pledging to stop the president’s worst impulses. He worked to thwart Trump’s agenda on every issue from border security to foreign affairs. Romney is the only senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party. In 2019, reporters uncovered his burner Twitter account: Pierre Delecto.
An unknown until Kristol floated his name as a rival to Trump in 2016, French leveraged his NeverTrump credentials to earn newfound fame. French, a columnist for National Review, routinely ridiculed evangelical Christians for backing Trump, insisted the government declare war on white supremacy, and pushed Russian collusion fiction. French supported the Democrats’ impeachment effort and commended Sen. Mitt Romney’s vote to convict the president. For his insufferable lecturing and proselytizing, French is often referred to as Pastor French. He left National Review in 2019 to join the Dispatch.
Once a fixture at National Review, Goldberg left the publication in 2019 to form his own outlet, the Dispatch, with fellow NeverTrumper Stephen Hayes, the former editor of the Weekly Standard. His predictions of doom about Trump’s presidency never materialized. While helping promote suspicions about Russian collusion, Goldberg insisted that anyone who believed in a “deep state” operation to oust Trump was a promoter of conspiracy theories. Trump brought impeachment upon himself, Goldberg argued, because he’s a man of low character who can’t act presidential.
CHAPTER 2
TRUMP WINS, NEVERTRUMP REGROUPS
The Never Trumpers rarely self-reflected about why their party had not won the popular vote in five out of the six last elections, or why the last Republican president had left office with near historic unpopularity, doubled the debt during two terms, and passed arguably progressive legislation. Like the Resistance, Never Trumpers failed in all their political aims at removing or delegitimizing Donald Trump.
—Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump
In its post-election issue, the Weekly Standard published a clear-eyed editorial about Donald Trump’s victory.1 Editor Stephen Hayes acknowledged that after years of threats, voters finally delivered the comeuppance long deserved by the ruling class. Barack Obama failed to make good on nearly all his promises; the Iran deal was a billion-dollar debacle, health care costs were skyrocketing, and the economy remained weak, among other troubles.
Hayes reiterated the Standard’s “early and often” opposition to Trump but pledged to play fair moving forward for the good of the country. “Wanting him to succeed, we’ll offer him good-faith advice. When he governs as a conservative, we’ll support him enthusiastically,” Hayes wrote. “If we see the old Trump, we won’t stint on criticism; and if he rises to the occasion, as all Americans must hope he will, we won’t hold back praise. In short, we were wrong about Trump’s electoral prospects, and we hope to be even more mistaken about the kind of president he’ll turn out to be.”
Other NeverTrumpers appeared to offer sincere promises about how they would cover the Trump presidency. Taking a conciliatory tone in the hours after Trump officially won, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg admitted he had been wrong about a Clinton victory and pledged to “do my best to support Trump when I think he’s right, and I will continue to criticize him when I think he’s not,” he wrote on November 9, 2016. “As I’ve been saying for 18 months—that’s my job.”2
With Trump headed to the White House, it initially looked as though NeverTrump might disband, cut their losses, and swallow a few ounces of their oversized reservoir of pride. It was one thing for NeverTrump to sound magnanimous after the whooping they took from their one-time Republican devotees. It was quite another to accept a drastically reconfigured Republican Party led by Donald Trump.
NeverTrump would have to own up to fomenting the rank-and-file’s uprising. Would NeverTrump confront the root causes of Trumpism and their own culpability? Further, would NeverTrump rally the fragmented party and protect the will of the electorate against an enraged Left sworn to go to any extreme to reverse the election results?
It wasn’t just that so many NeverTrumpers abandoned the Republican Party’s presidential candidate when the party needed them most. Many endorsed a third-party candidate with no shot of winning; some backed Hillary Clinton. They had burned their own reputations in service of frying Donald Trump. Even if they decided to stay in the Trumpified GOP, who wanted them?
The detailed election results were, after all, a harsh repudiation of establishment Republicans and Conservative, Inc. The Donald had achieved what no Republican presidential candidate had achieved since Ronald Reagan in 1984: With the exception of Illinois and a slim loss in Minnesota, Trump swept the Midwest. While the commentariat—and the enraged Clinton campaign—downplayed Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the outcome in those three states was stunning.
In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Wisconsin by seven percentage points, even though Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, was a native son. Trump, on the other hand, won the Badger State by nearly one percentage point. The Manhattan mogul won nearly half a million more votes than Romney won in Pennsylvania and Michigan alone.
Trump won Ohio and Iowa, states that Barack Obama won twice, by comfortable margins; he came within striking distance in Minnesota. More than 200 counties, mainly situated in the Midwest and Rust Belt, that twice voted to elect Barack Obama flipped to Trump: These so-called “pivot” counties would represent the new base of the Trumpified Republican Party. (Trump continued to court voters in the region throughout his first term by holding dozens of rallies and stumping for candidates.)
The Democratic Party’s fortified Blue Wall crumbled. Despite years of polling and focus groups, consultants’ advice, and conservative commentary about how to earn back working-class voters, the Republican Party could not come up with a winning formula.
In 2008, Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Atlantic Monthly writers at the time, forewarned that the Republican Party’s fixation on economic issues and failure to connect with “Sam’s Club” voters would keep a Republican out of the White House indefinitely. “Globalization and the rise of knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and healthcare security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration—all of these developments of the last three decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they’re materially better off than ever before,” they wrote in their book, Grand New Party. “And there’s no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP’s emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.”3
They continued. “Some combination of the populist Left and the neoliberal center is likely to emerge as America’s next political majority even so, if the conservative movement can’t find innovative ways to address the anxieties of working-class America.”4 (Douthat is a reliable Trump critic from his current perch at the New York
