history: the character assassination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the media mob against Covington Catholic High School students. As the Left continues to show their true colors—no tactic, no allegation, no child is out of bounds in their unholy crusade against Donald Trump—NeverTrump unflinchingly and willingly plays along.
Despite public claims by some that they have left the Republican Party and despite their collective pivot on nearly every previously held “conservative” belief, NeverTrump, disguised as legitimate voices on the Right, overpopulates left-wing cable news channels, political websites, and publications. NeverTrump’s gig as reliable mouthpieces to spew Trump hate from the right flank of #TheResistance has turned unknowns into social media celebrities, revived fledgling careers, earned nonstop hits on CNN and featured columns in the Washington Post, and resulted in long-awaited forgiveness for its members’ role in perpetuating the Iraq War.
Neoconservatives once tarred as “war criminals” by the Left now routinely link arms with their former antiwar tormentors. It is an insidious kumbaya with one shared purpose: Destroy the Bad Orange Man and everyone around him.
While they claim to be serious people with a strict adherence to “conservative” orthodoxy, in reality they have burned whatever reputations they have left. As I detail in chapter 8, many accept funding from a progressive billionaire who has worked against every policy and principle they’ve supported for three decades. The flagship of the once-powerful neoconservative movement, the Weekly Standard, was shut down under humiliating circumstances. NeverTrump campaigned for Democrats in the 2018 midterm election, which elevated lunatics such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar to power. Some NeverTrumpers have turned on evangelical Christians in a manner that can only be described as a form of religious bigotry.
Ironically, as NeverTrump claims to represent a swath of Trump-hating Republicans, support for the president among the GOP’s rank-and-file has increased since Election Day. NeverTrump members represent no one but themselves while acting as useful idiots for the Left in their selfish crusade against Donald Trump. They have betrayed the party that once provided the platform for their professional success; mocked us as rubes, racists, and cultists; and tormented Republican lawmakers who dare to support the president over NeverTrump’s objections.
They are worse than the Left because at least one knows what to expect from the Left. NeverTrump are the most dishonest political swindlers, pretending to be “conservatives” while promoting nonconservative ideology and employing the cruelest tactics of the Left.
In February 2017, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column entitled, “Why I’ve Decided to Break-Up with Bill Kristol.”1 The piece, published in the Federalist, was part parody, part plea. I described my longtime affinity for the former editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, who had completely gone off the rails since Trump’s presidency. (I hadn’t really followed his anti-Trump antics before Election Day.)
I complimented my one-time political hero: “I hold out hope that this very smart man will be mugged by reality (as his father famously said), emerge from his Trumpian-Nixonian dystopia, and once again play a valuable role as a thought leader instead of a sore loser still trying to prove he was right,” I wrote.
How naive. Little did I know how unhinged Kristol would become. Looking back, his remarks in early 2017 make him look tame compared to the crazed hater he is today.
Others noticed NeverTrump’s folly. My friend Kurt Schlichter mocks them as the “Ahoy” crew—named for their yearly cruises that charged patrons a fortune to listen to the dull musings of Conservative, Inc.’s marquee names. These folks were famous mostly for pushing “a bunch of utopian ideas generated by a bunch of people who had done nothing in their life except go to college and write unread position papers while completing a fellowship at the Liberty Forum Coalition for Freedom,” Schlichter wrote in his 2018 book, Militant Normals.2 (Schlichter often trolls NeverTrump on Twitter with cruise ship emoji.)
The party’s base and its newfound support of working-class voters revolted against Conservative, Inc. “Their real wages were stagnant at best, and the conservatives they had sent to Washington did not seem to care,” Schlichter wrote. “Their culture and religion were under attack. Their kids were getting killed in wars no one seemed interested in winning. The people they had sent to Washington did not seem to care about anything important to [normal people].”3 But NeverTrump, many of whom manipulated the inner workings of Conservative, Inc. for decades, couldn’t deal with the fact that they created the void filled by Donald Trump.
Since writing my faux break-up letter to Kristol, I have covered NeverTrump extensively. There are plenty of lesser-known NeverTrump proxies preening on social media and Right-leaning websites, but the leaders include the following: Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, David French, Jonah Goldberg, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Mona Charen, Evan McMullin, Charles Sykes, Rick Wilson, David Frum, the late Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Mitt Romney. (A brief description of each appears in chapter 2.) Romney would become the first US senator to vote to convict a president of his own political party when he voted in February 2020 to convict Trump of the Democrats’ abuse of power charge against him.
People would sometimes suggest that those of us covering NeverTrump should ignore them; they don’t represent the Republican Party, they don’t speak for Republican voters, and they have nothing useful to offer, some on our side would argue. Further, some of NeverTrump’s more tepid voices insist their criticism is duty-bound—just calling balls and strikes, people who hadn’t found the strike zone in two decades would claim—and part of their professional responsibility. All presidents, after all, deserve scrutiny from their party’s stalwarts. Trump is no exception.
All that is true. But, in my opinion, we need to make sure these back-stabbers are on record for what they’ve done, and that is my purpose in writing this book. They not only intend to damage Trump presidency’s but seek to divide the country during one of its most unstable periods in history. Instead of serving as honest brokers between a subset of conservatives uneasy about Trump’s past or his conduct or his plans to govern, NeverTrump doused unneeded fuel on the raging political fire.
They have not just rooted for Trump’s failure; by default, they have rooted for the country to fail.
This book isn’t just an account of how badly Donald Trump’s foes have behaved since he announced his candidacy. It isn’t about score-settling or pointing out all the ways the NeverTrump crowd has been wrong over the past five years. It’s a story about disloyalty—how people like me, millions of Republicans across the country, have been betrayed by the influencers we trusted and supported for decades.
For that, they should never have a place in the Republican Party again. This book is a Do Not Resuscitate order for any candidate, office holder, or serious publication that might consider reviving NeverTrump after their usefulness to the Left ends along with Trump’s presidency, either later this year or in 2024.
The future will remember NeverTrump as a cautionary tale: the disloyal opposition who tried—and failed—to take down Donald Trump.
CHAPTER 1
THE BIRTH OF NEVERTRUMP
Donald Trump is a menace to American
