a Clinton victory and pledged to “do my best to support Trump when I think he’s right, and I will continue to criticize him when I think he’s not,” he wrote on November 9, 2016. “As I’ve been saying for 18 months—that’s my job.”2
With Trump headed to the White House, it initially looked as though NeverTrump might disband, cut their losses, and swallow a few ounces of their oversized reservoir of pride. It was one thing for NeverTrump to sound magnanimous after the whooping they took from their one-time Republican devotees. It was quite another to accept a drastically reconfigured Republican Party led by Donald Trump.
NeverTrump would have to own up to fomenting the rank-and-file’s uprising. Would NeverTrump confront the root causes of Trumpism and their own culpability? Further, would NeverTrump rally the fragmented party and protect the will of the electorate against an enraged Left sworn to go to any extreme to reverse the election results?
It wasn’t just that so many NeverTrumpers abandoned the Republican Party’s presidential candidate when the party needed them most. Many endorsed a third-party candidate with no shot of winning; some backed Hillary Clinton. They had burned their own reputations in service of frying Donald Trump. Even if they decided to stay in the Trumpified GOP, who wanted them?
The detailed election results were, after all, a harsh repudiation of establishment Republicans and Conservative, Inc. The Donald had achieved what no Republican presidential candidate had achieved since Ronald Reagan in 1984: With the exception of Illinois and a slim loss in Minnesota, Trump swept the Midwest. While the commentariat—and the enraged Clinton campaign—downplayed Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the outcome in those three states was stunning.
In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Wisconsin by seven percentage points, even though Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, was a native son. Trump, on the other hand, won the Badger State by nearly one percentage point. The Manhattan mogul won nearly half a million more votes than Romney won in Pennsylvania and Michigan alone.
Trump won Ohio and Iowa, states that Barack Obama won twice, by comfortable margins; he came within striking distance in Minnesota. More than 200 counties, mainly situated in the Midwest and Rust Belt, that twice voted to elect Barack Obama flipped to Trump: These so-called “pivot” counties would represent the new base of the Trumpified Republican Party. (Trump continued to court voters in the region throughout his first term by holding dozens of rallies and stumping for candidates.)
The Democratic Party’s fortified Blue Wall crumbled. Despite years of polling and focus groups, consultants’ advice, and conservative commentary about how to earn back working-class voters, the Republican Party could not come up with a winning formula.
In 2008, Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Atlantic Monthly writers at the time, forewarned that the Republican Party’s fixation on economic issues and failure to connect with “Sam’s Club” voters would keep a Republican out of the White House indefinitely. “Globalization and the rise of knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and healthcare security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration—all of these developments of the last three decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they’re materially better off than ever before,” they wrote in their book, Grand New Party. “And there’s no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP’s emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.”3
They continued. “Some combination of the populist Left and the neoliberal center is likely to emerge as America’s next political majority even so, if the conservative movement can’t find innovative ways to address the anxieties of working-class America.”4 (Douthat is a reliable Trump critic from his current perch at the New York Times.)
Not only did the conservative movement fail to find policies that would appeal to the so-called “Sam’s Club” constituency at a national level, they failed to nominate an attractive salesman. John McCain and Mitt Romney had no natural connection to working-class voters—nor did they try to cultivate one.
So the very same clique of Republicans opposed to Trump’s candidacy in 2016 had struggled to make a Republican presidential candidate attractive enough to win blue-collar whites in the Heartland to flip those states from blue to red: Donald Trump figured it out in less than 18 months and basically on his own. In 2012, Barack Obama won 51 percent of non-college graduates; in 2016, that exact same percentage voted for Donald Trump.5
“Before Trump, few politicians saw an opening in defending the forgotten working class of the interior, which may have been far larger than believed,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson in his 2019 book, The Case for Trump. “And predictably, after the 2016 election, head-scratching experts sought to reexamine why their so-called exit polls had missed the impending Trump surge.”6
There was plenty of head-scratching data for the political class to digest, especially for NeverTrumpers inclined to view Trump’s election as an aberration—merely a revolt against the Clinton machine—rather than the relief valve of years of pent-up dissatisfaction with GOP leadership.
According to an exhaustive CNN exit poll with nearly 25,000 respondents, 81 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Trump; so did 80 percent of devout Christians.7 (Evangelicals would be repeatedly attacked in a vicious way, particularly by NeverTrumpers such as David French, for supporting Trump. The targeted harassment would not have been tolerated had it been aimed at any other religious group.)
Republicans’ rebuke of international trade policies, centerpieces of both Bush administrations, was resounding. Of those who said that international trade takes away US jobs, 64 percent voted for Trump, a consensus that not long ago would have been attributed to Democratic voters, not Republicans.
Trump overwhelmingly was viewed as the candidate of change. Twothirds of American voters said the country was headed in the wrong direction; 68 percent of that group supported Trump on Election Day. Trump won independents by four points.
In another stunning act of defiance, Trump did not campaign on two policies that had long represented the core of the Republican Party’s agenda: entitlement reform and debt reduction. And it was fine with Republican voters. In the end, Trump earned as much support from Republicans as Hillary Clinton had from Democrats.
With the post-election results smacking them right in their smug faces, NeverTrump would be forced to assess the smoldering wreckage of the Republican establishment, debris that had their names and ideas all over it. Canards about the advantages of free trade and illegal immigration were on the top of the trash heap. So too was the unquestioned use of the American military to police unstable nations across the globe in pursuit of vague goals with deadly consequences.
The bill of particulars that Trump supporters handed over to the castrated Republican establishment was long and damning.
“Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created,” wrote Tucker Carlson in his 2018 book, Ship of Fools. “Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street … Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class … Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.”8 Carlson, a product of the neoconservative political era, emerged as an antidote to the largely neoconservative NeverTrump claque.
ANOTHER KRISTOL COLLAPSE
For Kristol, Trump’s victory earned him one more participation trophy in his long Hall of Shame overstocked with political mistakes that has become something of a running joke among the professional commentariat. “The larger question about Kristol is how much it matters that he’s been wrong as often as he has been,” observed Paul Farhi in the Washington Post in February 2016. “Stock-market columnists, weather forecasters and horse-racing touts might never survive so many blown calls. But Kristol hasn’t just survived his errant predictions,