Conclusion

This concluding chapter highlights how the Republican Party has been substantially transformed by the experience of having Donald Trump at its head. The president's reelection in 2020 would only deepen that transformation. Deep sociological forces—in particular, a Republican Party base that is increasingly white, working class, Christian, less formally educated, and older—will lead the party to go where its voters are. What Trump started, his Republican successors will finish. Just as parties of the right across the Western world have become more populist and nationalist, so will the Republicans. That, of course, bodes poorly for most of the Never Trumpers, who combined a deep distaste for Trump personally with a professional interest in a less populist governing style and a disinclination to see their party go ideologically where he wanted to take it. Ultimately, the future is unwritten because it will be shaped by the choices of individuals. Never Trump will have failed comprehensively in its founding mission, which was to prevent the poison of Donald Trump from entering the nation's political bloodstream. However, it is likely to be seen, in decades to come, as the first foray into a new era of American politics.

In Scalia’s Shadow

This chapter explores the creation of Checks and Balances, a new group of conservative legal critics of the Trump administration. From his racist attack on the federal district judge ruling on the Trump University case and suspicions that he would appoint his own sister to the Supreme Court, to his threats to revise libel law so as to silence his rivals and his nearly total lack of constitutional discussion, Donald Trump was almost no prominent conservative lawyer's first choice. Once he dispatched all his Republican rivals, however, conservative lawyers were in a quandary. The death of Antonin Scalia, the most celebrated conservative jurist of his generation and a leader of the conservative legal movement, put the future of the Supreme Court squarely on the ballot. Once the character of Trump's governance became clear, Checks and Balances emerged to criticize the administration's legal conduct.

The Marginal Value of Economists

This chapter studies how Donald Trump directly challenged the core beliefs of conservative economists during the campaign, almost gleefully dismissing many of their core beliefs and openly spurning their advice. Indeed, just as he attacked the belief of national security conservatives in international alliances, Trump challenged the core creed of the economics discipline which held that an expanded scale of markets—for goods, capital, and people—was essential to economic growth and human flourishing. Rather than envisioning a world in which economic interdependence makes all nations wealthier, Trump advanced a darker vision in which America was constantly exploited by other nations, a trend that he would counter by making “great deals” that put “America first.” Republican economists had every reason to fear Trump and what he was doing to the party, yet they responded by keeping their distance. Unlike national security professionals, there has been little to no collective action by economists.

Ideas Have Consequences

This chapter addresses why the Never Trump intellectuals perceive Donald Trump—and increasingly the movement and party that have followed him—through such a dark lens. These are people for whom words are their stock and trade. They do not view the utterances of the president as simple annoyances that are easily ignored next to a record of conservative governance. They believe words are the raw material of culture and that, in a phrase they use often, politics is downstream from culture. They believe the president's words—as well as his actions—have driven a cultural decline that far outweighs short-term policy victories. For some, the cultural decline they associate with the rise of Trump has led them to reconsider conservatism itself, either because they came to see dark elements on the right that they had previously ignored or because they concluded that the party they thought was committed to conserving the nation's liberal traditions had become irredeemably illiberal. For others, Trump presented a profound and inescapable conflict. Ultimately, most of them have come to feel estranged from the party and the movement that had been at the center of their identity.

Pack Animals

This chapter focuses on how the Republican Party’s band of political operatives navigated the rise of Donald Trump. Political operatives are the professional campaign consultants, pollsters, media experts, fundraisers, and staffers who make a living by providing key services to their party and its candidates. Unlike the GOP national security experts or the conservative movement’s intelligentsia, Republican operatives who were publicly Never Trump cut against the grain of their professional network. Despite near-universal, albeit largely silent, opposition to Trump initially, most operatives dutifully fell in line once he became the presumptive nominee. Yet the small minority within the political operative world that refused to make their peace with him emerged as one of the brightest constellations in the Never Trump universe.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of the “#nevertrump” hashtag on Twitter. Like any meme, #nevertrump had a variety of meanings to those who deployed it. However, for the elite Republicans and conservatives who embraced it, #nevertrump signaled horror and incomprehension at the rise of Donald Trump and how it had turned their political world upside down. #Nevertrump was also a way of signaling that Trump represented something more sinister than normal quadrennial Republican and conservative movement primary politics. Once they recognized the threat, the strongest adherents to Never Trump relentlessly and desperately searched for ways to frustrate Trump's takeover of the Republican Party. Shocking even themselves, a number of these lifelong Republicans, who had spent their careers battling Democrats, ended up voting for someone other than their party's nominee, up to and including their former nemesis, Hillary Clinton. Even after his election, a remnant of these Never Trumpers have kept up rear guard efforts to expose the deceitfulness of the Trump administration and to call their former allies away from the siren song of Trumpian populism.

