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CHAPTER 2

TRUMP WINS, NEVERTRUMP REGROUPS

The Never Trumpers rarely self-reflected about why their party had not won the popular vote in five out of the six last elections, or why the last Republican president had left office with near historic unpopularity, doubled the debt during two terms, and passed arguably progressive legislation. Like the Resistance, Never Trumpers failed in all their political aims at removing or delegitimizing Donald Trump.

—Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump

In its post-election issue, the Weekly Standard published a clear-eyed editorial about Donald Trump’s victory.¹ Editor Stephen Hayes acknowledged that after years of threats, voters finally delivered the comeuppance long deserved by the ruling class. Barack Obama failed to make good on nearly all his promises; the Iran deal was a billion-dollar debacle, health care costs were skyrocketing, and the economy remained weak, among other troubles.

Hayes reiterated the Standard’s “early and often” opposition to Trump but pledged to play fair moving forward for the good of the country. “Wanting him to succeed, we’ll offer him good-faith advice. When he governs as a conservative, we’ll support him enthusiastically,” Hayes wrote. “If we see the old Trump, we won’t stint on criticism; and if he rises to the occasion, as all Americans must hope he will, we won’t hold back praise. In short, we were wrong about Trump’s electoral prospects, and we hope to be even more mistaken about the kind of president he’ll turn out to be.”

Other NeverTrumpers appeared to offer sincere promises about how they would cover the Trump presidency. Taking a conciliatory tone in the hours after Trump officially won, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg admitted he had been wrong about a Clinton victory and pledged to “do my best to support Trump when I think he’s right, and I will continue to criticize him when I think he’s not,” he wrote on November 9, 2016. “As I’ve been saying for 18 months—that’s my job.”²

With Trump headed to the White House, it initially looked as though NeverTrump might disband, cut their losses, and swallow a few ounces of their oversized reservoir of pride. It was one thing for NeverTrump to sound magnanimous after the whooping they took from their one-time Republican devotees. It was quite another to accept a drastically reconfigured Republican Party led by Donald Trump.

NeverTrump would have to own up to fomenting the rank-and-file’s uprising. Would NeverTrump confront the root causes of Trumpism and their own culpability? Further, would NeverTrump rally the fragmented party and protect the will of the electorate against an enraged Left sworn to go to any extreme to reverse the election results?

It wasn’t just that so many NeverTrumpers abandoned the Republican Party’s presidential candidate when the party needed them most. Many endorsed a third-party candidate with no shot of winning; some backed Hillary Clinton. They had burned their own reputations in service of frying Donald Trump. Even if they decided to stay in the Trumpified GOP, who wanted them?

The detailed election results were, after all, a harsh repudiation of establishment Republicans and Conservative, Inc. The Donald had achieved what no Republican presidential candidate had achieved since Ronald Reagan in 1984: With the exception of Illinois and a slim loss in Minnesota, Trump swept the Midwest. While the commentariat—and the enraged Clinton campaign—downplayed Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the outcome in those three states was stunning.

In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Wisconsin by seven percentage points, even though Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, was a native son. Trump, on the other hand, won the Badger State by nearly one percentage point. The Manhattan mogul won nearly half a million more votes than Romney won in Pennsylvania and Michigan alone.

Trump won Ohio and Iowa, states that Barack Obama won twice, by comfortable margins; he came within striking distance in Minnesota. More than 200 counties, mainly situated in the Midwest and Rust Belt, that twice voted to elect Barack Obama flipped to Trump: These so-called “pivot” counties would represent the new base of the Trumpified Republican Party. (Trump continued to court voters in the region throughout his first term by holding dozens of rallies and stumping for candidates.)

The Democratic Party’s fortified Blue Wall crumbled. Despite years of polling and focus groups, consultants’ advice, and conservative commentary about how to earn back working-class voters, the Republican Party could not come up with a winning formula.

