According to the
Institute for Policy Studies, Wehner's work usually centers on "domestic policy and
Christian ethics", although he is "a reliable hawk on foreign affairs and he tends to view foreign policy through the prism of
moralism". Wehner
opposes abortion. He called the
President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—which allocated $15 billion to promote prevention and treatment of
HIV/AIDS and
malaria in Africa—as "one of the great achievements of the [George W.] Bush administration." Wehner blames
Palestinian leadership for what he sees as its betrayal of its own people and for making "
anti-Semitism a central, organizing principle of Palestine life—more central, even, than
Palestinian statehood."
Donald Trump Wehner is a staunch critic of Trump. He joined many Republican figures who announced that they would not vote for him when Trump announced that he would seek the Republican nomination. In a January 2016 column in
The New York Times titled "Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump", Wehner wrote that, if Trump was the Republican nominee and
Hillary Clinton the
Democratic nominee, "I would prefer to vote for a responsible
third-party alternative; absent that option, I would simply not cast a ballot for President. A lot of Republicans, I suspect, would do the same." In another
Times op-ed in July 2016, Wehner wrote that Trump "embodies a
Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one", writing that Trump is "characterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless". He also wrote: it is fair to say that there existed in the Republican Party repulsive elements, people who were attracted to racial and ethnic politics and moved by resentment and intolerance rather than a vision of the good. This group was larger than I ever imagined, and at important moments the Republican Party either overlooked them or played to them. Some may have been hoping to appeal to these elements while also containing and moderating them, to sand off the rough edges, to keep them within the coalition but not allow them to become dominant. But the opposite happened. The party guests took over the party. A day after Trump was inaugurated as president, Wehner wrote a column in
The New York Times in which he expressed doubt that Trump would govern well. In a column appearing a day after the
dismissal of James Comey as
FBI Director, which Trump did when Comey asked for additional resources to investigate
Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, Wehner wrote that his prediction had been accurate. In July 2017, Wehner wrote, "Republican voters and politicians rallied around Mr. Trump in 2016, believing he was
anti-establishment when in fact he was anti-order. He turns out to be an institutional arsonist. It is an irony of American history that the Republican Party, which has historically valued order and institutions, has become the conduit of chaos." By February 2019, Wehner lamented that the Republican Party is "now Donald Trump's party, through and through". After Trump's defeat in the
2020 U.S. presidential election, Wehner wrote that "Trump's most enduring legacy [may be] a nihilistic political culture, one that is tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional, swimming in conspiracy theories." After reports emerged that Trump was considering imposing martial law to overturn the election and that he might appoint conspiracy theorist
Sidney Powell as a special counsel, Wehner wrote that Trump had "begun to lose his mind" and had "become even more destabilizing and dangerous"; he lamented that much of the Republican Party followed Trump's lead and been "radicalized". After the removal of
Liz Cheney from the House leadership, Wehner was quoted in
The Atlantic electronic newsletter of May 12, 2021, in a section headed "The new GOP is a threat to American democracy", as having said, "The Trump presidency might have been the first act in a longer and even darker political drama, in which the Republican Party is becoming more radicalized." ==Personal life==