Is Tom Nichols left or right?
Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught national-security affairs for more than two decades. He self-described as a "Never Trump conservative" in 2016 and formally left the Republican Party in October 2018, becoming an independent, but his underlying worldview — hawkish on Russia, institutionalist, pro-NATO, culturally traditional — remains that of a pre-Trump conservative. In 2025-26 he has been one of the most consistent critics of the second Trump administration from that vantage point, writing on threats to democracy and arms control (including a May 2026 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interview on arms control in the second Trump era) and appearing on Never-Trump outlets like The Bulwark. He is best understood as a conservative whose opposition to Trump has placed his output firmly within the anti-Trump coalition without his adopting progressive policy positions.
How credible is Tom Nichols's audience?
Tom Nichols scores 21.1 out of 100 on the RisingPolitics Credibility Score, ranking #161 among the political creators we track. The score starts with audience size, subtracts accounts that look fake, and weighs how strongly the audience actually engages.