In 2008, Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Atlantic Monthly writers at the time, forewarned that the Republican Party’s fixation on economic issues and failure to connect with “Sam’s Club” voters would keep a Republican out of the White House indefinitely. “Globalization and the rise of knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and healthcare security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration—all of these developments of the last three decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they’re materially better off than ever before,” they wrote in their book, Grand New Party. “And there’s no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP’s emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.”³

They continued. “Some combination of the populist Left and the neoliberal center is likely to emerge as America’s next political majority even so, if the conservative movement can’t find innovative ways to address the anxieties of working-class America.”⁴ (Douthat is a reliable Trump critic from his current perch at the New York Times.)

Not only did the conservative movement fail to find policies that would appeal to the so-called “Sam’s Club” constituency at a national level, they failed to nominate an attractive salesman. John McCain and Mitt Romney had no natural connection to working-class voters—nor did they try to cultivate one.

So the very same clique of Republicans opposed to Trump’s candidacy in 2016 had struggled to make a Republican presidential candidate attractive enough to win blue-collar whites in the Heartland to flip those states from blue to red: Donald Trump figured it out in less than 18 months and basically on his own. In 2012, Barack Obama won 51 percent of non-college graduates; in 2016, that exact same percentage voted for Donald Trump.⁵

“Before Trump, few politicians saw an opening in defending the forgotten working class of the interior, which may have been far larger than believed,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson in his 2019 book, The Case for Trump. “And predictably, after the 2016 election, head-scratching experts sought to reexamine why their so-called exit polls had missed the impending Trump surge.”⁶

There was plenty of head-scratching data for the political class to digest, especially for NeverTrumpers inclined to view Trump’s election as an aberration—merely a revolt against the Clinton machine—rather than the relief valve of years of pent-up dissatisfaction with GOP leadership.

According to an exhaustive CNN exit poll with nearly 25,000 respondents, 81 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Trump; so did 80 percent of devout Christians.⁷ (Evangelicals would be repeatedly attacked in a vicious way, particularly by NeverTrumpers such as David French, for supporting Trump. The targeted harassment would not have been tolerated had it been aimed at any other religious group.)

Republicans’ rebuke of international trade policies, centerpieces of both Bush administrations, was resounding. Of those who said that international trade takes away US jobs, 64 percent voted for Trump, a consensus that not long ago would have been attributed to Democratic voters, not Republicans.

Trump overwhelmingly was viewed as the candidate of change. Twothirds of American voters said the country was headed in the wrong direction; 68 percent of that group supported Trump on Election Day. Trump won independents by four points.

In another stunning act of defiance, Trump did not campaign on two policies that had long represented the core of the Republican Party’s agenda: entitlement reform and debt reduction. And it was fine with Republican voters. In the end, Trump earned as much support from Republicans as Hillary Clinton had from Democrats.

With the post-election results smacking them right in their smug faces, NeverTrump would be forced to assess the smoldering wreckage of the Republican establishment, debris that had their names and ideas all over it. Canards about the advantages of free trade and illegal immigration were on the top of the trash heap. So too was the unquestioned use of the American military to police unstable nations across the globe in pursuit of vague goals with deadly consequences.

The bill of particulars that Trump supporters handed over to the castrated Republican establishment was long and damning.

“Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created,” wrote Tucker Carlson in his 2018 book, Ship of Fools. “Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street … Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class … Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.”⁸ Carlson, a product of the neoconservative political era, emerged as an antidote to the largely neoconservative NeverTrump claque.

ANOTHER KRISTOL COLLAPSE

For Kristol, Trump’s victory earned him one more participation trophy in his long Hall of Shame overstocked with political mistakes that has become something of a running joke among the professional commentariat. “The larger question about Kristol is how much it matters that he’s been wrong as often as he has been,” observed Paul Farhi in the Washington Post in February 2016. “Stock-market columnists, weather forecasters and horse-racing touts might never survive so many blown calls. But Kristol hasn’t just survived his errant predictions, he’s thrived.”⁹ But here was Kristol, wrong again, and in a spectacular way.

