Hard Times Ahead For Never Trumpers At The Bulwark, Dispatch

Amid the celebration and relief at Donald Trump’s landslide victory last week on the right, there was a small yet shrill cadre of unreconstructed Never Trumpers, who, having convinced themselves that Kamala Harris would win, positively lost their minds.

I should clarify that like the vast majority of Americans on the right, I don’t read or pay much attention to the dwindling redoubts of Never Trumpism over at the Bulwark and Dispatch. If I want anti-Trump programming, I can tune into any corporate media outlet. But the Never Trumpers’ reaction to Trump’s win is nevertheless instructive because they reflect the opinions and feelings of the GOP establishment in Washington, which has never reconciled itself to Trump’s big-tent populism and would much prefer to live under Democrat Party rule.

Like the readership of these publications, this isn’t a particularly large group of people. And they have no real constituency outside of Washington. But they wield an outsized influence over certain factions of the Republican Party and various institutions of public life. They are overrepresented in the media as spokesmen for the right. They serve as a mouthpiece for elements of the deep state threatened by a second Trump administration. And they somehow gained enough purchase with Democrats that Kamala Harris’ campaign thought, against all evidence, that having Liz Cheney campaign with her in the Rust Belt would be persuasive to Republicans and moderates when there’s no constituency in either party for sanctimonious D.C. war hawks. So it’s important to understand them on some level, even if they are increasingly unhinged in their opposition to Trump.

Post-election, the main thing to understand about them is that however badly Trump broke their brains in 2016, he has now rendered them unable to explain what happened last week except to say that Americans themselves are the problem. Their anger and frustration is now shifting from Trump to his supporters, whom they clearly despise. 

Consider the Bulwark’s election night stream. Jonathan V. Last kept circling back to his favorite talking point about why Trump was winning: voters are stupid — “too stupid to exist” he said at one point, as if the tens of millions of stupid people who voted for Trump should just go off and die already.

As it became clear that Trump was in fact going win, the hysteria really got going. Historian Jonathan Alter chimed in to say it was “a horrific event in American history,” and that he was prepared to hide illegal immigrants in his attic. 

Last, for his part, took a day to digest the election results before publishing an unhinged rant about how the strategic failure of 2024 was written in 2021. Upon entering office, he says, President Joe Biden had two paths before him. He could govern in a bipartisan manner like it was 2015 and pretend the Trump years simply didn’t happen, or he could focus his agenda on “Trump-proofing our democracy.” For Last, this would have included destroying the Supreme Court, creating two new states out of D.C. and Puerto Rico to cement a permanent Democratic majority in the Senate, getting rid of the Electoral College, and putting Trump in prison for Jan. 6. 

Last’s argument is that Biden chose the former but, in light of Trump’s resounding comeback victory, he should have chosen the latter! It would have been better, as far as Last is concerned, for a Democrat president and congressional majority to alter the very structure of the Constitution than to risk allowing Trump to serve a second term.

This is an arsonist’s approach to democratic politics, marked by a kind of mental short-circuiting when faced with questions about what costs one would be willing to inflict on the country to prevent Trump from returning to office. For the scribblers at Bulwark, no cost is too high. They would rather destroy the country than see Trump back in power.

Last wasn’t alone in his rage, either. Over at The Dispatch, Nick Cataggio, a blogger once beloved by the right until he became a Republican-hating Covid paranoiac, just decided to give himself over to histrionic scolding. “Reelecting Donald Trump after January 6 is the greatest dereliction of civic duty by the electorate in the history of the United States,” he wrote. “We’ll pay for it in years to come, over and over, sometimes in grotesque ways. Without exaggeration, the country that you and I knew no longer exists.”

What induces someone to take such extreme views? Part of it is that no new information ever seems to penetrate the Never Trumper’s mind. Over the weekend, The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol repeated the “losers and suckers” hoax on X. This smear, first perpetuated by The Atlantic, that Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France has been denied on the record by a host of Trump officials who were with him at the time. It never happened. But in Kristol’s world, it did. And maybe it’s necessary for Kristol to persist in this delusion. How else can he convince himself that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy? How else can the monster of his imagination be plausible in real life? The smears, no matter how implausible or how false, must all be true.

That’s the mindset, too, of former GOP lawmakers like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who never heard a Trump hoax that was too outlandish to be questioned or verified. In their minds, every bad thing that’s ever been said about Trump on MSNBC or in the pages of The Washington Post is 100 percent true, no matter what the facts really are or what new details come to light.

The eventual result of so little reality breaking through to these people is that they lose their grip on basic political realities and beclown themselves in public. Jonah Goldberg, for example, thought it would be a good idea to post on X that he wrote in Paul Ryan on his presidential ballot. The purpose of writing in Paul is not just to display your Never Trump bone fides, but also to signal that you still long for a bygone era when Ryan was considered a Republican “young gun” and the GOP happily played the role of managed opposition to the Democrats. Ryan himself still longs for that era. He even thinks it could make a comeback. Last year Ryan went on CBS and declared that if Republicans nominate Trump, “we’re gonna lose.”

These people learn nothing, absorb no new information, and never admit they’re wrong. In light of that, maybe they should stop getting so much airtime. In a postmortem at MSNBC, Jen Psaki decided she’d had enough. She said one big mistake was giving Never Trumpers too much airtime. “There was an over-listening to and an over-lifting up of people who left Trump, not people who left the Democratic Party.” The people who left the Democrat Party are going to win in the future, she said. “The Never Trumpers… that is not the winning coalition.”

Psaki’s rebuke was a pretty surprising turn of events, when you consider that just a few days before the election Last was on the Bulwark’s podcast musing, “Did the neocons just take over the Democratic Party?” Last’s co-hosts were mortified he actually said this — not because he was wrong about Never Trump’s intentions, but because he said the quiet part out loud.

But after Tuesday’s humiliating defeat, the Never Trump movement is dead. It has no constituency, and its representatives are so out of touch that even MSNBC hosts are noticing it. They had one political aim, written into their name, and they failed spectacularly. All they have left to offer, in the wake of Trump’s victory, is hatred and contempt for the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump. So maybe it’s time to stop pretending they speak for anybody, especially on the right.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.