Charles Krauthammer and Trump
Performance Versus Personality
Charles Krauthammer and Trump
By Jim Reynolds | reynolds.com
April 13, 2026
The Hollywood Test
A Hollywood music director once asked his contractor:
“Who can you get to play this trumpet part?”
It wasn’t an easy part. It demanded precision, range, and nerves of steel.
The contractor paused and answered:
“I know a guy who can do it… but he’s kind of an asshole.”
The director didn’t blink:
“Then get me an asshole who can play this part.”
That exchange comes closer than anything else to Charles Krauthammer’s final, unresolved position on Donald Trump.
Krauthammer never liked the man — not the style, not the temperament, not the daily chaos. He said so repeatedly and without apology.
But he wasn’t blind to results. On judges, tax policy, and foreign posture, he saw performance that aligned with conservative priorities. He held both realities at once: the musician was difficult, yet the takes kept coming out clean.
Most commentators eventually pick a lane and stay in it. Krauthammer refused. He remained in the narrow, uncomfortable middle — crediting outcomes while refusing to rewrite the man.
He Ran Out of Time
Mark Levin started from a similar place: skeptical, doctrinal, resistant. Then the results accumulated and the institutional opposition hardened. Over time, Levin’s equation shifted — if the outcomes are right and the stakes are this high, the vehicle must be defended.
Krauthammer died in 2018, before the Trump presidency’s second act fully matured: more judges, deeper policy consolidation, and far clearer battle lines with institutions.
That timing matters.
Give Krauthammer three more years of consistent delivery plus escalating conflict, and the tension he carried likely would have moved — not into full cheerleading (that was never his style), but into a clearer acknowledgment that the performance had earned the stage.
He was results-aware and reality-based above all. Repeated outcomes carry weight. At some point the question stops being “Do I like the musician?” and becomes “Is the music good enough to keep him on stage?”
Krauthammer was already halfway down that slope when time ran out.
Closing Thought
Krauthammer didn’t endorse the man. He didn’t excuse the flaws.
But he was willing to credit the results — and that willingness is the beginning of every meaningful shift.
Sometimes the job doesn’t call for a gentleman. It calls for the guy who can play the part.
We can only speculate on how or if K’s views on Trump would have morphed over the years. We lost a good one. A generational voice. You know who started getting more airtime after he passed? VDH. That’s how I recall it. It took Victor a while to get accustomed to the part.
He was a generational voice.