Kristol’s poor soothsaying made several year-end lists tallying the worst political predictions, including his claims that Trump would lose the primaries, lose the general election, face a viable third-party candidate, and face an uprising at the Republican National Convention.¹⁰ He was like a forecaddie who could never find the ball in the rough, miscalculated the yardage, misread putts, and never replaced the pin but the country club refused to fire him.

In his pre–Election Day post in the Weekly Standard, Kristol sounded ready to redirect his energies if Trump was the victor. “After Election Day we should mostly look forward and not back,” he wrote. “There will be too much work to do to spend much time on retrospectives or recriminations. But before we all move on, I do want to reiterate one last time, to allies I’ve had the privilege of working with and to opponents I’ve had the pleasure of fighting: #NeverTrump.”¹¹

After the race was finally called on November 9, 2016, he encouraged his fellow NeverTrumpers to be “magnanimous losers,” as if they had an alternative.¹² But that call went unheeded; Kristol’s own humility was short-lived. As Trump’s transition team prepared to take the reins of government, Kristol organized the remaining NeverTrump holdouts.

Their motivation was obvious from the start: Act as the disloyal opposition to a president of their own (alleged) party while portraying themselves as the moral betters to Trump and his “deplorable” backers. That collective stunt would be a way to resurrect stalled careers and gain long-sought acceptance from the Left. (It would also be a pathway for redemption for the disastrous Iraq War. More on that in chapter 5.)

Groveling to Democrats and their cutouts in the news media—particularly on the pages of the New York Times or the sets of CNN and MSNBC—would help these now-inconsequential political players get the attention they no longer deserved.

They would finally get invited to appear on all the cool shows hosted by all the cool people like Bill Maher and Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg.

Their tarnished reputations as warmongers would be buffed to a shiny new patina; even George W. Bush, the most vilified Republican president since Richard Nixon, got a free makeover from most of the Left’s media cosmetologists after he bashed Trump and cozied up to the Obamas.

Kristol’s NeverTrump roster was filled with failed campaign consultants, B-list “conservative” commentators, fading political columnists, and Bush family loyalists. (Some I had never heard of until they jumped on the NeverTrump bandwagon.) None had ever run for public office before 2016, and their political credentials were as unimpressive as their ability to forecast election results or to win foreign wars.

The short list, with Kristol at the top, includes the following:

DAVID FRENCH

Unknown until Kristol teased his fake presidential candidacy, David French quickly realized that acting as a holier-than-thou “conservative” Trump foe would boost his indistinct punditry career. (He started writing for National Review full-time in mid-2015.)¹³ According to the memoir he wrote with his wife, the reason French signed up to serve as an army lawyer in Iraq in 2006 was because “I’ve always thought the theme of my life was that I was a patriot.” French views his anti-Trump gig as his patriotic duty while he appears on liberal cable news channels and the pages of liberal rags to satisfy the Left’s unquenchable appetite for Trump-loathing sound bites.

A practicing Presbyterian, French frequently scorns evangelicals for electing and continuing to stand by Donald Trump despite numerous scandals, including the Stormy Daniels kerfuffle. French also helped boost the phony Russian collusion storyline while castigating Republicans for exposing the legitimate scandal, the weaponization of President Obama’s Justice Department to sabotage Donald Trump.

By the middle of Trump’s first term, French was a frequent MSNBC contributor and a columnist for both Time and the Atlantic. In October 2019, he announced that he would join National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, the former editor-in-chief of the now-shuttered Weekly Standard, to form the Dispatch, an online newsletter.