Patrolling the Frontier

This chapter assesses how public intellectuals responded with such virulence to Donald Trump. Despite overwhelming opposition to Trump among the conservative intellectual elite, Republican voters had their own ideas of what the party should be about. That is not the outcome one might have expected at the start of the 2016 electoral cycle, given the outsized role that public intellectuals have played in the GOP over the last half-century. Whatever outsiders may believe, the modern Republican Party has often told its own story as the merger of a conservative intellectual project with a range of grassroots social movements. The idea of “fusionism”—the linkage of social conservatism with economic libertarianism—was thought by the party's intellectuals to be the glue that held together the GOP's various constituencies and activists. It is that perception of the Republican Party as a conservative party—one defined by its connection to a set of ideas and the intellectuals who generated them—that made the rise of Donald Trump so traumatic for conservative public intellectuals. Among the things that were especially striking about Trump was his dismissal and general ignorance of the history of conservative thought. The chapter then looks at the role played by public intellectuals in the conservative movement, including the historical role of its flagship magazine, National Review, as a policeman of ideological purity.

The Kamikaze Mission

This chapter looks at how, once the GOP made its decision (Trump for president), a horrified team of the party's political professionals—who were eager to put their skills to work on behalf of a client they could believe in—led a frantic and flailing search to find a statesman willing to launch an independent run for the presidency. After soliciting some of the Republican Party's senior statesmen to take on the job of providing an alternative to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the party's political professionals simply took on the job themselves. Joel Searby, a mid-level political consultant based in Florida, and William Kristol were at the center of the effort to run a “Real Republican” against Trump. Having failed to stop their party from nominating Donald Trump, or the country from electing him, the network of Never Trump operatives has been reduced to keeping the flame of resistance alive, in the hope that the party will one day come to its senses. Indeed, Kristol launched a number of initiatives explicitly designed to carry on the Never Trump crusade.

Guardians

Chapter 2 discusses how the John Hay Initiative, the Republican foreign policy establishment, became the purest strain of Never Trumpism. The John Hay Initiative was designed to create a firewall around the heresies of Rand Paul and to help the other Republican candidates competently defend their vision of conservative internationalism. However, no one around the project imagined that their party would be tempted by a figure like Donald Trump. Trump's candidacy threw them into a world of uncertainty, in which all of their experience and strategies were suddenly rendered unhelpful or even counterproductive. In sharp contrast to most of the rest of the groups discussed in this book, they responded to Trump with open, furious, and mostly unified opposition. There were two primary reasons that people within the Republican national security network offer for having gone Never Trump. First, many were mortified at Trump's statements on foreign policy issues. Even so, most Never Trumpers in the foreign policy network say that their objections ran deeper than policy disputes; it was Trump's fundamental and unredeemable character flaws that constituted the core problem.

Experts Gone Rogue

This chapter examines how Republican foreign policy professionals found themselves in an outright rebellion against their own party's nominee by the spring and summer of 2016. They were not prepared for their party nominating a candidate they suspected of illicit relationships to America's adversaries. Their level of alarm not only far eclipsed that of other Trump skeptics, but their tight network structure and orientation toward collective action allowed them to act quickly, and in concert. They managed to put together two letters—one during the primary and the second after Donald Trump was nominated at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland—that denounced him in the strongest possible terms. These letters, signed by a wide swath of the most senior members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, were aimed with martial intent. The signatories hoped that a warning this grave would alarm Republican primary voters, and then the electorate in the fall, causing them to turn away from the serious risk they were taking with the nation's security by putting its arms in the hands of Donald Trump. Having shot at Trump and missed, they were declared persona non grata as the president staffed his administration.