The Republicans Who Want to Destroy Trump
Their
party’s a lost cause. America isn’t.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
July 11, 2020
Should you have any doubt
about how passionately George Conway and the other Never Trumpers at the
Lincoln Project want to defeat the president, check out their ads.
There are dozens at this point, and the
best are minute-long masterpieces of
derision, miniature operas of contempt, designed to get into President Trump’s
head and deep under his skin. That’s exactly where they’ve burrowed.
After the release of “Mourning in America,” which turned Ronald Reagan’s
famous “Morning in America”
commercial on its head, Trump had one of his trademark Twitter meltdowns. He
shrieked at Conway in particular, mentioning his marriage to one of Trump’s
brashest aides.
“I
don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband,” the
president tweeted, “but it must have been really bad.”
Such grace. But if George Conway can
just shake it off and the Lincoln Project succeeds, he and his fellow
refugees from Trump’s Republican Party will find peace and a place in a
restored, recognizable political order on the other side. Right?
Wrong. They don’t hope to regain
control of the Republican Party, because they expect that Trump-ism will
survive Trump and that Trump himself won’t shut up simply because voters shut
him down.
“I personally think that the Republican
brand is probably destroyed,” Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having
become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the
party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and
he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
But the Lincoln Project’s full-court
press for Joe Biden, which involves social media and grass-roots organizing as
well as internet and television ads, doesn’t mean that Conway and company are
looking for a welcome mat in the Democratic Party. Not at all.
That’s
what’s so fascinating about their quest. They’re not fighting to come in from
the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of
this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
I asked Conway, “So you’ll be a man
without a party for the rest of your days?”
“Probably,” he said. “It makes me
tremendously sad.”
It’s easy to miss or minimize how
remarkable the Never Trumpers — at the Lincoln Project and elsewhere — are.
That’s partly because they’ve been around almost since Trump’s presidential
campaign commenced, so they’ve lost their novelty and some of their luster.
But they’ve gained in ranks and grown
in determination, to a point where you have to go back to 1972 — when many
prominent Democrats endorsed President Richard Nixon, a Republican, over George
McGovern, the Democratic nominee — to find anything close.
And even that precedent doesn’t quite
hold up. As the historian Timothy Naftali told me, the Democrats for Nixon
split with him primarily along ideological lines, and they weren’t trying to
undermine an incumbent president. Never Trumpers are doing precisely that, and
while they have ideological quibbles with Trump, they’re motivated principally
by their belief that he’s something of a monster.
“It’s an unprecedented moment,” said
Charlie Sykes, the editor in chief of The Bulwark, a
Trump-bashing publication begun in 2018 by
Trump-disgusted Republicans like him. Sykes no longer considers himself a
Republican. He described himself to me as “a politically homeless contrarian
conservative.”
The
Bulwark shares personnel and DNA with Republican Voters Against Trump and
Republicans for the Rule of Law, all bastions of Never Trumpers. There’s also a
new super PAC called 43 Alumni for Biden,
a reference to George W. Bush, the 43rd president. It comprises scores of
alumni of his administration who want to see Biden beat Trump, and it intends to release testimonials from
former senior Bush administration officials.
As for the Lincoln Project, it’s helmed
not by a ragtag band of renegades but by a
cluster of strategists who worked for Bush, John McCain or Mitt
Romney and were well-connected Republican insiders until Trump’s takeover. The
anti-Trump rebellion is distinguished by the pedigree of the rebels.
And it exists in paradoxical tension
with the equally remarkable loyalty that most Republicans give the president.
In the same manner that Trump triggers outsize dissent, he inspires outsize
support. He’s just plain outsize. Depending on the moment, about 80 percent to 90 percent
of voters who identify as Republican tell pollsters that they
stand behind Trump.
They’re the reason that some political
observers see what the Lincoln Project and its kin are doing as an exercise in
protracted political suicide. Even if Trump and his minions get a resounding
comeuppance in November, “It seems unlikely that Sean Hannity and Laura
Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh will apologize to the Cassandras and say, ‘You were
right all along!’” Matt Lewis, a conservative, wrote recently in a column in
the Daily Beast under the headline “The Never Trumpers May Destroy Him. Then
What?”
Sykes
at The Bulwark conceded: “It’s naïve to think that the Republican Party is
going to snap back to sanity anytime soon. The fact that people are talking
about Tucker Carlson in 2024 shows
you how far they’ve gone.”
So does that make these Never Trumpers
some uniquely high-minded breed? It’s complicated. While they broke with the
Republican Party on principle, they may well have expected the Trump fever to
break — and for other Republicans to follow them — in short order. Meanwhile,
Never Trump-ism had its perks, or at least its consolations.
There’s
an especially rapt audience for takedowns of Trump from conservatives, and
Never Trumpers have found themselves in high demand as commentators and book
authors.
Through some of their anti-Trump
organizations, funded by donors, some of them have arranged employment no
longer available to them in conventional Republican circles. In The Atlantic recently,
Andrew Ferguson fairly called out individual Never Trumpers for inconsistency,
hypocrisy and opportunism, and raised questions about the degree to which a few
of the people with the Lincoln Project are profiting from it.
But the most important syllable in
Never Trumper is Trump, and Never Trumpers are essentially sowing the seeds of
their own diminished relevance by working to get rid of him.
That’s why, when I look at them, I see
patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the
Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed
atonement.
Trump’s election made him revisit how
he and other Republican strategists had paved the way for Trump. For instance,
Weaver worked for the man who was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump for
president.
“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to
the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told me. “Now I look
back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for
that?’”
Sykes spoke of “a revelation” that he
has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the
policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values. I can disagree with you on eight
out of 10 issues, but if you’re an honorable, honest, empathetic human being,
we can do business.” Trump is none of those things. Biden is most or all of
them — and will get Sykes’s vote in November.
In exile he and other Never Trumpers
have found clarity. They cut to the heart of the matter.
That’s reflected in a
Lincoln Project ad from late May that
begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form
an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One
Wrong President.”
I don’t know that they’ll tip the
election. But they sure as hell tell it like it is.
Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995
and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief
and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the
author of three best-selling books.