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CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH OF NEVERTRUMP

Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

—The editors, National Review, January 22, 2016

Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Bill Kristol had a meltdown on MSNBC.

The Weekly Standard editor-in-chief was “practically crying,” host Joe Scarborough observed, at the idea that Donald Trump might shock the world and eke out a victory on Election Day. Kristol, raising his voice and with tears in his eyes, nearly leaping out of his chair, accused Scarborough of helping to elevate the candidacy of the Manhattan tycoon. “This show was very tough on Trump in late 2015, early 2016, are you going to pretend that?” Kristol sneered at Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, on October 20, 2016. “If that’s your way of rewriting history, that’s fine with you guys.”¹

It was an odd display: the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, a man who had been a fixture in Republican Party politics for nearly three decades, stifling sobs at the thought that Donald Trump, a Republican, would win the White House. Perhaps the fatigue of sitting on too many think tank panels and writing too many opinion columns and headlining too many cruise ship fundraisers finally caught up with the aging political hand.

After all, Kristol should have been elated. Trump was poised to beat Hillary Clinton, the woman whose health care plan Kristol helped kill in the 1990s.

But Kristol’s tantrum revealed his frustration that his yearlong, very public effort to sink Donald Trump’s candidacy would, like so many of his past political calculations, end in failure. Beltway creatures—the only people who really matter to Bill Kristol—already were mocking his almost unmatched political losing streak; Trump’s victory would be Kristol’s biggest humiliation of all time.

His tears were for himself, not for the Republican Party and certainly not for the country.

While Kristol would be a new name to many on the Left during the Trump era, he already is well known on the Right. A conservative thought leader and quarterback for the Iraq War, Kristol long had occupied a premium spot in the Republican Party’s hierarchy. After Bill Clinton beat his boss in 1992, Kristol helped lead the Republican Party out of the political wilderness at a time when many predicted the GOP was finished.

A series of memos, authored by Kristol, detailed a strategy to defeat Hillary Clinton’s universal health care legislation.² Clinton’s plan went down in flames in late 1993 before a bill even made it to the floor of the Democratically controlled US Senate. The following year, in large part due to the demise of the Clinton health care proposal and fear it could be resurrected, fired-up Republican voters elected a Republican-majority House of Representatives for the first time in 50 years.

Kristol’s memos morphed into the Weekly Standard, a thin but influential magazine that debuted in 1995. It featured several top-notch conservative writers; the publication was a must-read in the Bush White House and served as a crucial organ of pro–Iraq War propaganda before, during, and after the deadly conflict. The animating ideas of neoconservatism, a political philosophy conceived by Kristol’s father, Irving, played out in the pages of the Standard.

Kristol was a regular on Sunday news shows and even earned a spot in the New York Times editorial pages. He was a Beltway-accepted promoter of conservative thought and Republican Party politics.

But when Trump won the Republican nomination for president against his wishes, Kristol turned on the insubordinate party that had powered his gravy train for decades. He became the self-appointed leader of what evolved into “NeverTrump,” a small assortment of embittered, parochial “conservatives” enraged over Trump’s candidacy. Consumed with their self-importance and alarmed at their potential demotion within the GOP, they pledged to crush the brash interloper who had never edited a very important magazine or toiled at a very important conservative foundation.

Acting as a political Praetorian Guard of sorts, this group behaved as though they, not elected officials or—ew, gross—Republican voters, called the shots. NeverTrump leveraged their long-cultivated Rolodex of powerful press contacts to hit cable news shows and Twitter to express their displeasure about Trump’s candidacy.

Interestingly, the early battle between Team Trump and Team Kristol would be a proxy between the old guard and a national GOP agitated at its gutless party leadership; party faithful saw little daylight between Beltway Republicans and Democrats. A Queens-born international businessman who in no small measure owes his success to his father versus a Manhattan-born political guru who in no small measure also owes his success to his father—not exactly the head-to-head challenge that loyal Republicans asked for in 2016. But there we were.

