Why I Don't Trust "Never Trump" Republicans (And You Shouldn't Either)

Trump Is Their Creation

Paul Ryan? Don’t make me laugh.

Despite the dominant narrative surrounding his initial presidential candidacy and his unfortunate time in the White House, Donald Trump is not an aberration from the conservative norm. He stands in his position atop the mountain of modern conservatism by climbing on the legacy of a long line of leaders and advocates, pundits and elected officials, that goes back over 60 years in an unbroken line. Without the existing conservative movement, there would have been no launchpad for Trump.

So why would liberals ever trust the people who got us to this woeful point in American political history? The so-called “Never Trump” right is Trump in sheep’s clothing and they have done a great job of convincing people that they are the good guys, or at least the less-bad guys. Don’t buy it.

When push comes to shove, a figures like former Speaker Paul Ryan was all too happy to chum it up with Trump when it came to cutting taxes for the super wealthy and cutting off health care resources for millions of people. Never mind that just a few weeks before the 2016 election and at the time of the release of the Access Hollywood recordings showing Trump bragging about sexual assault, Paul made mournful faces about Trump when he thought those political wounds were mortal. All was forgiven when Trump was in the White House, ready to deliver on the conservative dream list that Ryan and his fellow travelers had lusted after for decades. Now Ryan, who serves on the board of Fox News’ parent company, is seeking to distance himself from the stench of Trump’s losing ways — even as Fox News pushes the Trump-style hate agenda anyway.

I find the attempted distancing between Trump and the camps of former John McCain and George W. Bush operatives even harder to stomach. You can see these figures at any given moment on MSNBC, where figures like former McCain staffers Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt repeatedly show how disgusted they are by Trump, that he would dare to sully the pure and pristine conservative movement with his uncouth language and foul views. These are people who worked on the campaign that elevated Sarah Palin’s racist and conspiracy-minded rants, where McCain himself proudly “joked” about bombing Iran, and who had no qualms about running ads that falsely claimed then-Senator Barack Obama wanted to teach sex-ed to kindergartners. Trump had nothing to do with that.

Ah, yes, the “good old days” of conservatism

And of course there is the Lincoln Project, a hive of Republican operatives who have convinced some liberals that they have the magic elixir to defeat Trumpism, despite evidence showing that their advertising had almost no effect on voters in the 2020 campaign. Aside from that, the Project is led by figures like Rick Wilson, who smeared former Sen. Max Cleland in favor of George W. Bush’s Iraq War agenda and yes, it’s personal, called for me and my then-coworkers at Media Matters for America to be “curb stomped” when we reported on his work with the slimy Dick Morris. In my personal opinion, the Lincoln Project, with its tone-deaf “strategy” of running ads on Fox News that are supposed to get under Trump’s skin is just a grift designed to separate liberals spurred on by their animal instincts to be separated from their money.

Then there are figures like Bill Kristol, Stephen Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg, three of the most visible right-wing pundits of the last twenty years. Kristol helped George W. Bush sell a bill of goods on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Hayes literally wrote the book on the nonexistent “connection” between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and Goldberg — in the throes of a nepotistic career of lies and deception — wrote a book on “liberal fascism” where he connected Benito Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

To paraphrase Black Panther’s Erik Killmonger, “Is this your Never Trump movement?”

Well, is it?

But you might ask, isn’t it worth it in times of crisis to let bygones be bygones? Isn’t the looming spectre of fascism from the Trump-led right enough of a threat to put aside this egregious behavior, just until things go back to normal and then we can engage in spirited disagreement with these ladies and gentlemen.

Fuck no.

These are the people and the overall movement that got us here. Donald Trump doesn’t have an original thought in his head and he doesn’t really care about politics. He parroted the attacks and language and positions that the acolytes of Reagan, Limbaugh, Beck, McCain, Hannity, Romney and company built up over decades. They formed his foundations and to think that they truly see anything wrong with Trump at his core is to be fooled.

Figures like soon to be former Rep. Liz Cheney do not fundamentally disagree with Trumpism. They just preferred the old way of doing things as embraced by her father Dick Cheney did. As Mitt Romney referred to it, it was better for these figures when the hate and greed were discussed in “quiet rooms,” at the meeting room of the country club instead of on the national stage at a Trump rally. But it is fundamentally the same thing.

Letting these people in the door is a Trojan horse, and we see it already with their complaints that President Biden is being led astray by progressive initiatives and that he should give up things like student debt forgiveness or not push too hard on transgender rights, and they all actually loved the Supreme Court undoing Roe vs. Wade.

These people and their backward views are not needed for liberalism to succeed. They don’t have any magical formula to beat Trumpism, and in fact all of their efforts to do so have spectacularly failed. They couldn’t prevent his brand of conservatism from leading the Republican Party, and they’ve done a crappy job in their purported alliance with liberals.

What has defeated Trump and conservatism multiple times at the ballot is unabashed support for the traditional values of liberalism within the Democratic Party. Democrats were triumphant in the 2018 and 2020 elections by supporting the party’s core issues without giving in to the Vichy impulses of these purported allies. The embrace of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ equality and gun safety and an expanded social safety net brought far more people into the Democratic camp than dumb Lincoln Project ads ever will.

The future of American liberalism and its main vehicle, the Democratic Party, cannot and should not be built with the parasitic involvement of movement conservatism, the singularly greatest force to undermine America that has existed for over 60 years. It is incompatible.

We should not trust those involved in the Never Trump grift on the right. If they have a come to Jesus moment and reject conservatism as the destructive force it clearly is, that’s great. But otherwise they are very clearly standing next to liberals always looking for a good spot to stick the knife in our collective backs.

Don’t let them.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis/Mastodon: @owillis@mastodon.online

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