based foreign policy.”

If anyone has sacrificed the status of “normal,” it is Jennifer Rubin, not the Republican party.