“To Trump, Kristol is the rigged system he’s fighting against, the personification of an elite establishment overdue for a rude awakening,” noted Michael Crowley in a July 2016 profile on Kristol. “And, of course, Trump’s not entirely wrong about that.”³

Kristol started trolling Trump shortly after he launched his campaign from the luxury hotel in New York City that bears his name. Throughout the last half of 2015, Kristol predicted Trump’s campaign would end before the ball dropped in Times Square; he even started a Twitter hashtag—#PeakTrump—to assure his followers that The Donald’s days were numbered.⁴ (It was a warning he would give repeatedly throughout the Republican primaries, general election, and Trump’s first term as president.) “From the beginning of the billionaire’s campaign, there has been no better contra-indicator of whether a given controversy would affect Trump than Bill Kristol’s Twitter feed,” one writer for New York magazine presciently noted in January 2016.⁵

That same month, Kristol joined like-minded conservatives in what will forever be considered the establishment’s declaration of war against Donald Trump and his supporters.

BUCKLEY’S BRETHREN TAKE AIM AT TRUMP

On the eve of the 2016 Republican primary season, nearly two dozen conservative influencers took to the pages of National Review, the conservative movement’s most esteemed magazine, to contribute to the publication’s infamous “Against Trump” issue.⁶ Every page was devoted to discrediting the rogue candidate at the time leading an impressive field of Republican governors, senators, and business executives.

Known for its mantra, “standing athwart history, yelling Stop,” the publication founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s attempted to stand athwart the accelerating freight train of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and yell to his supporters, “’Don’t you dare.”

Contributors included Kristol, broadcaster Glenn Beck, columnist Cal Thomas, scholar Thomas Sowell, and a handful of George W. Bush administration officials. It was a collection of some of the most powerful and revered names in the conservative movement at the time.

“Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself,” wrote editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and his colleagues. And that was kind compared to the other rants featured in the issue.

In fairness, National Review editors and contributors had reason to suspect Donald Trump was not one of “them.” A brash billionaire with political pals on both sides of the aisle and no record of fealty to conservative principles—“gaping holes” in his record, the NR editors truthfully surmised—Trump deserved legitimate scrutiny by Republican Party stalwarts. Bill and Hillary Clinton, after all, had attended Trump’s wedding to Melania.

Trump’s views on foreign affairs and social policies important to conservatives over time were erratic if not alarming. Pro-life conservatives were justifiably concerned after he suggested in 2015 that it was “possible” he once donated to Planned Parenthood.⁷ Further, his stance on gun control was unclear, as he once called out NRA-funded Republicans and boosted a ban on so-called “assault rifles.”⁸

But the “Against Trump” issue came across as a vanity project that smacked of both desperation and arrogance. Commentary veered from sober analysis to self-serving moralizing. Some contributors regurgitated the Democrats’ most inflammatory charges against Trump, including accusations he was a racist, a sexist, and an Islamophobe—pure irony from thought leaders of a political party accused of the same wickedness by the Left for decades.

“Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix,” warned longtime conservative commentator Mona Charen, unwittingly making the pro-Trump case for conservatives who think the two are not only compatible but essential.

“Should his election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime,” complained John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, the publication run for more than 30 years by his father Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished (and pro-Trump) public intellectual.

They—accurately—interpreted Trump’s support as a bootheel kick to the collective groin of the weak, eager-to-please, and largely incompetent conservative ruling class. “If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry and his colleagues.⁹

In the succeeding 10 months, Lowry would get his answer. And it would require not more condemnation of Trump and his conservative backers but a long look in the mirror.

Concern over Trump’s shaky conservative street cred wasn’t their only beef: Trump’s demeanor, mannerisms, and thrice-married status offended the Brahmin sensibilities of the National Review class. “Can conservatives really believe that, if elected, Trump would care about protecting the family’s place in society when his own life is—unapologetically—what conservatives used to recognize as decadent?” asked Russell Moore. “It is not just that he has abandoned one wife after another for a younger woman, or that he has boasted about having sex with some of the ‘top women of the world.’ It’s that he says, after all that, that he has no need to seek forgiveness.”¹⁰ (There is no record of similar concerns about John McCain’s admitted infidelity or extramarital affair with and subsequent marriage to a much younger woman. In a 2008 interview with CNN’s John King about McCain’s history of cheating on his first wife, who had been badly injured in a car accident while he was in captivity in Vietnam, McCain told King that “the responsibility is mine” as to why the marriage failed.)¹¹

But the magazine’s gambit didn’t work; in fact, it backfired in a spectacular way, unleashing a tide of pent-up resentment between rank-and-file Republicans and party masters. Frustrated by the GOP’s failure to derail the far-left agenda of President Barack Obama despite winning control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, Republican voters were out of patience and in no mood to take marching orders from conservative commanders who lacked a plan to defeat Hillary Clinton in November 2016.

