words as coronavirus cases began to rise.2 (The group, as I detail in chapter 8, is largely funded by a left-wing billionaire and sworn enemy of Donald Trump.)
The Bulwark, the refuge of former Weekly Standard editors and contributors after the publication shut down in December 2018, was flooded with columns that accused Trump of lying about the disease and ignoring its early stages (he didn’t). “The country deserves competent and responsible leadership and so, for the country’s sake, Trump should lose in November,” Kristol wrote in the Bulwark on March 19, 2020. “He probably will lose. But this is by no means inevitable. So we can’t be complacent.”3 The media were apoplectic over Trump’s insistence on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese flu.” NeverTrump, per usual, played along. “It’s vitally important to push back against Chinese propaganda regarding the virus. That can be done directly, by refuting Chinese lies. Dunking on each other, by contrast, seems like a frivolous sideshow,” tweeted David French on March 20.4 NeverTrumpers who had spent nearly four years dunking on Trump, his administration, Republican lawmakers, and Trump supporters suddenly were very worried about hurting the feelings of communist China. David Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic, instead suggested calling the disease the “Trump plague.”
Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor, fantasized that the disease would kill more Republicans than Democrats. Fox News, she falsely claimed, had downplayed the crisis. “There is a particular cruelty/irony that it is their core viewers, the Republican older viewers, who are the most at risk,” she said on MSNBC on March 15.5 She also commended Democrats for canceling campaign events before Trump did. “So, I hate to put it this way, but there will be less Democrat deaths because there will be less mass gatherings. There will be less opportunities for people to congregate and share this horrible disease.” Eager to blame any fatalities on Trump, Rick Wilson, a self-proclaimed Republican strategist, started referring to the president as “President Kevorkian.”6
As of this writing, it’s hard to know how the economic and political fallout of the coronavirus crisis will affect Trump’s reelection chances. (After instituting a 15-day social distancing policy to try to stem a rise in confirmed cases, President Trump on March 29 announced an extension of that policy until April 30, 2020.) But one thing is certain: NeverTrump will weaponize every aspect of the chaos, including the number of dead, against Trump. Of all the low points of NeverTrump’s crusade against the president, it will be the lowest.
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
