in a series of embarrassing moves: Around Memorial Day, he hinted that he had an independent candidate who would pose a serious challenge to Trump in the general election. Speculation swirled. Trump responded on Twitter, calling Kristol a “dummy” and warned that conservatives could “say good bye to the Supreme Court” if a conservative independent jumped in the race to take votes away from the Republican nominee.25
But Kristol’s secret candidate turned out to be David French, an unknown writer at National Review. (French later would emerge as a leading figure in the NeverTrump movement.) The political commentariat on both sides mocked Kristol’s attempted subversion. Vox referred to French as a “random dude off the street”26 and GQ called French a “random blogger” who had refused to allow his wife to drink, use Facebook, or have phone conversations with men during his one-year deployment as a military lawyer to Iraq.27
But Kristol’s tease would be short-lived and crash in a mortifying fashion. French, in his hallmark self-aggrandizing style camouflaged with a veneer of nonexistent humility, declined to run. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve my country, and I thank God for the successes I’ve had as a lawyer and a writer, but it is plain to me that I’m not the right person for this effort,” he wrote.28 French’s refusal to run wouldn’t be the last humiliation that Kristol would suffer before Election Day.
With time and options running out, NeverTrump plotted how to overthrow the Republican presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention. Delegates planning to attend the party’s convention in Cleveland were urged to abandon Trump. One group, Delegates Unbound, produced a 30-second television commercial featuring a split screen with competing video clips of Trump and Ronald Reagan. The ad urged convention delegates to “choose your values, follow your conscience.”29
National Review helped make the case that defections were allowed—there was some legal haggling about whether party rules permitted delegates elected to represent a specific candidate to switch. The drastic measure, one National Review contributor insisted, would be necessary in order to salvage the party’s chances in November. “Discontent with Trump remains high,” wrote John Fund on July 10, 2016. “He languishes in the polls behind a weak Hillary Clinton, his fundraising numbers are anemic, his campaign shambolic. Despite previously promising to do so, he has refused to release his tax returns … Many delegates believe damaging material from his tax returns will leak out of the federal government in October.”30
Kristol, as would be his habit for the entirety of Trump’s first term, imagined a farfetched scenario where Trump would go down in flames. He suggested that delegates should support either two-time loser Mitt Romney or Ohio governor John Kasich, who suspended his 2016 presidential campaign in May after only winning his home state. “They need to have a conversation very soon and agree that one of them will announce this week that he is willing to compete for the nomination after the convention has disposed of Donald Trump,” Kristol daydreamed in the pages of his magazine a week before the convention. “It’s even conceivable both could announce their willingness to serve, and that they intend to let the delegates choose between them and anyone else who chooses to compete.”31
Of course, that didn’t happen. The effort to oust Trump caused only a minor fracas on the convention floor a few days before Trump’s acceptance speech.32 He won the needed number of votes with little resistance.
But the number of establishment Republican and conservative defectors continued to mount. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in August 2016 to explain why she would not vote for Donald Trump.33 Former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber wondered aloud whether Trump was a “sociopath” in an interview outlining his various reasons for opposing Trump’s candidacy.34 (Weber later would be caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia election collusion as prosecutors scrutinized his lobbying work on behalf of Ukrainian interests.)35
A long list of former national security experts who once served Republican presidents, including former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, signed on to a letter pledging not to vote for Trump. “From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief,” concluded the architects of the lengthy wars and foreign conflicts that had disillusioned so many rank-and-file Republicans and that Trump promised to end. “Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”36
Trump’s erratic campaign helped reinforce the narrative that he was unprepared to lead the country and would be a reckless commander in chief. By late August, Trump had named his third campaign manager, longtime Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway.37 Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine was reaping daily windfalls. Prospects for a win in November looked grim; NeverTrump was already looking forward to a Trump-free future.
With summer winding down, Trump as the official Republican presidential candidate, and high-profile Republicans refusing to launch a last-ditch bid, NeverTrump scraped up someone even lesser known than David French to oppose Trump in the general election: Evan McMullin. The former CIA undercover agent and congressional staffer succumbed to recruitment efforts by Kristol and Rick Wilson, a self-proclaimed Republican campaign strategist, to take on Trump as an independent. The single, childless Mormon with a laughably thin political resume would act as the moral foil to Trump, they predicted. Conservatives would have no justification for choosing an amoral business mogul from New York City over a goody-goody from Utah.
Even the Washington Post touted McMullin’s clean-as-a-whistle image, offering glowing admiration for his courage to take on the evil magnate: “To understand that optimism, you have to understand Evan McMullin,” cooed Josh Rogin in September 2016. “Unlike his backers, he’s not trying to save the Republican Party or the conservative movement. He’s doing what he has always done, volunteering for service to play whatever role he can to fight what he views as a threat to America. In this case, that threat is Trump.”38
McMullin’s candidacy started to pick up some endorsements from anti-Trump conservatives, but his long-shot effort appeared to be in vain. That is, until NeverTrump received a gift that even Bill Kristol couldn’t screw up: the infamous Access Hollywood tape.
THE OCTOBER SURPRISE
On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post posted a recording of a private conversation from 2005 between Trump and Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.39 The exchange included lewd comments about women; Trump bragged that, because of his fame and wealth, women “let you do” anything, such as “grab them by the pussy.” (The tape, perhaps not coincidentally, dropped shortly before WikiLeaks released hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.)
Trump apologized for the language he had used, but the damage to his campaign appeared to be fatal. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had been hostile to Trump’s candidacy from the start, disinvited the candidate to an event and said he would no longer campaign for Trump. The move reignited the feud between the two: Responding on Twitter, Trump advised Ryan to “spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican nominee.”40
Republicans who had endorsed Trump started to demand that Trump abandon his candidacy and defer to Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and Trump’s ticket mate. “It would be wise for him to step aside and allow Mike Pence to serve as our party’s nominee,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), a Trump supporter, tweeted the day after the tape went public.41 Other high-profile Republican women, including Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (who exited the 2016 Republican primary early) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), joined Fischer’s plea.42
Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) bragged that he was right all along about Trump’s temperament and character—Kasich is on his second marriage to a younger woman and has a reputation as a hothead43—and promised to help rebuild the Republican Party after Trump lost.44 David French, the self-appointed religious scold of NeverTrump, blasted