poor soothsaying made several year-end lists tallying the worst political predictions, including his claims that Trump would lose the primaries, lose the general election, face a viable third-party candidate, and face an uprising at the Republican National Convention.10 He was like a forecaddie who could never find the ball in the rough, miscalculated the yardage, misread putts, and never replaced the pin but the country club refused to fire him.
In his pre–Election Day post in the Weekly Standard, Kristol sounded ready to redirect his energies if Trump was the victor. “After Election Day we should mostly look forward and not back,” he wrote. “There will be too much work to do to spend much time on retrospectives or recriminations. But before we all move on, I do want to reiterate one last time, to allies I’ve had the privilege of working with and to opponents I’ve had the pleasure of fighting: #NeverTrump.”11
After the race was finally called on November 9, 2016, he encouraged his fellow NeverTrumpers to be “magnanimous losers,” as if they had an alternative.12 But that call went unheeded; Kristol’s own humility was short-lived. As Trump’s transition team prepared to take the reins of government, Kristol organized the remaining NeverTrump holdouts.
Their motivation was obvious from the start: Act as the disloyal opposition to a president of their own (alleged) party while portraying themselves as the moral betters to Trump and his “deplorable” backers. That collective stunt would be a way to resurrect stalled careers and gain long-sought acceptance from the Left. (It would also be a pathway for redemption for the disastrous Iraq War. More on that in chapter 5.)
Groveling to Democrats and their cutouts in the news media—particularly on the pages of the New York Times or the sets of CNN and MSNBC—would help these now-inconsequential political players get the attention they no longer deserved.
They would finally get invited to appear on all the cool shows hosted by all the cool people like Bill Maher and Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg.
Their tarnished reputations as warmongers would be buffed to a shiny new patina; even George W. Bush, the most vilified Republican president since Richard Nixon, got a free makeover from most of the Left’s media cosmetologists after he bashed Trump and cozied up to the Obamas.
Kristol’s NeverTrump roster was filled with failed campaign consultants, B-list “conservative” commentators, fading political columnists, and Bush family loyalists. (Some I had never heard of until they jumped on the NeverTrump bandwagon.) None had ever run for public office before 2016, and their political credentials were as unimpressive as their ability to forecast election results or to win foreign wars.
The short list, with Kristol at the top, includes the following:
DAVID FRENCH
Unknown until Kristol teased his fake presidential candidacy, David French quickly realized that acting as a holier-than-thou “conservative” Trump foe would boost his indistinct punditry career. (He started writing for National Review full-time in mid-2015.)13 According to the memoir he wrote with his wife, the reason French signed up to serve as an army lawyer in Iraq in 2006 was because “I’ve always thought the theme of my life was that I was a patriot.” French views his anti-Trump gig as his patriotic duty while he appears on liberal cable news channels and the pages of liberal rags to satisfy the Left’s unquenchable appetite for Trump-loathing sound bites.
A practicing Presbyterian, French frequently scorns evangelicals for electing and continuing to stand by Donald Trump despite numerous scandals, including the Stormy Daniels kerfuffle. French also helped boost the phony Russian collusion storyline while castigating Republicans for exposing the legitimate scandal, the weaponization of President Obama’s Justice Department to sabotage Donald Trump.
By the middle of Trump’s first term, French was a frequent MSNBC contributor and a columnist for both Time and the Atlantic. In October 2019, he announced that he would join National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, the former editor-in-chief of the now-shuttered Weekly Standard, to form the Dispatch, an online newsletter.
TOM NICHOLS
The author of The Death of Expertise and an academic with no hands-on political experience, Tom Nichols left the Republican Party in 2012 over Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy. Calling himself a “moderate conservative” (which usually means a pro-growth, pro-war supporter without the pro-life, pro-gun baggage), Nichols “came back [to the Republican Party] when the danger of a Trump victory loomed,” he wrote in 2018 after he quit the GOP—again.14 Nichols spent an inordinate amount of time on the Twitter battlefield, cranking out one post after another, usually aimed at Trump and his supporters. He cut ties with the Federalist when the online publication became more pro-Trump, but appears regularly in USA Today, in the Atlantic, and on MSNBC. Nichols voted for Hillary Clinton.15
JENNIFER RUBIN
A lawyer with no political background, Jennifer Rubin began writing for conservative publications such as the Weekly Standard and Commentary in the early 2000s. The Washington Post hired her in 2010 to pose as a right-wing “blogger” and act as a foil for the paper’s left-wing bias. Shortly after she was hired by the Post, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that Rubin “characterizes opponents by derision … delegitimizing them rather than engaging them on the substance of their policy preferences.”16 That approach would escalate during the Trump era when, aside from her daily columns at the Post, Rubin often appeared on cable news shows to ridicule anyone in Trump’s orbit. She openly called for the public harassment of Trump advisors, including press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Trump supporters.17
BRET STEPHENS
During his time as a columnist and editorial board member for the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens was a thoughtful journalist with harsh words for the Obama administration; Trump, as the saying goes, broke him. Like Nichols, Stephens announced his separation from the Republican Party because of Trump’s views on immigration, trade, and international policy. He also denounced Republican voters who pointed to Clinton’s similar character defects as justification to vote for Trump. “Such deflections are the usual way in which people seek to justify their own side’s moral lapses,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2016.18 He prayed Trump would lose so “Republican voters will forever learn their lesson” not to ever again nominate a candidate that Stephens does not approve of.
He left the Wall Street Journal in mid-2017 to work for the New York Times, a move widely condemned by the Times’ readership, since Stephens was a so-called “climate denier.” In order to please his new leftist masters, Stephens flipped his views on climate, suddenly insisting he believed in anthropogenic global warming; he later would call for the abolition of the Second Amendment.
MONA CHAREN
Mona Charen, the longtime conservative influencer and syndicated columnist, offers her anti-Trump rants in several publications including National Review. She is a fellow for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which houses a number of NeverTrumpers. During an annual gathering of conservatives that had become Trump-friendly territory, Charen blasted the president during a discussion about #MeToo. “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House,” she said during a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) panel in Washington, D.C., in February 2018. “And because he happens to have an R after his name, we look the other way.”19 Charen gained instant affection from the Left, later boasting in the New York Times about her courage and candor.20
EVAN MCMULLIN
One would assume that the candidate who came in fifth place in the 2016 presidential election, only winning an embarrassing 730,000 votes out of the more than 137 million cast, would slink back into anonymity and get a real job. But Evan McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, remained on the national political