TOM NICHOLS

The author of The Death of Expertise and an academic with no hands-on political experience, Tom Nichols left the Republican Party in 2012 over Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy. Calling himself a “moderate conservative” (which usually means a pro-growth, pro-war supporter without the pro-life, pro-gun baggage), Nichols “came back [to the Republican Party] when the danger of a Trump victory loomed,” he wrote in 2018 after he quit the GOP—again.¹⁴ Nichols spent an inordinate amount of time on the Twitter battlefield, cranking out one post after another, usually aimed at Trump and his supporters. He cut ties with the Federalist when the online publication became more pro-Trump, but appears regularly in USA Today, in the Atlantic, and on MSNBC. Nichols voted for Hillary Clinton.¹⁵

JENNIFER RUBIN

A lawyer with no political background, Jennifer Rubin began writing for conservative publications such as the Weekly Standard and Commentary in the early 2000s. The Washington Post hired her in 2010 to pose as a right-wing “blogger” and act as a foil for the paper’s left-wing bias. Shortly after she was hired by the Post, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that Rubin “characterizes opponents by derision … delegitimizing them rather than engaging them on the substance of their policy preferences.”¹⁶ That approach would escalate during the Trump era when, aside from her daily columns at the Post, Rubin often appeared on cable news shows to ridicule anyone in Trump’s orbit. She openly called for the public harassment of Trump advisors, including press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Trump supporters.¹⁷

BRET STEPHENS

During his time as a columnist and editorial board member for the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens was a thoughtful journalist with harsh words for the Obama administration; Trump, as the saying goes, broke him. Like Nichols, Stephens announced his separation from the Republican Party because of Trump’s views on immigration, trade, and international policy. He also denounced Republican voters who pointed to Clinton’s similar character defects as justification to vote for Trump. “Such deflections are the usual way in which people seek to justify their own side’s moral lapses,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2016.¹⁸ He prayed Trump would lose so “Republican voters will forever learn their lesson” not to ever again nominate a candidate that Stephens does not approve of.

He left the Wall Street Journal in mid-2017 to work for the New York Times, a move widely condemned by the Times’ readership, since Stephens was a so-called “climate denier.” In order to please his new leftist masters, Stephens flipped his views on climate, suddenly insisting he believed in anthropogenic global warming; he later would call for the abolition of the Second Amendment.

MONA CHAREN

Mona Charen, the longtime conservative influencer and syndicated columnist, offers her anti-Trump rants in several publications including National Review. She is a fellow for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which houses a number of NeverTrumpers. During an annual gathering of conservatives that had become Trump-friendly territory, Charen blasted the president during a discussion about #MeToo. “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House,” she said during a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) panel in Washington, D.C., in February 2018. “And because he happens to have an R after his name, we look the other way.”¹⁹ Charen gained instant affection from the Left, later boasting in the New York Times about her courage and candor.²⁰

EVAN MCMULLIN

One would assume that the candidate who came in fifth place in the 2016 presidential election, only winning an embarrassing 730,000 votes out of the more than 137 million cast, would slink back into anonymity and get a real job. But Evan McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, remained on the national political stage, bolstered by a steady stream of left-wing funding. Frequently overestimating his talent or value, McMullin claimed in 2017 that he had to wear a “light disguise” around the nation’s capital and warned that Trump’s victory would result in every nightmare scenario from despotism to authoritarianism to a land terrorized by white supremacists.²¹

MAX BOOT

The Russian-born author and historian Max Boot would morph into arguably the most caricatured of the NeverTrumpers, a shameless sycophant for the Left who used the opinion pages of the Washington Post as a confessional to reverse himself on nearly every previously held belief, all in service of blasting Trump and the Republican Party. Boot voted for Clinton; he exited both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, although there was scant evidence—aside from his nonstop support for foreign war—that he ever was part of either one.