National Review’s plea not only fell on deaf ears, it likely contributed to Trump’s ascendancy. “Many now believe the reason Trump won both the primary and national election is precisely because publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard coddled and encouraged a Republican Party that not only betrayed conservatism but turned on what was once its own base by becoming the party of Washington insiders courting favorable press from pundits,” Breitbart News noted after the election.¹²

Mark Steyn, a onetime contributor to NR, mocked the publication for its outdated fealty to the Morning-in-America era and droning wistfully about how the Gipper would not approve of The Donald. But Ronald Reagan, Steyn noted, could never be elected governor of California today. “The past is another country, and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans gave it away,” Steyn wrote. “Reagan’s California no longer exists.”¹³

After the release of “Against Trump,” the leading GOP contender wasted no time trolling National Review. “The late, great, William F. Buckley would be ashamed of what had happened to his prize, the dying National Review!” Trump tweeted on January 21, 2016.¹⁴ The battle lines had been drawn between the Republican elite and the GOP’s most flamboyant party crasher. And the rank-and-file’s rebuke against the former would be swift.

One week after the release of the “Against Trump” issue, the tycoon barely lost the Iowa caucus to Texas senator Ted Cruz. (Trump would go on to win nearly every other contest.) The Republican National Committee rescinded an invitation for National Review to help moderate one of the debates.¹⁵ The “Against Trump” issue, rather than scare off Republicans from voting for Trump, had the opposite effect.

(A few years after his publication, Lowry and others expressed regret about the issue as it spurred what would become known as the NeverTrump movement. “I wish they’d never come up with that phrase,” Lowry told the New York Times in October 2019, referring to NeverTrump.¹⁶ Brent Bozell III, a contributor to the “Against Trump” missive who later became a Trump ally, told the Times, “Had I known this was going to be perceived as the bible of the anti-Trump movement, I never would have written it.”¹⁷)

Trump was unfazed by National Review’s condemnation. If anything, the thrashing by buttoned-up, tight-assed, tone-deaf “conservative” scolds motivated Trump to push back even harder. And he went right for the jugular, saying the quiet parts out loud, as they say, related to the Republican Party’s biggest failures in a generation.

THE RECKONING OF THE IRAQ WAR

On a debate stage in February 2016, Trump spoke what was—up until that point—considered blasphemy in the Republican Party. Standing just feet away from former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump declared that the Iraq War had been a mistake and that America’s 13-year-long military involvement had destabilized, not liberated, the Middle East. Then, in typical Trump style, he went a step further. “They lied,” he roared from Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”¹⁸ The crowd mostly booed.

The next morning on Fox News, Trump continued his tirade. “The Iraq War was a disaster,” he told the morning news hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had opposed the war. “We spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors who we love … what do we have, nothing? We have absolutely nothing.”¹⁹

Trump’s roast of the Iraq War would be the most significant challenge to conservative orthodoxy in years; it resulted in a group therapy session for large chunks of the Republican Party who would reassess their attachment to widely accepted slogans that had, by and large, been empty vessels for failed policies. According to polling in 2015, most Republicans still believed the Iraq War was the right thing to do.²⁰ By 2018, less than half of Republicans believed the US succeeded in achieving its goals in Iraq.²¹ (More recriminations about the war would continue into Trump’s first term.)

Trump’s tongue-lashing for the perpetrators of the Iraq War would be a harbinger of things to come from his candidacy and presidency. No issue was off-limits, no accepted truth too sacred to challenge. It is an approach that to this day appeals to rank-and-file Republicans and some Democrats while rankling urbane, effete backers of the Democratic Party and NeverTrump fussbudgets.

