NeverTrumpers assemble!

Alexander Nazaryan, the national correspondent at Yahoo! News, has a new book out – The Best People, pillorying the Trump administration’s staffing. And guess what? The NeverTrumper set is throwing a book party for him in New York in June, Cockburn has learned.

The shindig will be held at the home of the new it girl of the Never Trump clique: Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of northeastern blue-bloods Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast.

MJF is known most for her libertine parents, her partial-renunciation of their antics and a weirdly massive Twitter following. She’s now contributing editor of The Bulwark, the Studio 54 of out-of-power, baby boomer conservatives. She’s also, apparently, its social chair,  expanding the publication’s mandate to cheering anything, literally anything, anti-Trump, such as Nazaryan’s pamphlet.

The Bulwark — formed like a Frankenstein’s monster out of the carcass of neocon staple the Weekly Standard —  has a simple, reasonable enough charge: excoriate the constituency it once served. Members of this project of Bill Kristol, an architect of the Iraq war, are mad as hell at less affluent American voters for having supported Trump. This shows in their prose.

For Kristol et al, America’s heartland was salt of the earth when it supported bombs on Baghdad. But now that Donald Trump is president, the MAGA-hat wearing hordes are a bunch of rubes.

This government-in-exile had better get its act together! They’re disseminating invitations – to Jong-Fast’s house! – to some of the group’s archenemies, including the notorious Raheem Kassam, ‘global editor-in-chief’ of the mega-MAGA and newly reincarnated website Human Events.

Cockburn would say this exhibits a hitherto unappreciated generosity of spirit from Miss Jong, who has made a reputation writing sassy dispatches about how stupid Trump and his fans are.

But inviting Kassam is a breach of NeverTrumper decorum. The first rule of founding an expatriate, urban conservative support group is you don’t talk to MAGA-supporting media blowhards. Will Molly’s NeverTrump pals ever forgive her? Or are they inviting Kassam as an ironic gesture?

Still, onwards, onwards. Laissez-faire and let’s bomb Iran – it’s an ideology that’s seen better days. NeverTrumpism is the Taiwan of the Right: it’s the ‘real’ ideology of American conservatism, just waiting to take back over…some day…