At the end of Trump’s first year, Boot, in perhaps his most cringeworthy column in a lengthy library of similar screeds, admitted that 2017 was the year he learned about his “white privilege.”²² A few months before Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his report concluding there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, Boot listed “18 reasons why Trump could be a Russian asset.”²³ In September 2019, he wondered why all of his Trump invective hadn’t yet resulted in the president’s removal from office. “I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference,” he whined.²⁴

JONAH GOLDBERG

A longtime National Review editor and Fox News contributor, Jonah Goldberg often rejected the formal term “NeverTrump” to describe his political position in the Trump era, but his commentary before and during Trump’s first term rightfully earns Goldberg a spot alongside Kristol and company. Goldberg is a fierce critic of the president; when his colleague, Rich Lowry, penned a column rebuking the “delusion” of NeverTrump,²⁵ Goldberg wrote a harsh response defending “conservative” critics of Trump.²⁶ Republican voters, Goldberg advised, should consider Trump an “outlier.” Nope, not NeverTrump at all.

Goldberg’s year-end column in 2018 predicted Trump’s presidency will “end poorly” because “character is destiny.”²⁷ He mocked the idea of a “deep state” operation aimed at Donald Trump despite overwhelming evidence:²⁸ “Trump’s coalition is a big tent where people with tinfoil hats get to belly up to the Kool-Aid punch bowl, proudly wearing their QA-non, Pizzagate, anti–Deep State name tags,” he sneered in August 2019.²⁹ Goldberg, however, gave oxygen to one of the biggest conspiracy theories of all time, that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians to hijack the 2016 presidential election. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller admitted there was no collusion between the two interests, Goldberg said in March 2019 that the findings did not “put to rest softer versions of collusion.”³⁰

CHARLIE SYKES

Before he took on Trump, Charlie Sykes was unknown to Republicans outside of Wisconsin. The “conservative” host of a daily radio program in the Badger State, Sykes interviewed Trump in the spring of 2016 and subsequently declared himself a proud member of NeverTrump.³¹ Sykes predicted that Trump would lose his home state in 2016 and take incumbent US senator Ron Johnson down with him. “It’s not going to be pretty,” Sykes warned in August 2016.³² (Republican Johnson beat Democrat Russ Feingold by almost four percentage points.) He released a book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, in 2017.³³

Sykes is now the editor of the Bulwark, the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trump offspring. Upon the website’s launch, Sykes said the reason he is part of the NeverTrump project is because he “is all out of fucks to give.”³⁴

RICK WILSON

Until Trump’s candidacy, Rick Wilson had a thin, unimpressive, and controversial political resume. His most notable accomplishment was producing the infamous ad in 2008 featuring Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright with clips of Wright bellowing “God damn America” from his pulpit. The McCain campaign distanced itself from the spot: “If you speak against the anointed one [Obama], God will smite you,” Wilson explained in October 2008, responding to Obama supporters’ criticism of him.³⁵ Armed with a prodigious dialect of profanity and an eagerness to display his vulgarity on cable news programs at all hours of the day—he called Trump supporters, among other things, “childless single men who masturbate to anime” in 2016—Wilson earned a level of celebrity he never had pre-Trump.³⁶ (MSNBC had to mute one of his vile tirades during a live interview; this is the same guy who called Trump a “vulgar clown.”) Wilson caused an uproar for mocking Trump supporters, referring to them as “Boomer rube[s]” and using a phony Southern accent during a segment on CNN in January 2020. (Host Don Lemon later clarified that he was not laughing at Wilson’s ridiculing half the country but at another joke he had made.)

Wilson published his first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, in 2018.

In early 2017, several of the aforementioned sworn NeverTrumpers began gathering in Washington on a regular basis to plot their next move to overthrow Donald Trump. Calling their confab the “Meeting of the Concerned,” participants also included a few former Republican lawmakers and a handful of DC-based think tank officials. “The Meeting of the Concerned, which has grown all year but consists of just a few dozen people, meets during the work day and does not reveal its member list,” Washington Post blogger David Weigel reported in November 2017. “Unanimity has been hard to find, even as some members … have become more vocal about the threat posed by the Trump administration.”³⁷ The Post later reported that George Conway, husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, also attended Meeting of the Concerned gatherings.³⁸

While Kristol and company represent the starring cast of NeverTrump, a cadre of other Republican lawmakers, conservative influencers, and former bureaucrats plays a supporting role. After he stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard in December 2016, Kristol anointed his protégé, Stephen Hayes, as his successor.³⁹ Hayes, like Kristol, had been wrong about everything in 2016, which in the insulated world of the conservative commentariat entitles you to a promotion. Hayes continued Kristol’s anti-Trump legacy at the magazine, eventually turning on Trump-supporting Republicans as well.

