personal aversion to Trump’s style with their genuine fears about the consequences of a Clinton presidency. An anonymous essay published in September 2016 described, using a stark analogy, the choice before conservatives on Election Day. “The Flight 93 Election,” referring to the doomed airliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, after passengers wrested control of the jet from Islamic terrorists, made the conservative case for Donald Trump.57
The 4,300-word piece detailed the multiple failures of the conservative hierarchy; the “whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc. reeks of failure,” the unnamed author wrote. “Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation.” The essay described the prospective doom posed by a Hillary Clinton presidency and the reasons why conservatives would be justified in voting for a presidential candidate, who, by nearly every measure, contradicted the airbrushed avatar of a true conservative leader.
Writing as Publius Decius Mus in the Claremont Review of Books—it initially was published at the Journal for American Greatness website, now American Greatness, for which I write—the author directly challenged arguments made by marquee conservative influencers against the election of Donald Trump while advocating a vote for Clinton or a third-party candidate:
“Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.”
The writer presciently warned that the Clinton machine would “be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England.” Little did he, or anyone outside of the Obama White House or Clinton team, know that a Stasi-like cabal of political operatives were already using powerful government tools to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign, a scheme that would escalate after he won.
Then this parting shot: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”
The essay outraged the conservative intelligentsia, mostly because it was clear the writer was of their ilk. Kristol outed the identity of the writer—Michael Anton, a former Bush speechwriter—and NeverTrumpers subsequently piled on. (More on this in chapter 6.) In his criticism of the piece, Jonah Goldberg, unwittingly making Anton’s point, admitted, “I am the first to concede that if Hillary Clinton wins it will likely be terrible for the country,” but the Republic will not in fact literally die like the passengers on Flight 93.58
Point missed.
So while pragmatic conservative thinkers like Anton recognized the cataclysmic future under the reign of Hillary, NeverTrump, shamefully, continued their opposition to the Republican nominee while bracing for another Clinton presidency.
A few days before the election, Kristol predicted that Clinton would win by a larger margin that Obama had won by in 2012. “I think there’s probably a little more hidden Hillary Clinton vote than hidden Donald Trump vote,” Kristol said in an interview on MSNBC on November 4.59 In another one of his Trump-related delusions in the same interview, Kristol claimed that “many working class white women”—it’s unlikely Kristol knows any—“whose husbands are enthusiastic for Trump but don’t want to pick a fight at home who might go into the ballot booth and vote for Hillary Clinton.”
And as the polls were about to close on Election Day, Kristol again predicted the outcome would be like 2012.60
THE NOVEMBER SURPRISE
Hours later, Kristol would join a dozen other commentators on the sprawling set of ABC News as the vote totals gradually indicated Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States.
Realizing that another political prediction would crash and burn, Kristol struggled to explain what was about to happen while proving, once again, he had learned nothing. “He doesn’t agree with [Republican House Speaker] Paul Ryan on entitlement reform, the heart of the congressional Republican agenda,” Kristol said at around 1:00 A.M. on November 9 as the country awaited the final verdict. “He’s got a very different view of immigration, of trade. Is he really going to go ahead with the trade policies he talked about? We’re in even more unchartered waters than we really think.”61
With that final quip, Kristol was uncharacteristically correct.
An hour later, the major network news stations called the race for Donald Trump. The country—and the world—was stunned. The Republican Party would never be the same. And NeverTrump suffered another loss at the hands of Donald Trump.
There would be many more to come.
The de facto leader of NeverTrump kept his well-documented political losing streak intact during the Trump era. Kristol’s predictions about the “end days” for Trump were wrong every single time. A paid propagandist for both the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachment crusade, Kristol also supported Democratic candidates and declared in February 2020, “we are all Democrats now.” His contemptuous campaign against Trump and the GOP propelled the demise of the Weekly Standard, the magazine he founded in 1995.
The phoniest conservative of all the so-called conservative NeverTrumpers, Rubin, a columnist for the Washington Post and an MSNBC contributor, eventually alienated even her onetime allies in NeverTrump. She encouraged violence against Trump associates, peddled phony Russian collusion, and rooted for Democrats to take back Congress in 2018. She reversed herself on every previous opinion including climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and tax cuts, just to name a few.
The male version of Rubin—he also writes for the Washington Post and appears on MSNBC—Boot renounced his past views in a desperate attempt to please his new allies and paymasters on the Left. Trump forced Boot to confront his own “white privilege,” Boot revealed. The Russian immigrant claimed that because of Trump, he no longer felt welcome in America. Boot became so unhinged toward the end of Trump’s first term that he was calling National Review writers white supremacists.
After twice failing to win the White House, Romney settled for the consolation prize