THE PARTY’S OVER

By May 2016, Trump locked up the nomination, to much widespread pearl-clutching by the party’s top tier. Trump crushed his opponents, winning a record number of Republican votes while besting the previous record held by George W. Bush in 2000, in another ironic slap at the Bush dynasty.

The Republican establishment was rocked to its neoconservative core.

But it was the post-primary conduct of NeverTrump that deepened the fault lines between the conservative establishment opposed to Trump and conservative voters who overwhelmingly supported him. Trump gave voice to long-simmering anger about Republicans’ complicity in unfettered illegal immigration, unfair trade agreements, and endless foreign war, matters that had been ignored by Washington’s political class for more than a decade. Conservatives were especially alarmed at the Left’s takeover of academia, the news media, Hollywood, and the corporate world while conservatives were unable to halt the incursion.

The once-patriotic heartbeat of the Republican Party had been put on a bypass machine by party leaders, who seemed more concerned about the plight of illegal immigrants than of American citizens who had been gradually displaced—occupationally, culturally, academically, and socially—in their own homeland.

Trump, with his gaudy but genuine slogan to “Make America Great Again,” made an unapologetic commitment to put America’s interests first. It was a scolding as much as a promise. To the neoconservatives who ruled the Republican Party, Trump’s MAGA mantra disemboweled the internationalist Bush Doctrine, a post-9/11 foreign policy approach that had resulted in protracted war in several countries, with dubious, deadly outcomes.²² To Democrats, MAGA posed a direct hit to the undercurrent of anti-Americanism that had animated the party for years.

Trump openly antagonized the power base of both political parties—that, of course, was the real threat to establishment conservatives.

So, rather than coalesce around the Republican nominee in preparation for a brutal general election against a well-funded Democrat hostile to conservative views and values, GOP stalwarts fortified their ranks in a galling rebuke of party acolytes. The very same people who had long profited from their affiliation with Republicans—who sold them books and headlined fancy fundraisers and consulted on campaigns and led them into treacherous wars—turned on their patrons in an ugly way.

“Make sure he loses,” bow-tied George Will advised beleaguered conservative voters in a June 2016 interview. “Grit [your] teeth for four years and win the White House.”²³

Will, channeling Reagan in another slap at Republican voters, changed his voter registration from Republican to unaffiliated because, as he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “the party left me.”²⁴ He later would join other alleged “conservatives” who either endorsed Hillary Clinton or rooted for Trump’s defeat.

Kristol’s desperation to thwart Trump prompted him to make the first in a series of embarrassing moves: Around Memorial Day, he hinted that he had an independent candidate who would pose a serious challenge to Trump in the general election. Speculation swirled. Trump responded on Twitter, calling Kristol a “dummy” and warned that conservatives could “say good bye to the Supreme Court” if a conservative independent jumped in the race to take votes away from the Republican nominee.²⁵

But Kristol’s secret candidate turned out to be David French, an unknown writer at National Review. (French later would emerge as a leading figure in the NeverTrump movement.) The political commentariat on both sides mocked Kristol’s attempted subversion. Vox referred to French as a “random dude off the street”²⁶ and GQ called French a “random blogger” who had refused to allow his wife to drink, use Facebook, or have phone conversations with men during his one-year deployment as a military lawyer to Iraq.²⁷

But Kristol’s tease would be short-lived and crash in a mortifying fashion. French, in his hallmark self-aggrandizing style camouflaged with a veneer of nonexistent humility, declined to run. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve my country, and I thank God for the successes I’ve had as a lawyer and a writer, but it is plain to me that I’m not the right person for this effort,” he wrote.²⁸ French’s refusal to run wouldn’t be the last humiliation that Kristol would suffer before Election Day.

