Never Trump After 2024
The social media hashtag #NeverTrump first appeared in June 2015, days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. For the balance of that year, social media derision attracted less attention than Trump himself, mostly due to the widespread belief that Trump’s campaign was self-extinguishing, which argued against pointless efforts to bring about an already inevitable defeat. In election cycles since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory, unlikely protest candidates for the GOP presidential nomination—Pat Robertson, Ron Paul, Herman Cain—had briefly surged in the polls, only to give way to a conventional politician who ended up as the party’s nominee. Bill Clinton observed that, when selecting a presidential nominee, there is an almost anthropological difference between Democrats, who fall in love with a previously obscure politician (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama), and Republicans, who fall in line behind an established one (Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney).
By early 2016, however, it had become increasingly clear that Republican primary voters were not going to fall in line. Within the first two months of the year, Trump won primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, drove presumptive favorite Jeb Bush from the race, and received the endorsement of another vanquished rival, New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie. By that point, Never Trump had become more serious and less obscure. Disaffected Republican donors and campaign professionals started Political Action Committees whose initial purpose was to deny Trump the nomination, despite his relentless progress toward securing a majority of the Republican delegates with primary and caucus victories, and other candidates’ decisions, one by one, to abandon the contest.
These efforts proved futile, predictably, but after Trump’s nomination became a foregone conclusion the Never Trump focus shifted to an even more quixotic goal: fielding a third-party candidate who would allow Americans to vote against Trump without having to vote for Hillary Clinton. The effort was led by Joel Searby, a Republican political consultant, and William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard magazine. No one involved in their undertaking expected that any such candidate would win 270 electoral votes, but there was hope that an independent could win some states, enough to ensure that neither Clinton nor Trump received an Electoral College majority. In that event, the House of Representatives would choose the 45th president, keeping alive the possibility that it might be someone other than either major party nominee.
We’ll never know if that deus ex machina might have somehow come together. It required, at minimum, a credible alternative with high name recognition but, as political scientists Robert Saldin and Steven Teles report in Never Trump: The Revolt of The Conservative Elites (2020), each prospect Searby and Kristol approached—Condoleezza Rice, James Mattis, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney—rejected them with more or less extreme prejudice. Among their reasons, several argued that an independent candidacy would be counterproductive, making it harder for the GOP to pivot away from Trump after 2016. Because Hillary Clinton was sure to win in any case, as a robust consensus of informed opinion maintained, it would be better—clearer and, therefore, more resonant—if it were impossible to blame Trump’s defeat on anyone but Trump.
And yet, Clinton lost. According to Never Trump, which was published just before the 2020 election, “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.”
Switching Teams
From the perspective of 2025, Never Trump is still a thing, but not the same thing, no longer fueled by hopes that the Republican Party will revert to what it was before June 2015. Some of the qualities that Saladin and Teles discerned in the five years following Trump’s entrance on the political stage have remained the same, while others have been upended by subsequent events. At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers. Never Trump’s leaders and its constituency are one and the same, as Saldin and Teles’s subtitle suggests. The conservative elites whose revolt the book examines include: 1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law, the sort of people who end up staffing Republican administrations; 2) campaign professionals, especially those who manage communications and campaign strategy; and 3) public intellectuals, including opinion journalists and academics who write for a general readership.
The first two groups’ career considerations have curtailed their early Never Trump fervor. “Deep sociological forces,” Saldin and Teles observe, lead a political party to “go where its voters are.” As Trump’s voting base has remained solid, and he has demonstrated the ability to expand it, most people who aspire to work in a Republican administration or manage a Republican politician’s campaign either stopped doubting Trump or stopped voicing their doubts.
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