Peter Wehner

Following the removal of Liz Cheney from the House leadership, Wehner was quoted in The Atlantic's electronic newsletter of May 12, 2021, 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" in a section headed "The new GOP is a threat to American democracy".

Wehner is a staunch critic of Trump. He joined many Republican figures who announced that they would not vote for Trump. 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:

A day after Trump was inaugurated as president, Wehner authored a column in The New York Times in which he expressed doubt that Trump would govern well. In a column he wrote a day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, which came after Comey asked for additional resources in investigating 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". Following Trump's defeat in the 2020 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 has "begun to lose his mind" and "has become even more destabilizing and dangerous"; he laments that much of the Republican Party has followed Trump's lead and been "radicalized."

Wehner's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Commentary, Christianity Today, the Financial Times, National Affairs, Politico, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard. Wehner also has appeared on many cable news channels, C-SPAN, and talk radio. He became a contributing editor at The Atlantic and contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times in 2015.

Wehner supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but later criticized the subsequent U.S. war strategy.

Wehner served George W. Bush as deputy director of speechwriting in 2001, and became the head of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives in 2002. After leaving the White House in 2007, Wehner joined EPPC as a senior fellow. He has also served as an advisor to several presidential campaigns.

Peter Hermann Wehner (born February 10, 1961) is an American writer and former speechwriter for the administrations of three U.S. presidents. He is a vice president and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank, and a fellow at the Trinity Forum, a nonprofit Christian organization. Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the author of The Death of Politics.