With time and options running out, NeverTrump plotted how to overthrow the Republican presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention. Delegates planning to attend the party’s convention in Cleveland were urged to abandon Trump. One group, Delegates Unbound, produced a 30-second television commercial featuring a split screen with competing video clips of Trump and Ronald Reagan. The ad urged convention delegates to “choose your values, follow your conscience.”²⁹

National Review helped make the case that defections were allowed—there was some legal haggling about whether party rules permitted delegates elected to represent a specific candidate to switch. The drastic measure, one National Review contributor insisted, would be necessary in order to salvage the party’s chances in November. “Discontent with Trump remains high,” wrote John Fund on July 10, 2016. “He languishes in the polls behind a weak Hillary Clinton, his fundraising numbers are anemic, his campaign shambolic. Despite previously promising to do so, he has refused to release his tax returns … Many delegates believe damaging material from his tax returns will leak out of the federal government in October.”³⁰

Kristol, as would be his habit for the entirety of Trump’s first term, imagined a farfetched scenario where Trump would go down in flames. He suggested that delegates should support either two-time loser Mitt Romney or Ohio governor John Kasich, who suspended his 2016 presidential campaign in May after only winning his home state. “They need to have a conversation very soon and agree that one of them will announce this week that he is willing to compete for the nomination after the convention has disposed of Donald Trump,” Kristol daydreamed in the pages of his magazine a week before the convention. “It’s even conceivable both could announce their willingness to serve, and that they intend to let the delegates choose between them and anyone else who chooses to compete.”³¹

Of course, that didn’t happen. The effort to oust Trump caused only a minor fracas on the convention floor a few days before Trump’s acceptance speech.³² He won the needed number of votes with little resistance.

But the number of establishment Republican and conservative defectors continued to mount. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in August 2016 to explain why she would not vote for Donald Trump.³³ Former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber wondered aloud whether Trump was a “sociopath” in an interview outlining his various reasons for opposing Trump’s candidacy.³⁴ (Weber later would be caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia election collusion as prosecutors scrutinized his lobbying work on behalf of Ukrainian interests.)³⁵

A long list of former national security experts who once served Republican presidents, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, signed on to a letter pledging not to vote for Trump. “From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief,” concluded the architects of the lengthy wars and foreign conflicts that had disillusioned so many rank-and-file Republicans and that Trump promised to end. “Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”³⁶

Trump’s erratic campaign helped reinforce the narrative that he was unprepared to lead the country and would be a reckless commander in chief. By late August, Trump had named his third campaign manager, longtime Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway.³⁷ Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine was reaping daily windfalls. Prospects for a win in November looked grim; NeverTrump was already looking forward to a Trump-free future.

With summer winding down, Trump as the official Republican presidential candidate, and high-profile Republicans refusing to launch a last-ditch bid, NeverTrump scraped up someone even lesser known than David French to oppose Trump in the general election: Evan McMullin. The former CIA undercover agent and congressional staffer succumbed to recruitment efforts by Kristol and Rick Wilson, a self-proclaimed Republican campaign strategist, to take on Trump as an independent. The single, childless Mormon with a laughably thin political resume would act as the moral foil to Trump, they predicted. Conservatives would have no justification for choosing an amoral business mogul from New York City over a goody-goody from Utah.

Even the Washington Post touted McMullin’s clean-as-a-whistle image, offering glowing admiration for his courage to take on the evil magnate: “To understand that optimism, you have to understand Evan McMullin,” cooed Josh Rogin in September 2016. “Unlike his backers, he’s not trying to save the Republican Party or the conservative movement. He’s doing what he has always done, volunteering for service to play whatever role he can to fight what he views as a threat to America. In this case, that threat is Trump.”³⁸

McMullin’s candidacy started to pick up some endorsements from anti-Trump conservatives, but his long-shot effort appeared to be in vain. That is, until NeverTrump received a gift that even Bill Kristol couldn’t screw up: the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

THE OCTOBER SURPRISE

On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post posted a recording of a private conversation from 2005 between Trump and Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.³⁹ The exchange included lewd comments about women; Trump bragged that, because of his fame and wealth, women “let you do” anything, such as “grab them by the pussy.” (The tape, perhaps not coincidentally, dropped shortly before WikiLeaks released hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.)

