The Never Trumpers are GOP establishment luminaries and others in the Washington-New York media/political circuit who would have preferred Democrat Hillary Clinton winning the presidency in 2016 over their party’s official candidate. Since the election, vocal Never Trumpers, Republicans in Name Only, and assorted globalists have gone increasingly left ideologically out of animosity for the 45th president. Putting the “con” in conservative, they have abandoned all the long-time principles they supposedly espoused to collect a check from CNN or MSNBC or another liberal benefactor.
Some Never Trumpers find their way onto Fox News too, a network that has gone incrementally liberal owing to the influence of the Murdoch bros. They were just as disappointed as the Trump-hating Democrats when Meuller cleared the president of any campaign collusion with Russia. If anything, this development has exacerbated Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Former Gov. William Weld and current Gov. Larry Hogan are considering quixotically challenging Trump in the 2020 GOP presidential primary. New Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who lost to Obama in 2012, sounds like he might get into the mix too.
According to two pro-Trump pundits, Never Trumpers propped up by the media don’t have much a future especially after the Mueller report’s release.
Trump foes on the left and right seem incapable or unwilling to look beyond his bombastic rhetoric and the trolling (and maybe the hair) to recognize the accomplishments of the administration. That is, actions rather than words — that latter what historian Victor Davis Hanson calls Trump’s “occasional callousness and crassness” and his “sometimes counterproductive and coarse tweets.”
Never Trump Never Tired of Losing
From Kurt Schlicter at Town Hall:
“Now, it’s not really fair to imply that the Never Trumpers hate Trump solely because he’s vulgar and crude – or, as normal people see it, unwilling to meekly take the guff the Never Trumpers’ country club class pals dish out like a proper gentleman should. They do find him aesthetically displeasing, but it also gnaws at them because every time he stands up to the garbage Democrats, the garbage press, or the garbage jerks and pervs of Hollywood, his refusal to knuckle-under reminds Team Fail that they don’t have the stones to do the same. He shames their cowardly weakness….
“But besides providing a manly contrast to their own gimp-like submission to the leftist establishment, Trump infuriates the Never Trumpers for another reason. He’s kicked them out of their comfy sinecures. One of Trump’s magical powers is to make his enemies reveal their own grift complicity, and boy, have they ever… Being Never Trump means never giving up the notion that someday the unwashed masses of the conservative base will someday come to their senses, grow tired of winning, and beg the same coterie of feckless failures, whose dismal inability to conserve anything led to the base selecting Donald Trump in the first place, to return to power.
“So, we must remain vigilant. We must strike ruthlessly when we detect these weak and defeatist tendencies in our conservative leaders, both inside politics and in the conservative media. Never Trump is really Never Win. To the extent that ‘Trumpism’ means fighting for victory, being woke to the fact that the establishment is garbage, and not giving a damn what our much-worse betters think, we must be Always Trump.”
Never Trump on Life Support?
Added David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation in a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed:
“NeverTrumpism is not dead, but it is on life-support with no possibility of returning to the vitality it displayed in 2016. Were it not for the news media’s eagerness to amplify the voices of those who hate the president, the movement would have long since been relegated to the more obscure corners of the internet.
“NeverTrumpism only still exists because the Left finds it useful to add a sprinkling of ‘conservative’ anti-Trump vitriol to its progressive anti-Trump vitriol. At this point, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the NeverTrumpers who claim to be on the Right from the anti-Trumpers on the Left…
“Now, 2½ years into the Trump presidency, the case for NeverTrumpism has completely collapsed. Not one of the overblown doomsday scenarios that President Trump was supposed to unleash on humanity has panned out. The economy hasn’t collapsed. Fascism hasn’t come to America. And we aren’t at war with the world.
“The president, in fact, has an impressive record of conservative accomplishments. Admittedly, it is easy to lose sight of them amid the flurry of tweets, the high turnover rate in the administration and the daily skirmishes with journalists. But Trump has cut taxes, pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda, boosted the defense budget and appointed two fine justices to the Supreme Court as well as a record number of appellate judges to the federal bench.
“The economy is growing, unemployment is falling and wages are rising. We have pulled out of the Paris Accord, withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, and destroyed Islamic State. Trump has arguably done more to advance the conservative agenda than any other of the 16 Republican candidates he ran against would have.
“If anything, it is Trump’s original die-hard supporters who have the most reason to be disappointed with him. His rhetoric notwithstanding, Trump has proven to be more of a conventional Republican than an America First nationalist. The great irony, which is entirely lost on the NeverTrumpers, is that in terms of policy, Trump has turned out to be the kind of president they always said they wanted but predicted he could never be..”
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