around the nation’s capital and warned that Trump’s victory would result in every nightmare scenario from despotism to authoritarianism to a land terrorized by white supremacists.21
MAX BOOT
The Russian-born author and historian Max Boot would morph into arguably the most caricatured of the NeverTrumpers, a shameless sycophant for the Left who used the opinion pages of the Washington Post as a confessional to reverse himself on nearly every previously held belief, all in service of blasting Trump and the Republican Party. Boot voted for Clinton; he exited both the Republican Party and the conservative movement, although there was scant evidence—aside from his nonstop support for foreign war—that he ever was part of either one.
At the end of Trump’s first year, Boot, in perhaps his most cringeworthy column in a lengthy library of similar screeds, admitted that 2017 was the year he learned about his “white privilege.”22 A few months before Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his report concluding there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, Boot listed “18 reasons why Trump could be a Russian asset.”23 In September 2019, he wondered why all of his Trump invective hadn’t yet resulted in the president’s removal from office. “I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference,” he whined.24
JONAH GOLDBERG
A longtime National Review editor and Fox News contributor, Jonah Goldberg often rejected the formal term “NeverTrump” to describe his political position in the Trump era, but his commentary before and during Trump’s first term rightfully earns Goldberg a spot alongside Kristol and company. Goldberg is a fierce critic of the president; when his colleague, Rich Lowry, penned a column rebuking the “delusion” of NeverTrump,25 Goldberg wrote a harsh response defending “conservative” critics of Trump.26 Republican voters, Goldberg advised, should consider Trump an “outlier.” Nope, not NeverTrump at all.
Goldberg’s year-end column in 2018 predicted Trump’s presidency will “end poorly” because “character is destiny.”27 He mocked the idea of a “deep state” operation aimed at Donald Trump despite overwhelming evidence:28 “Trump’s coalition is a big tent where people with tinfoil hats get to belly up to the Kool-Aid punch bowl, proudly wearing their QA-non, Pizzagate, anti–Deep State name tags,” he sneered in August 2019.29 Goldberg, however, gave oxygen to one of the biggest conspiracy theories of all time, that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians to hijack the 2016 presidential election. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller admitted there was no collusion between the two interests, Goldberg said in March 2019 that the findings did not “put to rest softer versions of collusion.”30
CHARLIE SYKES
Before he took on Trump, Charlie Sykes was unknown to Republicans outside of Wisconsin. The “conservative” host of a daily radio program in the Badger State, Sykes interviewed Trump in the spring of 2016 and subsequently declared himself a proud member of NeverTrump.31 Sykes predicted that Trump would lose his home state in 2016 and take incumbent US senator Ron Johnson down with him. “It’s not going to be pretty,” Sykes warned in August 2016.32 (Republican Johnson beat Democrat Russ Feingold by almost four percentage points.) He released a book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, in 2017.33
Sykes is now the editor of the Bulwark, the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trump offspring. Upon the website’s launch, Sykes said the reason he is part of the NeverTrump project is because he “is all out of fucks to give.”34
RICK WILSON
Until Trump’s candidacy, Rick Wilson had a thin, unimpressive, and controversial political resume. His most notable accomplishment was producing the infamous ad in 2008 featuring Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright with clips of Wright bellowing “God damn America” from his pulpit. The McCain campaign distanced itself from the spot: “If you speak against the anointed one [Obama], God will smite you,” Wilson explained in October 2008, responding to Obama supporters’ criticism of him.35 Armed with a prodigious dialect of profanity and an eagerness to display his vulgarity on cable news programs at all hours of the day—he called Trump supporters, among other things, “childless single men who masturbate to anime” in 2016—Wilson earned a level of celebrity he never had pre-Trump.36 (MSNBC had to mute one of his vile tirades during a live interview; this is the same guy who called Trump a “vulgar clown.”) Wilson caused an uproar for mocking Trump supporters, referring to them as “Boomer rube[s]” and using a phony Southern accent during a segment on CNN in January 2020. (Host Don Lemon later clarified that he was not laughing at Wilson’s ridiculing half the country but at another joke he had made.)
Wilson published his first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, in 2018.
In early 2017, several of the aforementioned sworn NeverTrumpers began gathering in Washington on a regular basis to plot their next move to overthrow Donald Trump. Calling their confab the “Meeting of the Concerned,” participants also included a few former Republican lawmakers and a handful of DC-based think tank officials. “The Meeting of the Concerned, which has grown all year but consists of just a few dozen people, meets during the work day and does not reveal its member list,” Washington Post blogger David Weigel reported in November 2017. “Unanimity has been hard to find, even as some members … have become more vocal about the threat posed by the Trump administration.”37 The Post later reported that George Conway, husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, also attended Meeting of the Concerned gatherings.38
While Kristol and company represent the starring cast of NeverTrump, a cadre of other Republican lawmakers, conservative influencers, and former bureaucrats plays a supporting role. After he stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard in December 2016, Kristol anointed his protégé, Stephen Hayes, as his successor.39 Hayes, like Kristol, had been wrong about everything in 2016, which in the insulated world of the conservative commentariat entitles you to a promotion. Hayes continued Kristol’s anti-Trump legacy at the magazine, eventually turning on Trump-supporting Republicans as well.
Other media figures include Seth Mandel, opinion page editor for the New York Post who moved to the Washington Examiner magazine in 2018; John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and occasional cohost of The View; and David Frum, senior editor of the Atlantic. (Frum said in 2018 that “Donald Trump is God’s judgment on the United States for not being good enough citizens.”)40
On Capitol Hill, no Republican lawmaker held more contempt for Donald Trump than the late Sen. John McCain. After Trump derided McCain’s captivity during the Vietnam War—“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump snarked in 201541—McCain, who failed in 2008 to capture the office Trump now occupies, used his substantial Beltway power and prestige to undermine Trump.
The Arizona Republican bolstered the manufactured Trump-Russia election collusion plotline and represented the decisive vote in the US Senate to block the repeal of Obamacare, even though he campaigned on the issue in 2014. McCain’s funeral in September 2018 featured anti-Trump tirades disguised as eulogies. Meghan McCain’s emotional speech invoked Trump on several occasions: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” she said defiantly, a tantrum met with applause. “We live in an era where we knock down old American heroes for all their imperfections when no leader wants to admit to fault or failure.”42 McCain, as a host of The View, routinely criticizes the president.
Senator McCain’s close friend, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also thwarted Trump until McCain’s death. Jeff Flake, the other Republican senator from Arizona, had to bail on his 2018 reelection bid due to his unpopularity in the state for opposing Trump. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse relished his role as a Trump agitator until his 2020 reelection loomed. Two-time-losing presidential candidate Mitt Romney sought Trump’s endorsement in his lay-up Utah