The End of Never Trump: Republican Support for Trump Went Up in Every Election Never Trump Worked On; Done With Never Trump

The End of Never Trump:

Republican support for Trump went up in every election Never Trump worked on.

The Lincoln Project, the crown jewel of the Never Trump movement, raised $67 million meant to swing Republicans toward the Democrats in the 2024 election. Instead, Kamala’s share of the Republican vote dropped from Hillary’s 7% and Biden’s 6% all the way down to 5%.

The Lincoln Project had been co-founded by McCain’s manager who had overseen a campaign where Obama had won 9% of Republican votes. Trump not only performed better (94%) with Republicans than McCain had (90%), but Kamala’s share of the Republican vote was a little over half what it had been under Obama despite spending $67 million on Republicans.

That $67 million was only a part of the money spent by Democrats and leftists on the Never Trump movement even though there was never any reason to think that it was working.

Defending Democracy Together, Bill Kristol’s operation, partnered with the Lincoln Project to become the largest ‘dark money’ spender in 2020 and after blowing through $35 million, had nothing to show in the exit polls except another single digit drop in Republican support for its chosen candidate. Every presidential election cycle that Never Trump has intervened in, Republican support for Democrats has not only failed to go up, but actually went down.

During 2020 and 2024, when Never Trump’s political operation was most active, CNN exit polls showed Trump’s share of the Republican vote rose from 88% in 2016 to 94%. The only thing that Never Trump seemed to accomplish was to unify Republicans around Trump.

Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together Institute and its various projects like The Bulwark and Lyceum Labs have taken in millions of dollars annually with nothing to show for it except gathering up various useless political operatives and staffers like Romney’s former counsel and policy director, a former Dick Armey staffer and Beto O’Rourke’s South Carolina staff director.

This Never Trump political cruft was funded by leftist billionaires like Persian eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and foundations, including $500,000 from the liberal Hewlett Foundation (Lyceum’s director Daniel Stid conveniently also ran Hewlett’s Democracy Program).

The Hewlett Foundation along with Soros, the Rockefeller Foundation, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s family foundation, and assorted liberal foundations, also funds the Niskanen Center, a pre-Trump hub for liberal Republicans and libertarians which responded to Trump’s win by insightfully blaming it on the lack of public school integration. And it only got worse from there.

The Bulwark, the Substack magazine of Kristol’s movement, funded by Omidyar, is largely indistinguishable from Slate or MSNBC, and has nothing to offer to anyone who isn’t already obsessed with hating Trump, analyzing his connections to Vladimir Putin and fuming at the media including ABC News, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ Isn’t a Serious Publication Anymore. Just another Fox News!) for not being sufficiently anti-Trump. —>READ MORE HERE

Done With Never Trump

It’s been more than nine years since I first denounced Donald Trump as a “loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians.” I’ve called myself a Never Trump conservative ever since, even when I agreed with his policies from time to time. I also opposed him throughout his run this year.

Could his second term be as bad as his most fervent critics fear? Yes. Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement — and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse? Yes, please.

Who, and what, is Trump? He’s a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic — and angry.

Some of that anger is intensely bigoted and some of it misplaced. That side of the anger gets most of the media’s attention. But some of it, too, is correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn’t, whether the subject is Covid restrictions, immigration policy or how to get our allies to pay more for their defense.

It’s Trump’s sulfurous contempt for that elite — his refusal to be shaped by their norms or shamed by their scorn and his willingness to call out their hypocrisy — that makes him a hero to his followers. Cases in point: How come so many who denounce Trump as a sexual predator were, 20 years earlier, Bill Clinton’s steadfast defenders? Why were the same people who demanded investigations into every corner of the Trump family’s business dealings so incurious about the Biden family’s dealings, like the curiously high prices for Hunter’s paintings?

Never Trumpers — I include myself in this indictment — never quite got the point. It wasn’t that we’d forgotten Clinton’s scandals or were ignorant of the allegations about the Bidens. It’s that we thought Trump degraded the values that conservatives were supposed to stand for. We also thought that Trump represented a form of illiberalism that was antithetical to our “free people, free markets, free world” brand of conservatism and that was bound to take the Republican Party down a dark road. —>READ MORE HERE

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