Читать книгу Disloyal Opposition - Julie Kelly - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

Like many of today’s writers on the Right, I grew up in a National Review household.

My dad was a longtime subscriber and a big fan of William F. Buckley Jr. Raised during the Reagan era, I would occasionally read the magazine, too. It helped shape many of my early political views.

When National Review online posted my first article in 2015, it was a huge thrill. Each time my work was published on NRO—and once in the magazine—I thought about my dad, who passed away in 2012, and how proud he would have been. (He also would have been a MAGA man.)

While my dad was more of a typical 1980s country club Republican, I cut my political teeth in the 1990s during the reign of the so-called neoconservatives. A recent college graduate and political junkie, I signed up to volunteer for the 1992 Bush/Quayle reelection campaign. It was basic grunt work: working phone banks, registering voters, delivering yard signs. Even though it was clear President Bush would lose to Bill Clinton on November 3, 1992, it still was a shock. My first political defeat!

One figure emerged from the GOP’s political wreckage after Bush’s loss: Bill Kristol, who had served as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. He helped the party regain its footing after Clinton took the White House; Democrats, at the same time, controlled Congress and all the experts were once again predicting the demise of the Grand Old Party.

But Kristol devised a plan to fight First Lady Hillary Clinton’s health care plan in 1993. I was working for a newly elected Republican Illinois state senator at the time and became a Bill Kristol fan. When he launched the Weekly Standard in 1995, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was one of the magazine’s first subscribers.

As I continued working in Republican politics in the western suburbs of Chicago, once a Republican stronghold that has skewed blue over the past decade, I continued to follow Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives.

But after Donald Trump declared his candidacy and steadily rose in the polls throughout late 2015 and early 2016, the maestros of what some call Conservative, Inc.—the aristocracy that houses right-leaning think tanks, media organizations, major donors, and former officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations—decided Donald Trump could not be elected. Their opposition to Trump was voiced often in the pages of National Review and the Weekly Standard, as well as other less-popular publications throughout 2016.

Trump, as we know, shocked the world and won. Plenty of us had our reservations about Donald Trump when we voted for him in November 2016. Many Republican voters, myself included, had supported someone else in the primary. But when he won, barely defeating a treacherous, vindictive candidate who would have spent the ensuing four years seeking revenge against anyone who had ever wronged her, including everyone associated with the conservative movement, it was time to rally behind the president.

But Kristol and his Trump-opposing pals refused to get on board. They couldn’t get past their own bruised egos and personal agendas to stand with the president.

They have proudly displayed their defiance under one banner: NeverTrump.

Never has a president been subjected to the vicious, divisive, and self-indulgent intra-party resistance orchestrated by Donald Trump’s “conservative” foes. And his detractors aren’t only random bloggers and disgruntled party officials and wanna-be contenders: The list of agitators includes two former Republican presidential candidates, esteemed conservative opinion/news outlets, and influential thought leaders. (A detailed list is published in chapter 2.)

From the time Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015 to the point you are reading this right now, NeverTrump has plotted his demise.

And, since the summer of 2015 to the point you are reading this right now, NeverTrump has been wrong about everything: Wrong that Trump wouldn’t win the primary. Wrong that Trump wouldn’t win the election. Wrong that Trump wouldn’t survive his first year in office. Wrong that Trump wouldn’t survive his first term.

They have been wrong that Trump would cause a stock market crash, a recession, and widespread economic misery. They have been wrong that our allies would abandon us. They have been wrong that his hardline tariff policies would launch a trade war, a war that the United States would lose. They were wrong that his saber-rattling in North Korea and Iran would prompt World War III.

NeverTrump, as I explain in chapter 5, planted the very first seeds of the Russian collusion hoax. For three years, and even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, NeverTrump bolstered the destructive scheme. NeverTrump opinion outlets published collusion propaganda as early as March 2016; in the interim—before Mueller issued his report confessing that his team of partisan prosecutors, despite unlimited resources, could not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy—NeverTrump hyped every collusion tidbit and “bombshell” as fact.

NeverTrump offered aid and comfort to the enemy Left during two of the most despicable events in modern political history: the character assassination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the media mob against Covington Catholic High School students. As the Left continues to show their true colors—no tactic, no allegation, no child is out of bounds in their unholy crusade against Donald Trump—NeverTrump unflinchingly and willingly plays along.

Despite public claims by some that they have left the Republican Party and despite their collective pivot on nearly every previously held “conservative” belief, NeverTrump, disguised as legitimate voices on the Right, overpopulates left-wing cable news channels, political websites, and publications. NeverTrump’s gig as reliable mouthpieces to spew Trump hate from the right flank of #TheResistance has turned unknowns into social media celebrities, revived fledgling careers, earned nonstop hits on CNN and featured columns in the Washington Post, and resulted in long-awaited forgiveness for its members’ role in perpetuating the Iraq War.

Neoconservatives once tarred as “war criminals” by the Left now routinely link arms with their former antiwar tormentors. It is an insidious kumbaya with one shared purpose: Destroy the Bad Orange Man and everyone around him.

