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