Trump apologized for the language he had used, but the damage to his campaign appeared to be fatal. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had been hostile to Trump’s candidacy from the start, disinvited the candidate to an event and said he would no longer campaign for Trump. The move reignited the feud between the two: Responding on Twitter, Trump advised Ryan to “spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican nominee.”⁴⁰

Republicans who had endorsed Trump started to demand that Trump abandon his candidacy and defer to Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and Trump’s ticket mate. “It would be wise for him to step aside and allow Mike Pence to serve as our party’s nominee,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), a Trump supporter, tweeted the day after the tape went public.⁴¹ Other high-profile Republican women, including Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (who exited the 2016 Republican primary early) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), joined Fischer’s plea.⁴²

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) bragged that he was right all along about Trump’s temperament and character—Kasich is on his second marriage to a younger woman and has a reputation as a hothead⁴³—and promised to help rebuild the Republican Party after Trump lost.⁴⁴ David French, the self-appointed religious scold of NeverTrump, blasted Trump voters on National Review’s website for blaming the media’s last-minute hit job: “If you’re a Trump fan, this one’s on you. Your eyes were open: You were warned, and you took the plunge anyway. You should be furious at two people today: Donald Trump and yourself. It’s time for some soul-searching,” he preached.⁴⁵

Hundreds of Republican candidates and lawmakers withdrew their endorsements. A stable of National Review writers, including Jonah Goldberg and Dan McLaughlin, committed to McMullin.⁴⁶ Others promised to write in a candidate or vote for Hillary Clinton.

But the tide of outrage from the Republican establishment played right into Trump’s hands: Just as with the “Against Trump” missive, voters viewed the rebuke as another way for party elders to thwart their choice. It would not stand.

In fact, some Republicans were forced to promptly reverse themselves after facing backlash from their constituents for abandoning Trump. Less than three days after tweeting her demand that Trump exit the race, Fischer backtracked and restated her support for the Republican ticket.⁴⁷ “The quick reversals back to Mr. Trump’s camp vividly illustrated Republicans’ predicament as they grapple with a nominee whom some of their core supporters adore, a Democratic candidate their base loathes—and a host of voters who believe that Mr. Trump is self-evidently unsuited for high office,” wrote Jonathan Martin in the New York Times on October 11, 2016.⁴⁸

It would be a harbinger of which side Republican voters would take when faced with a choice between Trump and old-line party leadership. The Access Hollywood matter also served up another opportunity for Trump to remind Americans, especially younger voters, exactly who the Clintons were.

In a gutsy piece of stagecraft, Trump hosted a pre-debate press conference on October 10 with four women, including Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault and rape. (Broaddrick also claimed that Hillary Clinton had threatened her.) The stunt was a display of Hillary Clinton’s immense political baggage and her own husband’s predatory sexual behavior; it also served as a stark visual that, had Trump been running against anyone besides Hillary Clinton, his prospects might not have been so bright.

To twist the optics knife even deeper, Trump attempted to seat the victims in his box for the debate, which would have placed the women near the former president; the debate commission prevented the move.⁴⁹

And it was during that debate in St. Louis that Trump, unbowed by the scandal besieging his campaign, murmured his most memorable comment of the general election. When Clinton remarked that she was relieved Trump was “not in charge of the law in our country,” Trump, not missing a beat, responded, “because you’d be in jail.”⁵⁰

That moment stood in sharp contrast to the debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama four years earlier when Romney fumbled his face-to-face encounter with Obama over the president’s lies about the Benghazi terror attacks. Confronted by debate moderator Candy Crowley, who sided with Obama’s misleading version of events by insisting he did call the deadly assault an act of terror (he had not), Romney stammered to condemn the Obama administration for its egregious excuse that a YouTube video sparked the spontaneous attack.⁵¹ Romney’s stumble on the debate stage a month before Election Day deflated Republican voters and contributed to his losing a very winnable race in 2012.

Trump, on the other hand, managed to survive a blow that would have tanked the campaign of any other candidate—a feat not unnoticed by Republican voters weary of Romney-esqe timidity. By the beginning of November, Trump had as much support among likely Republican voters as Clinton had among Democrats.⁵² Further, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll taken just days before Election Day, 97 percent of Trump voters had an unfavorable view of Clinton, the exact percentage of Clinton voters who felt the same about Trump. “This depth of animosity is unprecedented in available data from previous elections,” the pollsters observed.⁵³

No kidding.

But hundreds of Republican and conservative leaders remained opposed to Trump.⁵⁴ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced he would vote for McMullin, an act of pure silliness. French threatened to shame believers to do the same. “I’ll be calling on Christians to support a candidate who possesses real integrity,” French said of McMullin.⁵⁵

Dozens of one-time party heroes, including former secretary of state Colin Powell and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, pledged to vote for Clinton. Some news outlets reported that former president George H.W. Bush and his wife also would pull the lever for Hillary Clinton.⁵⁶ (The Bushes and Clintons had developed a chummy relationship, something that Republicans, especially conservatives, viewed as a betrayal.)

ELECTION DAY: STORM THE COCKPIT OR DIE

Meanwhile, conservatives were reconciling their personal aversion to Trump’s style with their genuine fears about the consequences of a Clinton presidency. An anonymous essay published in September 2016 described, using a stark analogy, the choice before conservatives on Election Day. “The Flight 93 Election,” referring to the doomed airliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, after passengers wrested control of the jet from Islamic terrorists, made the conservative case for Donald Trump.⁵⁷

The 4,300-word piece detailed the multiple failures of the conservative hierarchy; the “whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc. reeks of failure,” the unnamed author wrote. “Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation.” The essay described the prospective doom posed by a Hillary Clinton presidency and the reasons why conservatives would be justified in voting for a presidential candidate, who, by nearly every measure, contradicted the airbrushed avatar of a true conservative leader.

Writing as Publius Decius Mus in the Claremont Review of Books—it initially was published at the Journal for American Greatness website, now American Greatness, for which I write—the author directly challenged arguments made by marquee conservative influencers against the election of Donald Trump while advocating a vote for Clinton or a third-party candidate:

“Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.”

The writer presciently warned that the Clinton machine would “be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England.” Little did he, or anyone outside of the Obama White House or Clinton team, know that a Stasi-like cabal of political operatives were already using powerful government tools to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign, a scheme that would escalate after he won.

Then this parting shot: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”

The essay outraged the conservative intelligentsia, mostly because it was clear the writer was of their ilk. Kristol outed the identity of the writer—Michael Anton, a former Bush speechwriter—and NeverTrumpers subsequently piled on. (More on this in chapter 6.) In his criticism of the piece, Jonah Goldberg, unwittingly making Anton’s point, admitted, “I am the first to concede that if Hillary Clinton wins it will likely be terrible for the country,” but the Republic will not in fact literally die like the passengers on Flight 93.⁵⁸

Point missed.

So while pragmatic conservative thinkers like Anton recognized the cataclysmic future under the reign of Hillary, NeverTrump, shamefully, continued their opposition to the Republican nominee while bracing for another Clinton presidency.

A few days before the election, Kristol predicted that Clinton would win by a larger margin that Obama had won by in 2012. “I think there’s probably a little more hidden Hillary Clinton vote than hidden Donald Trump vote,” Kristol said in an interview on MSNBC on November 4.⁵⁹ In another one of his Trump-related delusions in the same interview, Kristol claimed that “many working class white women”—it’s unlikely Kristol knows any—“whose husbands are enthusiastic for Trump but don’t want to pick a fight at home who might go into the ballot booth and vote for Hillary Clinton.”

And as the polls were about to close on Election Day, Kristol again predicted the outcome would be like 2012.⁶⁰

THE NOVEMBER SURPRISE

Hours later, Kristol would join a dozen other commentators on the sprawling set of ABC News as the vote totals gradually indicated Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States.

Realizing that another political prediction would crash and burn, Kristol struggled to explain what was about to happen while proving, once again, he had learned nothing. “He doesn’t agree with [Republican House Speaker] Paul Ryan on entitlement reform, the heart of the congressional Republican agenda,” Kristol said at around 1:00 A.M. on November 9 as the country awaited the final verdict. “He’s got a very different view of immigration, of trade. Is he really going to go ahead with the trade policies he talked about? We’re in even more unchartered waters than we really think.”⁶¹

With that final quip, Kristol was uncharacteristically correct.

An hour later, the major network news stations called the race for Donald Trump. The country—and the world—was stunned. The Republican Party would never be the same. And NeverTrump suffered another loss at the hands of Donald Trump.

There would be many more to come.