From the moment he descended the escalator that fateful June day, a small but persistent group of Republicans refused to support Donald Trump, vowing to do everything in its power to stop him. Known by the moniker “Never Trump,” it includes figures at all levels of the conservative movement, from donors, consultants, and operatives to writers and commentators, all the way up to Republican officeholders.
What bound them was the conviction that Trump shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House or, once the electorate signaled its disagreement, that he should not be allowed to remain. In 2020, the public agreed and cast him out. But Trump would not stay down, and he ran for president again. A third and final time, Never Trump mobilized to stop him. Victory for Trump would mean total and utter defeat for the Never Trumpers, the ultimate repudiation of their vision, not just of the Republican Party but of American politics itself. The 2024 election, therefore, was Never Trump’s last stand. And like General Custer at Little Bighorn, it was completely wiped out.
In military terms, the engagement would barely qualify as a skirmish. Never Trump wasn’t large enough to rate anything bigger. It was never more than a minority, a rump within the Republican Party. What it lacked in size, however, it made up for in volume. Turn on cable news over the last eight years, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the dominant faction in the GOP. Never Trumpers drew interest out of all proportion to their numbers because they possessed, in the journalist Ben Jacobs’s apt phrasing, the knack of capturing “media attention, in the way that heretics often do.” “Heretics” is a good term since their defining characteristic was deviation from the party line. While such heresy propelled their initial success, ultimately, it was the reason Never Trump failed: The longer it endured, the further it drifted from the Republican Party until it was no longer in the party at all.
An avatar of this shift was David French. Once a leading figure of the pre-Trump evangelical Right, he became arguably the preeminent media Never Trumper, using his perch on the New York Times’s opinion page, no doubt a reward for his transformation, to scold, hector, and harangue his erstwhile brethren for not being as enlightened as him. Vice President Kamala Harris backed unlimited abortion, ending the filibuster, and packing the Supreme Court, three ideas anathema to conservatives. Yet that did not deter French, who declared with a straight face that his opposition to abortion compelled him to vote for her “to try to save conservatism.” French did not justify imposing term limits on the Supreme Court with that absurd rationalization, but he nonetheless championed that minor form of court-packing whose aim is to erode and eventually eliminate its Republican majority. Destroying one of the branches of government does not seem particularly conservative, but no sacrifice is too small to preserve the constitutional order, even the constitutional order itself.
Many Never Trumpers indicted their peers who remained within the conservative fold of placing party over principle. Yet quite a few of them were just as guilty, jettisoning one former belief after another in the name of beating Trump. Thus, Charlie Sykes, another shining light of the before time turned staunch Trump foe, expressed his compatriots’ “resolve to do whatever” they need “to do to keep him out of office,” including backing Harris.
Only by electing her, averred Peter Wehner, a staffer in the Bush 43 White House who spent the Trump years expressing his disdain for MAGA in the pages of the Atlantic, could Trump’s hold be broken and the GOP “become a sane, conservative party again.” Voting Democratic for the good of Republicans sounds suspiciously like the advice a Democrat would offer. Wehner sounded even more like one when he stated that Trump’s supporters, however enraged they were by the Harris campaign calling him a “fascist,” as it did for one of its closing messages, “they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies.”
Admitting you’re supporting the Democrat and regurgitating her talking points is a poor strategy if you’re ostensibly trying to reach Republican voters. But there is one group that adores no Republican more than it does a Republican who trashes other Republicans: the media.
Never Trump was not a media creation, but it was very much a media phenomenon. That certainly describes the Lincoln Project. Launched by GOP operatives bitter that Trump canceled their meal tickets, it made a big splash with ads designed to get under the Orange Man’s skin. Curiously, the ads never seemed to run outside cable news and Twitter. These days, if anyone remembers the group’s name, it’s probably because one of its founders was outed as a serial sexual harasser of young men.
Nor would anyone but the media have made a mountain out of the molehill that was “A Call for American Renewal,” a 2021 effort to combat Trumpism within the Republican Party and defeat Trump at the ballot box spearheaded by Evan McMullin, the ex-CIA officer who ran as an independent in the 2016 election, and Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security functionary who penned the “Anonymous” op-ed in the New York Times about officials trying to thwart the Trump administration from within. The endeavor was so successful that today, its web address redirects to an Indonesian sports betting site.
The more impeccable a Trump critic’s conservative credentials, the greater the media’s infatuation. Hence the attention lavished on Michael Luttig. A one-time Supreme Court short-lister and luminary of the legal Right, the retired judge was the chief advocate of using the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump from the presidency on the grounds that he committed insurrection against the United States. The idea was preposterous and was shot down by the Supreme Court unanimously. Yet, here was someone with Luttig’s pedigree acting like a member of the anti-Trump “resistance.” The average Republican voter who had probably never heard of Luttig could be forgiven for thinking he was a Democrat since he talked just like one.
