Levin endlessly trashed Trump long after he’d secured the nomination, providing implicit support to Hillary Clinton until weeks before the election when, in a transparent attempt to be able to claim to his audience that he fought against Hillary Clinton when he never had, he went through the motions of support but only with caveats about how he’d hold Trump’s feet to the fire etc etc followed by more criticisms.
Well, nobody has denied that Levin continued to attack Trump on many issues. Not "endlessly", though, else he wouldn't have had time to announce he was going to vote for Trump, or to emphasize how disastrous it would be if Hillary won. Levin made the case for voting for Trump even if you oppose him on a considerable number of issues, which was a useful case to make, and the only one likely to influence most of his listeners at the time (as I explained previously).
> ...providing implicit support to Hillary Clinton until weeks [September 6 — more like two months] before the election when, in a transparent attempt to be able to claim to his audience that he fought against Hillary Clinton when he never had...
Obviously Levin spent more time on Trump than on Hillary during the primaries, and it’s true that he continued to criticize Trump on some matters after the nomination as well. He’d never stopped attacking Hillary and the Democrats, though, and those attacks increased long before the September announcement of his intention to vote for Trump.
I listened to Levin only two or three times a week for maybe twenty or thirty minutes at a time, but I heard them. Well before the announcement I predicted on this forum that when it came down to the final choice between Hillary and Trump, Levin would publicly choose Trump. (I’ll look up the link to prove it, if you’d like to see it.)
Why shouldn’t he? No assumptions of nefarious motives were required to understand why he’d do that. Do you really believe he wanted Hillary appointing Supreme Court Justices, who could be there for a generation? Or Hillary — who tried to cover up Benghazi and who announced she’d increase the number of Muslim refugees admitted into the United States — handling the opposition to Islamism?
Despite major differences, Levin’s long-held positions are closer to Trump’s in more instances than they are to Hillary’s. As vehemently as he opposes Trump on some matters, he opposes Hillary and the Democrats even more. It’s a simple as that.