NeverTrump

Let's sit down and have a talk about James Comey, America's tallest teenage girl. Typically the conversation around the nation's most famous former FBI director focuses on political gripes – whether his grandstanding, poorly timed announcements that Democrats still blame for Hillary Clinton's loss, or his back-channeling conniving debriefings Republicans still blame for Russiagate. But nowadays, whenever Comey pops up in the algorithm, it seems to be because he's just so deeply weird. His latest debacle: a social media posting of seashells spelling out "86 47", a threat which prompted immediate controversy which Comey attempted to brush off as naivete. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to write about Liz Cheney again. After she was crushed by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman last week in the Wyoming GOP primary, I figured the self-obsessed crusader would retreat to her boudoir to dress up in top hats once worn by Abraham Lincoln while guzzling a brand of whiskey favored by Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom she invoked in her petulent non-concession concession speech. But Cheney is not quite done making a spectacle of herself. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump-deranged congresswoman sniffed that she would find it “very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis because he had aligned himself with Donald Trump. That remark garnered some portion of the contempt it deserved, but it was nothing to her latest foray on to the public stage.

I see that my National Review friends are writing their letters to Santa a bit early. Some, like Rich Lowry's recent paean to Ron DeSantis, are asking for that shiny new firetruck all the cool kids want. Others, like Charles Cooke’s febrile King Lear-like anti-Trump expostulation (“never, never, never, never, never”) hearken back to NR’s infamous "Against Trump" issue and are mostly negative: “No coal, please, Santa, and especially No More Trump!” I remember when I first heard the expression that Donald Trump “lived rent-free in the heads of his opponents.” “Vivid,” I thought, “and quite right.” Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, Max Boot — the list of people obsessed with the forty-fifth president of the United States is long.

Last weekend, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted not to recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the Republican Party by a margin of 31-29, a vote that was much closer than those taken in some county committees, a number of which made the unanimous decision to disavow her. The action does nothing to reduce Cheney’s power and position as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative, and in any case it seems increasing likely that the lady no longer cares what her constituency Way out West thinks of her. Last weekend Cheney, together with Representative Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and Chris Wallace of Fox News, each accepted a Jefferson-Lincoln Award bestowed by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy on Dr. Wallace’s Sunday show.

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in the recent Virginia gubernatorial debate against Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin, touted an odd endorsement: founder of the Weekly Standard and editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol. 'I left a huge surplus when I left office. And that's the reason so many Republicans have endorsed me — over two dozen prominent Republicans. Tonight, I have the leading conservative in America here, Bill Kristol, who has endorsed my campaign for governor,' McAuliffe said. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1442999842771546113 Any right-leaning politico couldn't help but laugh at the notion that Kristol is the nation's 'leading conservative’.

After whispering a prayer to St Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan rose to his feet, solemnly kissed his bible, Atlas Shrugged, and gave a speech at the Gipper's presidential library in Simi Valley about the perils of personality cults. Though the former Republican House speaker did not attack Donald Trump directly on Thursday, it was obvious who was on his mind. 'If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we're not going anywhere,' Ryan said. And if the conservative movement fails, he warned, 'it will be because we gave too much allegiance to one passing political figure, and weren't loyal enough to our principles'. Ryan also called the audience away from the culture war.

When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride, the Republican party was too attached to abstract principles at the expense of the material interests of its own voters. It wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of adhering to its preferred ideological abstractions. Whatever the Democratic party’s ideological failings, its leadership understands the importance of delivering tangible benefits to the electoral coalition that puts them in power (although their newfound suburban voters could be in for a rude awakening if the Democrats ever get too much power). Trump presented an opportunity to change this.

It started a few weeks before Election Day. With the polling data almost universally showing that Joe Biden would win the White House and a ‘blue wave’ would sweep Mitch McConnell into the Senate minority, creatures of the Washington swamp started becoming emboldened enough to publicly buck Donald Trump and his team. I don’t mean, of course, the NeverTrumpers who opposed Trump during the primary and general elections in 2016. Those ‘brave’ souls assumed Trump wasn’t going to beat Hillary Clinton so spoke out against him with incredibly judgmental letters and tweets by the dozens, telling voters Trump was unworthy of the presidency, as if Bill Clinton never happened.

Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't yet been officially certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the Trump campaign has launched numerous legal challenges to the results. Nonetheless, Biden is moving ahead with his transition team under the assumption he will be the next president. On Monday, he announced that his coronavirus task force would include Dr Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration. Bright was a high-ranking Health and Human Services official until he was demoted in May of this year. Bright alleged in a whistleblower complaint that he was ousted because he was critical of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 and was resistant to efforts to fast-track the distribution of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus.

The right has a cannibalism problem. It gleefully attacks and eats its own. The left silently watches Republican after Republican do their dirty work for them. John Bolton is just the latest example of this problem. Sitting astride their high moral horses, establishment Republicans talk wistfully about the integrity of the presidency and the perceived damage Donald Trump’s personality and style are doing to it — as if Bill Clinton had not already defined the presidency downward.The left never attacks its own leaders in this way, which is why they’ve managed to enact far more of their policies over the last 30 years. The left knew that a morally repugnant Clinton allowed for the placement of thousands of political appointees who got their wish list done.

By George! After numerous attempts to provoke President Trump, George Conway, husband of Kellyanne, managed to elicit a series of tweets denouncing him as, among other things, 'Moonface'. In lavishing this attention on Conway, Trump has done him an enormous favor, creating a controversy and publicity where there was none.This fresh objurgatory feat from Trump was triggered by a new advertisement sponsored by the Lincoln Project, a consortium formed by NeverTrumpers to help torpedo his reelection bid, that declared it is 'Mourning in America', a riff on the 'