ironic slap at the Bush dynasty.
The Republican establishment was rocked to its neoconservative core.
But it was the post-primary conduct of NeverTrump that deepened the fault lines between the conservative establishment opposed to Trump and conservative voters who overwhelmingly supported him. Trump gave voice to long-simmering anger about Republicans’ complicity in unfettered illegal immigration, unfair trade agreements, and endless foreign war, matters that had been ignored by Washington’s political class for more than a decade. Conservatives were especially alarmed at the Left’s takeover of academia, the news media, Hollywood, and the corporate world while conservatives were unable to halt the incursion.
The once-patriotic heartbeat of the Republican Party had been put on a bypass machine by party leaders, who seemed more concerned about the plight of illegal immigrants than of American citizens who had been gradually displaced—occupationally, culturally, academically, and socially—in their own homeland.
Trump, with his gaudy but genuine slogan to “Make America Great Again,” made an unapologetic commitment to put America’s interests first. It was a scolding as much as a promise. To the neoconservatives who ruled the Republican Party, Trump’s MAGA mantra disemboweled the internationalist Bush Doctrine, a post-9/11 foreign policy approach that had resulted in protracted war in several countries, with dubious, deadly outcomes.22 To Democrats, MAGA posed a direct hit to the undercurrent of anti-Americanism that had animated the party for years.
Trump openly antagonized the power base of both political parties—that, of course, was the real threat to establishment conservatives.
So, rather than coalesce around the Republican nominee in preparation for a brutal general election against a well-funded Democrat hostile to conservative views and values, GOP stalwarts fortified their ranks in a galling rebuke of party acolytes. The very same people who had long profited from their affiliation with Republicans—who sold them books and headlined fancy fundraisers and consulted on campaigns and led them into treacherous wars—turned on their patrons in an ugly way.
“Make sure he loses,” bow-tied George Will advised beleaguered conservative voters in a June 2016 interview. “Grit [your] teeth for four years and win the White House.”23
Will, channeling Reagan in another slap at Republican voters, changed his voter registration from Republican to unaffiliated because, as he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “the party left me.”24 He later would join other alleged “conservatives” who either endorsed Hillary Clinton or rooted for Trump’s defeat.
Kristol’s desperation to thwart Trump prompted him to make the first in a series of embarrassing moves: Around Memorial Day, he hinted that he had an independent candidate who would pose a serious challenge to Trump in the general election. Speculation swirled. Trump responded on Twitter, calling Kristol a “dummy” and warned that conservatives could “say good bye to the Supreme Court” if a conservative independent jumped in the race to take votes away from the Republican nominee.25
But Kristol’s secret candidate turned out to be David French, an unknown writer at National Review. (French later would emerge as a leading figure in the NeverTrump movement.) The political commentariat on both sides mocked Kristol’s attempted subversion. Vox referred to French as a “random dude off the street”26 and GQ called French a “random blogger” who had refused to allow his wife to drink, use Facebook, or have phone conversations with men during his one-year deployment as a military lawyer to Iraq.27
But Kristol’s tease would be short-lived and crash in a mortifying fashion. French, in his hallmark self-aggrandizing style camouflaged with a veneer of nonexistent humility, declined to run. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve my country, and I thank God for the successes I’ve had as a lawyer and a writer, but it is plain to me that I’m not the right person for this effort,” he wrote.28 French’s refusal to run wouldn’t be the last humiliation that Kristol would suffer before Election Day.
With time and options running out, NeverTrump plotted how to overthrow the Republican presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention. Delegates planning to attend the party’s convention in Cleveland were urged to abandon Trump. One group, Delegates Unbound, produced a 30-second television commercial featuring a split screen with competing video clips of Trump and Ronald Reagan. The ad urged convention delegates to “choose your values, follow your conscience.”29
National Review helped make the case that defections were allowed—there was some legal haggling about whether party rules permitted delegates elected to represent a specific candidate to switch. The drastic measure, one National Review contributor insisted, would be necessary in order to salvage the party’s chances in November. “Discontent with Trump remains high,” wrote John Fund on July 10, 2016. “He languishes in the polls behind a weak Hillary Clinton, his fundraising numbers are anemic, his campaign shambolic. Despite previously promising to do so, he has refused to release his tax returns … Many delegates believe damaging material from his tax returns will leak out of the federal government in October.”30
Kristol, as would be his habit for the entirety of Trump’s first term, imagined a farfetched scenario where Trump would go down in flames. He suggested that delegates should support either two-time loser Mitt Romney or Ohio governor John Kasich, who suspended his 2016 presidential campaign in May after only winning his home state. “They need to have a conversation very soon and agree that one of them will announce this week that he is willing to compete for the nomination after the convention has disposed of Donald Trump,” Kristol daydreamed in the pages of his magazine a week before the convention. “It’s even conceivable both could announce their willingness to serve, and that they intend to let the delegates choose between them and anyone else who chooses to compete.”31
Of course, that didn’t happen. The effort to oust Trump caused only a minor fracas on the convention floor a few days before Trump’s acceptance speech.32 He won the needed number of votes with little resistance.
But the number of establishment Republican and conservative defectors continued to mount. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in August 2016 to explain why she would not vote for Donald Trump.33 Former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber wondered aloud whether Trump was a “sociopath” in an interview outlining his various reasons for opposing Trump’s candidacy.34 (Weber later would be caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia election collusion as prosecutors scrutinized his lobbying work on behalf of Ukrainian interests.)35
A long list of former national security experts who once served Republican presidents, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, signed on to a letter pledging not to vote for Trump. “From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief,” concluded the architects of the lengthy wars and foreign conflicts that had disillusioned so many rank-and-file Republicans and that Trump promised to end. “Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”36
Trump’s erratic campaign helped reinforce the narrative that he was unprepared to lead the country and would be a reckless commander in chief. By late August, Trump had named his third campaign manager, longtime Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway.37 Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine was reaping daily windfalls. Prospects for a win in November looked grim; NeverTrump was already looking forward to a Trump-free future.
With summer winding down, Trump as the official Republican presidential candidate, and high-profile Republicans
