used his international platform to promote anti-abortion policies around the world. “Every child born and unborn is a sacred gift from God,” Trump said during his September 2019 address to the United Nations.34
Trump’s vocal defense of the unborn came at a time when the Democratic Party finally revealed its support for straight-up infanticide. After Virginia state lawmakers considered a bill that would permit the killing of a child even after the mother had given birth, Democratic governor Ralph Northam (supported by many NeverTrumpers over his Republican rival, Ed Gillespie) calmly explained how the “infant would be kept comfortable” as the mother and doctors decided whether or not to murder the baby.35
NeverTrumpers, however, waved away the Democrats’ slouch toward infanticide. Most were silent about Northam’s comments. After Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seemingly advocated for abortion to halt climate change, Jennifer Rubin warned Sanders that he might want to keep their baby-killing plans quiet. “At a time when progressives have the high ground in abortion politics, citing the cruel and unreasonable abortion bans, Sanders’s remark is, to put it lightly, unhelpful,” she wrote. “This is similar to how the phony infanticide issue put Democrats on defense … as with Sanders, all the issue did was put the target on Democrats’ backs in the battle to determine who gets cast as the most unreasonable side in the abortion fight.”36
Tom Nichols referred to abortion as a “medical process” and wondered why abortion is such a big deal to conservatives.37 Even when David French finally gave Trump props for his pro-life advocacy, he added this disclaimer: “I appreciate Trump’s pro-life actions, but he can’t yet match GWB.”38 When Trump became the first president to speak in person at the March for Life in January 2020, French’s blog, the Dispatch, gave it a one-sentence mention.
In a nine-tweet thread on the day of the march, French, who jumps on the platform at every opportunity to rant about the president, made no mention of Trump’s historic visit to the event.39
So, almost en masse, on every issue of importance to devout conservatives, NeverTrump flipped. Rather than defend conservative “principles,” as was their alleged raison d’être, NeverTrump converted into propagandists for the pro–climate change, pro–gun control, pro–abortion, anti–tax cut radical Left.
The Trump era ripped the mask off the “conservative” costume donned by so many NeverTrumpers. This tweet by Bill Kristol in November 2017 said it all: “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”40
In a lengthy interview with CNBC’s John Harwood in 2018, Kristol sounded more like Bernie Sanders than Ronald Reagan.41 The benefits of Trump’s tax cuts, Kristol said, didn’t need to be laundered through the corporations that benefited from the rate reduction—the federal government could have handled all of that from Washington! (Many companies announced bonuses for their employees after the cuts went into effect. Horror!)
“Wasn’t the whole point of the tax cut to free up money for investment? I mean, the government can just write checks to people. It doesn’t have to go through a middleman, you know. Give ’em to everyone, not just the people who work for certain favored companies,” said Kristol.
Calling himself a “conservative who’s been mugged by Trump” (Kristol’s father, a founder of neoconservatism, famously referred to his political transformation as a “liberal who’s been mugged by reality”), Kristol then suggested that conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action—a defining cog of the movement’s platform for more than three decades—was not based on principles of fairness but rather rooted in “bigotry.” Ditto for illegal immigration policies.
WHITE GUILT AND RACIAL POLITICS
Borrowing the most mendacious tactics of the Left, NeverTrump readily assigns racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic motives to Trump for any number of policies, comments, and tweets; even events outside of his control, such as the melee in Charlottesville in August 2017, are blamed on Trump for allegedly stoking racial strife.
There is nothing conservative, of course, about evaluating people based on skin color or gender or religion. Further, there is nothing conservative about blaming large groups for the actions of a few. But over and over, NeverTrump aids the Left in painting Trump, his administration, congressional Republicans, and Trump supporters as gay-bashing, Muslim-hating, woman-hating, anti-Semitic white supremacists. Imaginary threats about a surge in white supremacy stoke unnecessary fear in order to gratify their Trump-hating urges.
Specific incidents, while not directly Trump’s fault, NeverTrump explains, nevertheless should be pinned on the president because he once made derogatory comments about a Mexican judge and “attacked” a Gold Star Muslim family in 2016. Even Trump’s condemnation of kneeling NFL players, a trend started by former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, are racial “dog whistles” to his knuckle-dragging base of white nationalist Neanderthals, according to NeverTrump.
Max Boot got the shtick rolling in late 2017 in a self-flagellating article where he confessed that he is a beneficiary of “white privilege.” Boot’s introspection, oddly, coincided with his rising star as a Trump detractor and his new gig as a regular columnist at the Washington Post.
“Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it,” Boot confessed in Foreign Affairs magazine in December 2017.42
Immigrants, Bill Kristol observed, work harder than native—meaning, white—Americans. David French, in a quasi-defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s contemptible anti-American rhetoric, referred to native-born Americans as “ingrates.” He claimed he could not take “pride” in his birth here in America in the same way that immigrants take pride in obtaining American citizenship. “Native-born Americans by the countless millions don’t trouble themselves to be educated enough about their own country to pass the basic citizenship test that we give to prospective citizen immigrants,” he wrote.43 French’s message was clear: Just like the Left tells us, immigrants are better than US citizens.
After Charlottesville, Jennifer Rubin wrote that anyone who “continue[d] to support the president is continuing to deny he is unfit for office and to make excuses for his verbiage makes one complicit in his racial divisiveness and his determination to provide aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”44
The Charlottesville riot occurred two months after a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to murder several Republican congressmen on a baseball field outside of Washington, D.C. Rep. Steve Scalise sustained life-threatening injuries that later required him to use a cane. Media outrage was brief and scant.
David French, in a frantic piece the night of the Charlottesville melee, when facts were still emerging, attempted to equate an attempted assassination with the events in Charlottesville:
America is at a dangerous crossroads. I know full well that I could have supplemented my list of violent white supremacist acts with a list of vicious killings and riots from left-wing extremists—including the recent act of lone-wolf progressive terror directed at GOP members of the House and Senate. There is a bloodlust at the political extremes. Now is the time for moral clarity, specific condemnations of vile American movements—no matter how many MAGA hats its members wear—and for actions that back up those appropriately strong words.45
The wanna-be mass murderer hoping to kill a dozen Republican House members was a “lone-wolf progressive.” The alt-right protestor who drove his car through a crowd of