While they claim to be serious people with a strict adherence to “conservative” orthodoxy, in reality they have burned whatever reputations they have left. As I detail in chapter 8, many accept funding from a progressive billionaire who has worked against every policy and principle they’ve supported for three decades. The flagship of the once-powerful neoconservative movement, the Weekly Standard, was shut down under humiliating circumstances. NeverTrump campaigned for Democrats in the 2018 midterm election, which elevated lunatics such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar to power. Some NeverTrumpers have turned on evangelical Christians in a manner that can only be described as a form of religious bigotry.

Ironically, as NeverTrump claims to represent a swath of Trump-hating Republicans, support for the president among the GOP’s rank-and-file has increased since Election Day. NeverTrump members represent no one but themselves while acting as useful idiots for the Left in their selfish crusade against Donald Trump. They have betrayed the party that once provided the platform for their professional success; mocked us as rubes, racists, and cultists; and tormented Republican lawmakers who dare to support the president over NeverTrump’s objections.

They are worse than the Left because at least one knows what to expect from the Left. NeverTrump are the most dishonest political swindlers, pretending to be “conservatives” while promoting nonconservative ideology and employing the cruelest tactics of the Left.

In February 2017, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column entitled, “Why I’ve Decided to Break-Up with Bill Kristol.”¹ The piece, published in the Federalist, was part parody, part plea. I described my longtime affinity for the former editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, who had completely gone off the rails since Trump’s presidency. (I hadn’t really followed his anti-Trump antics before Election Day.)

I complimented my one-time political hero: “I hold out hope that this very smart man will be mugged by reality (as his father famously said), emerge from his Trumpian-Nixonian dystopia, and once again play a valuable role as a thought leader instead of a sore loser still trying to prove he was right,” I wrote.

How naive. Little did I know how unhinged Kristol would become. Looking back, his remarks in early 2017 make him look tame compared to the crazed hater he is today.

Others noticed NeverTrump’s folly. My friend Kurt Schlichter mocks them as the “Ahoy” crew—named for their yearly cruises that charged patrons a fortune to listen to the dull musings of Conservative, Inc.’s marquee names. These folks were famous mostly for pushing “a bunch of utopian ideas generated by a bunch of people who had done nothing in their life except go to college and write unread position papers while completing a fellowship at the Liberty Forum Coalition for Freedom,” Schlichter wrote in his 2018 book, Militant Normals.² (Schlichter often trolls NeverTrump on Twitter with cruise ship emoji.)

The party’s base and its newfound support of working-class voters revolted against Conservative, Inc. “Their real wages were stagnant at best, and the conservatives they had sent to Washington did not seem to care,” Schlichter wrote. “Their culture and religion were under attack. Their kids were getting killed in wars no one seemed interested in winning. The people they had sent to Washington did not seem to care about anything important to [normal people].”³ But NeverTrump, many of whom manipulated the inner workings of Conservative, Inc. for decades, couldn’t deal with the fact that they created the void filled by Donald Trump.

Since writing my faux break-up letter to Kristol, I have covered NeverTrump extensively. There are plenty of lesser-known NeverTrump proxies preening on social media and Right-leaning websites, but the leaders include the following: Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, David French, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Mona Charen, Evan McMullin, Charles Sykes, Rick Wilson, David Frum, the late Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Mitt Romney. (A brief description of each appears in chapter 2.) Romney would become the first US senator to vote to convict a president of his own political party when he voted in February 2020 to convict Trump of the Democrats’ abuse of power charge against him.

People would sometimes suggest that those of us covering NeverTrump should ignore them; they don’t represent the Republican Party, they don’t speak for Republican voters, and they have nothing useful to offer, some on our side would argue. Further, some of NeverTrump’s more tepid voices insist their criticism is duty-bound—just calling balls and strikes, people who hadn’t found the strike zone in two decades would claim—and part of their professional responsibility. All presidents, after all, deserve scrutiny from their party’s stalwarts. Trump is no exception.

All that is true. But, in my opinion, we need to make sure these back-stabbers are on record for what they’ve done, and that is my purpose in writing this book. They not only intend to damage Trump presidency’s but seek to divide the country during one of its most unstable periods in history. Instead of serving as honest brokers between a subset of conservatives uneasy about Trump’s past or his conduct or his plans to govern, NeverTrump doused unneeded fuel on the raging political fire.

They have not just rooted for Trump’s failure; by default, they have rooted for the country to fail.

This book isn’t just an account of how badly Donald Trump’s foes have behaved since he announced his candidacy. It isn’t about score-settling or pointing out all the ways the NeverTrump crowd has been wrong over the past five years. It’s a story about disloyalty—how people like me, millions of Republicans across the country, have been betrayed by the influencers we trusted and supported for decades.

For that, they should never have a place in the Republican Party again. This book is a Do Not Resuscitate order for any candidate, office holder, or serious publication that might consider reviving NeverTrump after their usefulness to the Left ends along with Trump’s presidency, either later this year or in 2024.

The future will remember NeverTrump as a cautionary tale: the disloyal opposition who tried—and failed—to take down Donald Trump.