The end of NeverTrump

Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the 2024 election saw the end of a host of political assumptions — about the country, the inevitability of the left’s generation-shifting agenda and the inability of the Republican Party to penetrate key demographics that have proven resistant to its message. But it also ends one of the most vile and corrupt strains of political activity in the past eight years: the professionalized NeverTrump movement, which raised scads of cash — “generational wealth,” in the phrasing of Steve Schmidt — selling an obviously failed product to Trump’s antagonists.

Trump’s ascendance to the top of the Republican Party in 2016 brought about the creation of a unique collection of individuals and organizations who positioned themselves as constant, unending opponents of the man, his administration and his policies. While some of these were respected commentators animated by principle and a deep belief in an old-fashioned version of American conservatism — George F. Will, for instance — the vast majority had more selfish reasons for their positioning.

The NeverTrump movement had no guiding principle other than “Orange Man Bad.” They were a collection of power-hungry individuals, frustrated at being shut out of the Republican administration or denied access to the halls of power, yet granted the imprimatur of righteousness in their mission by the captains of media.

In the media, the most prominent among these was a collection of neoconservatives, led by Bill Kristol, who turned to leftist funders to start online publications bashing former friends, launch podcasts providing outlets for resistance coping and offer easy quotes antagonizing Republicans for anyone who called.

In the world of publishing, NeverTrumpers developed into high-octane booksellers: all you needed to do was work for the administration for a limited amount of time, then write an op-ed — sometimes anonymously — claiming you could no longer stand silent beside the terrible things you witnessed and precipitating a massive book deal.

And in the dirty realm of political consulting, for aging flacks who had already burned through the period of life when they could find relevant campaign work, the desire of #Resistance funders to give to anyone hammering at pro-Trump Republicans meant you could stand up nonprofits that proved very profitable. Get the money to make the ads, pay yourself to buy the ad-time and do enough commentary on MSNBC that people throw money at you in the hope of stopping the Trump GOP.

It quickly became apparent to anyone paying attention that NeverTrump just meant opposition to all Republicans. Democrat money flowed toward these grifters in subscriber fees, donations and investments, seeking to drive loud, manic attacks on their former party. Some of the most ridiculous attacks were directed at the most mild-mannered of Republicans. When Glenn Youngkin, with an old-style combination of pro-business policy and polite social conservatism, was running for governor of Virginia, the Lincoln Pro-ect attempted a stunt with five khaki-clad staffers approaching Youngkin’s campaign bus brandishing tiki torches in a lazy pantomime of the Charlottesville supremacist march. Like so many other NeverTrump attempts, it backfired on the Democrats and led to a Republican sweep.

The Lincoln Project was the tip of the spear for NeverTrump ad men and politcal operatives, hailed by the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin as “head and shoulders above all the rest in the hard work of beating back President Trump and Trumpism” and producing some of the most prominent and over-the-top ad campaigns against the GOP. Its permanently angry founders were given to non-stop tweeting, often promising the imminent destruction of Republican targets who offended them by taking pro-Trump stances. They were incredibly ineffective — and became even more controversial when one of the group’s co-founders, longtime campaign hack John Weaver, was exposed for sending inappropriate messages to dozens of younger men in his employ. The project fractured over Weaver’s history of harassment — particularly over divisions about who knew what, when — but the overall effort still hung around. The money was too good.

The return of Trump should theoretically boost the prospects of these #Resistance efforts. The whole approach was based on an assumption that enough ex-Republican voices sounding a note of caution or openly campaigning for Democrats would prove politically helpful. But experience shows the opposite is true.

No NeverTrump individual exemplifies this more than Liz Cheney, who endorsed and backed Trump for years — but when her support for impeachment led to her removal from her GOP leadership post, she turned against her former colleagues, leading a January 6 inquiry designed to embarrass them. In 2024, the now-former congresswoman was joined at the hip with Kamala Harris, campaigning with her and endorsing Democratic efforts more broadly, promising the country that she would work tirelessly to ensure Republicans would “not be in the majority come 2025.” Her presence generated discomfort for longtime liberals, considering the massive evidence that her position was about access to power, and preventing people she disliked from having it. The effort fell flat — and may have hurt Harris in states with key Muslim populations like Michigan.

Cheney’s failure and Trump’s return mark the death knell for the NeverTrump movement, which achieved almost none of its aims and is now on the outs even with the Democrats who funded it. It turns out that just employing the enemy of your enemy isn’t enough — you have to have an alternative to what they’re offering, too.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.