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She came up as a "conservative" and wrote for Commentary, PJ Media, Human Events, and The Weekly Standard, before eventually gaining her permanent seat at the Washington Post.

This is the model that many of the neoconservatives followed in 2000s. Start with smaller but influential by smaller outlets or magazines, gain notoriety, then transition to the big time. Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks also took the same path.

Commentary is a explicitly Jewish magazine, founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 and today considers itself "the leading postwar Journal of Jewish affairs". The founder of the magazine Elliot E. Cohen was it's first editor. After his suicide in 1959 both Norman Podhoretz, and later his son John Podhoretz served as long-running editors of this magazine. Norman Podhoretz, along with Irving Kristol, are considered founders of the NeoConservative movement.

The Weekly Standard was founded by Irving Kristol's son, Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. It published from 1997 to 2018, when their incessant anti-Trump rhetoric had lost them most of their readers. But during their heyday they were the most powerful Conservative magazine. Many of their contributors went on to paying positions at various think thanks and then into the Bush administrations. Alumni, besides Jennifer Rubin, include Elliott Abrams, Peter Berkowitz, John Bolton, Ellen Bork, David Brooks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, Harvey Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Joe Queenan, and John Yoo.

Why did the Neocons turn so savagely on Donald Trump? Were the Neocons ever legitimate Conservatives, or were they always LARPing as Conservatives while secretly being Leftists inside? |

Jennifer Rubin is of-a-piece with the other Neoconservatives in her trajectory from up-and-coming Conservative writer, to successful mainstream Conservative editorialist / personality, to Trump hating party-switching no-longer-a-conservative.