Like a Democrat, though, is how more and more Never Trumpers talked as the Trump era went on. They did so because, more and more, that’s what they had become, in word and deed, if not name. No longer belonging to the party might have been survivable. Joining the other side was not. And for the last five years, Never Trump was an affiliate, if not an arm, of the Democratic Party.
The prime example is the series of entities run by Bill Kristol, a founder of the Weekly Standard, and Sarah Longwell, a corporate lobbyist-turned-den mother of Never Trumpism. One of those outfits is the Bulwark, the main organ of the Never Trump movement. Billed as a redoubt for disaffected Republicans seeking refuge from Trump and founded with the motto “conservatism conserved,” it has since birth operated more like a Democratic comms shop. As one would expect, given that it derived much of its funding, at least originally, from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and the Hewlett Foundation, major donors to left-wing causes. Longwell, the Bulwark’s publisher, is also the mastermind of Republican Voters Against Trump, a super PAC that committed to spending $50 million on anti-Trump messaging this year. Unsurprisingly, it counts LinkedIn creator Reid Hoffman and Netflix founder Reed Hastings, two of the biggest contributors to progressive organizations, among its most generous patrons.
A group that is paid by Democrats, promotes Democratic policies, and praises Democratic candidates is, to put it simply, a bunch of Democrats. Kristol himself said so, posting online in February 2020 that “for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.” In the wake of Trump’s comeback, he defiantly implored his fellow partisans to begin the “adversarial work” of organizing what would effectively be a second “resistance” to Trump because “there should be no honeymoon for the Trumpists, no honeymoons for authoritarians.”
Kristol sounded more like a Democrat than the Democrats. Yet the unspoken agreement between the media and the Never Trumpers was that one would continue pretending they weren’t Democrats, and the other would continue pretending they were Republicans. Which side of this bargain needed the deception more, I can’t say.
Unfortunately, not everyone was in on the joke. Some, taking the media at their word, took Never Trump as a genuine bloc within the Republican Party. It was this misunderstanding that led to the catastrophic decision by the Harris campaign to close out the race by trying to appeal to Trump-skeptical Republicans by uniting with the biggest Never Trumper of them all, former Rep. Liz Cheney.
The idea was to win over wavering Republicans by receiving the imprimatur of the most prominent anti-Trump Republican in the country. There was just one problem: Republicans no longer regarded Cheney as a Republican. She lost the 2022 GOP primary for Wyoming’s House seat by about 40 points. Which is to say, she lost like Democrats usually do in that ruby-red state. David French might have found the Harris-Cheney union inspiring, but many Democrats and liberals were repulsed and said so to Harris’s team, pleas that fell on deaf ears.
Coaxing Republicans who voted for former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in the primaries into the fold was an understandable strategy, for even after she dropped out, she kept getting double-digit vote shares. But it failed spectacularly, as it was bound to, because the conceit rested on a fundamental ignorance of the realities of politics. Anyone who bought Cheney’s message that Trump was too “dangerous” to be reelected was already voting for Harris. Thus, they were preaching to the choir. Moreover, nearly all primary voters stick with their party in the general election. The notion that a candidate who only got 60% of his party’s voters in March will get only 60% of them in November is nonsense. That’s not how elections work. Yet many in the media and on the Left acted as though they did. As such, there was never a large group of possible GOP defectors who’d gone for Haley in the spring ready to switch to Harris in the fall. Most were already de facto Democrats and had voted for Biden in 2020 and said they’d do so again. The rest were still Republicans, who, having cast their protest votes against Trump, would go back to him.
Which they did. NBC News reported in October that undecided Haley voters were unmoved by Cheney’s endorsement. Longwell’s hope that “a sizable portion of Republican voters may be up for grabs” proved hollow. Trump won 94% of GOP voters, a greater share than any other Republican presidential nominee this century. Its moral and political capital exhausted with nothing to show for it, the bankruptcy of Never Trump was complete.
Never Trump formed in 2016 to deny Trump the nomination and, when that failed, not to vote for him. The fatal error occurred when what might be called the professional Never Trumpers took the next step and became Never Republican. That was always going to be a bridge too far. Never Trump was never likely to succeed, but it condemned itself to failure the moment it became an appendage of the Democratic Party. But that is what it is, perhaps what it was always meant to be, what it could only be.
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Shortly after the election, Newsweek published an op-ed by a self-described Never Trumper rebutting predictions of the movement’s demise. The bio described the author this way: “Ashley Pratte Oates is a communications strategist, a registered Independent and board member of Republican Women for Progress, which endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024.” Whatever a group that endorses the Democrat in three straight elections might be, what it isn’t is Republican.
The Russian aristocrats who fled the revolution found the lounges of Parisian hotels comfortable, but they were still the lounges of Parisian hotels. What they discovered is the same as the dejected and defeated ranks of Never Trump will: that they shall never return home again, for the future no longer belongs to them.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X @varadmehta.