hodge-podge of House Republicans, Beltway Bushies, and lower-tier writers and editors rounded out NeverTrump as Trump’s first year in office began.
At first, they framed their collective mission in patriotic terms. NeverTrump, they explained, would keep an erratic and amoral president in check. Any attempted breach of conservative “principles” would be swiftly condemned on the set of CNN or the opinion pages of the Washington Post. Acting as the home stadium referee, NeverTrump vowed to call “balls and strikes” on the Trump administration’s at-bats—this from a team of backbenchers who hadn’t found the political strikes zone in years.
All in the defense of conservatism, they assured us.
But then Kristol tipped his hand. “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state,” he tweeted on February 14, 2017.43 Coincidentally (or not), that was the same day that former national security advisor Mike Flynn resigned amid a deep state–fueled attack based on illegally leaked details of his classified call with the Russian ambassador and an ambush by FBI director James Comey’s lackeys.
That tweet made it “Kristol” clear that the animating forces of NeverTrump would not, in fact, promote conservatism—ceding power to nameless, faceless, unelected federal bureaucrats is wholly inimical to the core of conservatism. Empowering government agencies to crush the will of the electorate is what the Left does, not the Right.
Kristol’s message would be a harbinger of what to expect from NeverTrump. Rather than fortify a Trumpified Republican Party advancing conservative policies—from federal tax reform to long-promised deregulation to pro-life protections—NeverTrump sided with the Left time and again. Not only would many NeverTrumpers embarrassingly reverse their previously-held views on a number of issues, but they would cozy up to characters far more dubious than Trump, while getting on the dole of leftist funders opposed to every conservative value and policy they had championed for two decades.
CHAPTER 3
USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE LEFT
Demented and sad, but social.
—The Breakfast Club (1985)
In 2003, a prominent conservative commentator authored an impressive book that detailed how the Left helped legitimize communism throughout the twentieth century. The writer explained that Democratic lawmakers and presidents, academics, and elite news organizations defended the rise of the Soviet Union as it tightened its iron grip. Their boosterism lasted until beyond the end of the Cold War.1
American liberals, the conservative influencer wrote, acted as “useful idiots” for a murderous ideology responsible for the death of tens of millions of people around the world and perpetuated the misery of hundreds of millions more.
The author of the book, entitled Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, is Mona Charen. Ironically, Charen, as a proud NeverTrumper, would give succor to the Trump-hating Left during his first term in office.
While her coddling of the Left obviously didn’t result in the execution and starvation of innocents, Charen and her fellow NeverTrumpers nonetheless reinforced the Left’s ranks during one of its most violent periods in modern American history and acted as the Trump era’s version of useful idiots for American liberals.
In even more idiotic fashion, NeverTrump did a 180-degree pivot from its very principled conservative perch. This is where NeverTrump’s useful idiots fare worse than Stalin’s: At least the Soviet Union’s American shills didn’t pretend to be something they never were.
As it became clear that Donald Trump intended to govern as a conservative, NeverTrump couldn’t in good faith, or even bad faith, continue their “principled” conservative crusade against the president. How could they object to tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judicial picks, climate policy rollback, updated trade agreements, and the like from a “conservative” standpoint?
As NeverTrumpers settled into left-wing news and opinion outlets, pleasing their anti-Trump pals at the Washington Post and CNN at any cost has been their top priority. This requires a reversal of their previous views on any number of policies and political strategies.
“One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with,” confessed MSNBC host Joy Reid in September 2017. “I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.”2
Shocked, you say?
In 2007, reporter David Corn, then at the Nation, vilified Kristol’s espousal of the Iraq War and declared (correctly) that Kristol “ought to have his pundit’s license yanked.”3 In 2013, Corn asked why people like Kristol hadn’t paid a price for promoting the war under false pretenses.4
Just a few years later, united in their common contempt for Donald Trump and everything he represents, Corn and Kristol would share the set as MSNBC pundits. Kristol, the man who excoriated Barack Obama for years, admitted in early 2017 that he would rather endure another four years of President Obama than one term of President Trump.5
Trump made strange people into bedfellows.
NeverTrump easily fooled its new followers on the Left to believe that, yes, they represented a large swath of the Republican Party who deep down hated Trump and only voted for him because Clinton was more objectionable. NeverTrumpers assured their distraught soul sisters on the Left that it was only a matter of time before the GOP would see things their way and dump Trump. It was chicken soup for the Trump-loathing soul.
“We have seen a number of people who have been friends and colleagues of ours go pretty strongly in the other direction [away from fundamental conservatism], just embrace big government liberalism because they don’t like Trump.” That observation, ironically, came from NeverTrumper Stephen Hayes in a podcast interview with Charlie Sykes.6
The leftward lurch of NeverTrump happened fast—and nowhere did it happen quicker than on the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, occupied by Jennifer Rubin.
RUBIN’S RANTINGS
Her anti-Trump tirades began in 2015.
Disguised as a conservative, Rubin offered Clinton pre-election advice on how to attract Republican voters; that counsel came one year after Rubin listed 20 reasons why Clinton’s campaign was on the ropes and possibly doomed to fail.7
She fantasized about what would happen to Trump after Clinton defeated him. “That’s the best part of this election—it will end and so will Trump’s domination of the news,” Rubin predicted a few weeks before Election Day.8 Her post-election ridicule extended to Trump’s cabinet picks—she referred to his early nominees as “ignoramuses, billionaires and a few generals”—and his base of support teeming with nativists, white nationalists, and bigots.9
One would assume that considering Rubin’s support for Hillary Clinton, her contempt for Trump and his conservative backers, and her broken political meter in general, the Post would have offered that coveted spot to a legitimate conservative, perhaps even a fair-minded columnist without an axe to grind against the Republican president. (Trump tweeted in December 2015 that Rubin was one of the Post’s “low IQ people” and “a real dummy.”)10
And since the Post made it clear that it would ratchet up its nonstop negative coverage of Trump during his presidency—the paper introduced its new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” in February 2017—giving