The End of Never Trump

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.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last responded to Trump’s victory by urging that “Democrats should not try to save America from itself” and proposed that Democrats should not fight deportations of illegal aliens because Latinos voted for Trump. “Democrats should spend exactly zero political capital stopping any Trump deportation efforts,” he broadcast. “It is madness to spend capital trying to help people who are no longer a major part of your electoral coalition.”

While professional Never Trumpers shot further down the radicalization rabbit hole, Bret Stephens at the New York Times headlined his column, “Done With Never Trump” dismissing the “heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement”, conceding that the Russiagate “collusion allegations were a smear” and that “Trump’s Russia policy — whether it was his opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or his covert aid to Ukraine — was much tougher” than Obama’s or Biden’s had been or would be.

Stephens wrote about the hypocrisy of Trump’s critics asking “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?” and argued that ” as much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether it’s higher education or the F.B.I., many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.”

The reactions from The Bulwark and Stephens typify the two poles of Never Trumperism.

Serious adults like Stephens proved capable of reevaluating their positions in the face of a landslide election and a major shift in public sentiment while professional Never Trumpers doubled down on trying to out-MSNBC the actual MSNBC in the fanatical fashion of past defectors from the conservative movement like Media Matters guru David Brock.

But they’re imitating a model that may be dead. MSNBC’s ratings are struggling and from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, the media’s Trump-baiters are rethinking their offerings. The liberal base is tired of rants about Trump and has been tuning out. And after three election cycles of failure, the big liberal foundations may grow weary of funding the vanity projects of Never Trumpers which have never been anything other than a social club for political operatives who had found a way to use the rise of Trump to make money from his enemies.

‘Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites’, a book funded in part by the movement, warned that Never Trump’s “funding has come from left-of-center sources including Democracy Fund Voice, an initiative solely sponsored by tech entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, and the Hewlett Foundation.” Will the money keep on coming especially with Trump in his final term in office?

Never Trump built its movement around opposing one man who has won his last election. What are they going to do for a next act? Rebrand around opposing the next GOP candidate?

When the money dries up, the campaign consultants who were the real force behind Never Trumperism will move on and the handful of intellectuals who lent their name to this facade will have to do likewise. And that may end up happening even sooner than anyone expects.

The Lincoln Project, like the rest of the Never Trump movement, proved to be a political dead end, but enormously profitable for those connected with it. Its operatives failed to elect Kamala, but by diverting millions in Democrat funds, they may have helped to reelect Trump.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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