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
