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.
CHAPTER 3
USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE LEFT
Demented and sad, but social.
—The Breakfast Club (1985)
In 2003, a prominent conservative commentator authored an impressive
