probably a little more hidden Hillary Clinton vote than hidden Donald Trump vote,” Kristol said in an interview on MSNBC on November 4.59 In another one of his Trump-related delusions in the same interview, Kristol claimed that “many working class white women”—it’s unlikely Kristol knows any—“whose husbands are enthusiastic for Trump but don’t want to pick a fight at home who might go into the ballot booth and vote for Hillary Clinton.”
And as the polls were about to close on Election Day, Kristol again predicted the outcome would be like 2012.60
THE NOVEMBER SURPRISE
Hours later, Kristol would join a dozen other commentators on the sprawling set of ABC News as the vote totals gradually indicated Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States.
Realizing that another political prediction would crash and burn, Kristol struggled to explain what was about to happen while proving, once again, he had learned nothing. “He doesn’t agree with [Republican House Speaker] Paul Ryan on entitlement reform, the heart of the congressional Republican agenda,” Kristol said at around 1:00 A.M. on November 9 as the country awaited the final verdict. “He’s got a very different view of immigration, of trade. Is he really going to go ahead with the trade policies he talked about? We’re in even more unchartered waters than we really think.”61
With that final quip, Kristol was uncharacteristically correct.
An hour later, the major network news stations called the race for Donald Trump. The country—and the world—was stunned. The Republican Party would never be the same. And NeverTrump suffered another loss at the hands of Donald Trump.
There would be many more to come.
The de facto leader of NeverTrump kept his well-documented political losing streak intact during the Trump era. Kristol’s predictions about the “end days” for Trump were wrong every single time. A paid propagandist for both the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachment crusade, Kristol also supported Democratic candidates and declared in February 2020, “we are all Democrats now.” His contemptuous campaign against Trump and the GOP propelled the demise of the Weekly Standard, the magazine he founded in 1995.
The phoniest conservative of all the so-called conservative NeverTrumpers, Rubin, a columnist for the Washington Post and an MSNBC contributor, eventually alienated even her onetime allies in NeverTrump. She encouraged violence against Trump associates, peddled phony Russian collusion, and rooted for Democrats to take back Congress in 2018. She reversed herself on every previous opinion including climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and tax cuts, just to name a few.
The male version of Rubin—he also writes for the Washington Post and appears on MSNBC—Boot renounced his past views in a desperate attempt to please his new allies and paymasters on the Left. Trump forced Boot to confront his own “white privilege,” Boot revealed. The Russian immigrant claimed that because of Trump, he no longer felt welcome in America. Boot became so unhinged toward the end of Trump’s first term that he was calling National Review writers white supremacists.
After twice failing to win the White House, Romney settled for the consolation prize of junior senator from Utah. Before taking office in January 2019, Romney authored an editorial in the Washington Post pledging to stop the president’s worst impulses. He worked to thwart Trump’s agenda on every issue from border security to foreign affairs. Romney is the only senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party. In 2019, reporters uncovered his burner Twitter account: Pierre Delecto.
An unknown until Kristol floated his name as a rival to Trump in 2016, French leveraged his NeverTrump credentials to earn newfound fame. French, a columnist for National Review, routinely ridiculed evangelical Christians for backing Trump, insisted the government declare war on white supremacy, and pushed Russian collusion fiction. French supported the Democrats’ impeachment effort and commended Sen. Mitt Romney’s vote to convict the president. For his insufferable lecturing and proselytizing, French is often referred to as Pastor French. He left National Review in 2019 to join the Dispatch.
Once a fixture at National Review, Goldberg left the publication in 2019 to form his own outlet, the Dispatch, with fellow NeverTrumper Stephen Hayes, the former editor of the Weekly Standard. His predictions of doom about Trump’s presidency never materialized. While helping promote suspicions about Russian collusion, Goldberg insisted that anyone who believed in a “deep state” operation to oust Trump was a promoter of conspiracy theories. Trump brought impeachment upon himself, Goldberg argued, because he’s a man of low character who can’t act presidential.
CHAPTER 2
TRUMP WINS, NEVERTRUMP REGROUPS
The Never Trumpers rarely self-reflected about why their party had not won the popular vote in five out of the six last elections, or why the last Republican president had left office with near historic unpopularity, doubled the debt during two terms, and passed arguably progressive legislation. Like the Resistance, Never Trumpers failed in all their political aims at removing or delegitimizing Donald Trump.
—Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump
In its post-election issue, the Weekly Standard published a clear-eyed editorial about Donald Trump’s victory.1 Editor Stephen Hayes acknowledged that after years of threats, voters finally delivered the comeuppance long deserved by the ruling class. Barack Obama failed to make good on nearly all his promises; the Iran deal was a billion-dollar debacle, health care costs were skyrocketing, and the economy remained weak, among other troubles.
Hayes reiterated the Standard’s “early and often” opposition to Trump but pledged to play fair moving forward for the good of the country. “Wanting him to succeed, we’ll offer him good-faith advice. When he governs as a conservative, we’ll support him enthusiastically,” Hayes wrote. “If we see the old Trump, we won’t stint on criticism; and if he rises to the occasion, as all Americans must hope he will, we won’t hold back praise. In short, we were wrong about Trump’s electoral prospects, and we hope to be even more mistaken about the kind of president he’ll turn out to be.”
Other NeverTrumpers appeared to offer sincere promises about how they would cover the Trump presidency.