Other media figures include Seth Mandel, opinion page editor for the New York Post who moved to the Washington Examiner magazine in 2018; John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and occasional cohost of The View; and David Frum, senior editor of the Atlantic. (Frum said in 2018 that “Donald Trump is God’s judgment on the United States for not being good enough citizens.”)⁴⁰

On Capitol Hill, no Republican lawmaker held more contempt for Donald Trump than the late Sen. John McCain. After Trump derided McCain’s captivity during the Vietnam War—“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump snarked in 2015⁴¹—McCain, who failed in 2008 to capture the office Trump now occupies, used his substantial Beltway power and prestige to undermine Trump.

The Arizona Republican bolstered the manufactured Trump-Russia election collusion plotline and represented the decisive vote in the US Senate to block the repeal of Obamacare, even though he campaigned on the issue in 2014. McCain’s funeral in September 2018 featured anti-Trump tirades disguised as eulogies. Meghan McCain’s emotional speech invoked Trump on several occasions: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” she said defiantly, a tantrum met with applause. “We live in an era where we knock down old American heroes for all their imperfections when no leader wants to admit to fault or failure.”⁴² McCain, as a host of The View, routinely criticizes the president.

Senator McCain’s close friend, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also thwarted Trump until McCain’s death. Jeff Flake, the other Republican senator from Arizona, had to bail on his 2018 reelection bid due to his unpopularity in the state for opposing Trump. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse relished his role as a Trump agitator until his 2020 reelection loomed. Two-time-losing presidential candidate Mitt Romney sought Trump’s endorsement in his lay-up Utah Senate race in 2018, then promptly turned on the president when he realized that would be the only way to get attention.

A hodge-podge of House Republicans, Beltway Bushies, and lower-tier writers and editors rounded out NeverTrump as Trump’s first year in office began.

At first, they framed their collective mission in patriotic terms. NeverTrump, they explained, would keep an erratic and amoral president in check. Any attempted breach of conservative “principles” would be swiftly condemned on the set of CNN or the opinion pages of the Washington Post. Acting as the home stadium referee, NeverTrump vowed to call “balls and strikes” on the Trump administration’s at-bats—this from a team of backbenchers who hadn’t found the political strikes zone in years.

All in the defense of conservatism, they assured us.

But then Kristol tipped his hand. “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state,” he tweeted on February 14, 2017.⁴³ Coincidentally (or not), that was the same day that former national security advisor Mike Flynn resigned amid a deep state–fueled attack based on illegally leaked details of his classified call with the Russian ambassador and an ambush by FBI director James Comey’s lackeys.

That tweet made it “Kristol” clear that the animating forces of NeverTrump would not, in fact, promote conservatism—ceding power to nameless, faceless, unelected federal bureaucrats is wholly inimical to the core of conservatism. Empowering government agencies to crush the will of the electorate is what the Left does, not the Right.

Kristol’s message would be a harbinger of what to expect from NeverTrump. Rather than fortify a Trumpified Republican Party advancing conservative policies—from federal tax reform to long-promised deregulation to pro-life protections—NeverTrump sided with the Left time and again. Not only would many NeverTrumpers embarrassingly reverse their previously-held views on a number of issues, but they would cozy up to characters far more dubious than Trump, while getting on the dole of leftist funders opposed to every conservative value and policy they had championed for two decades.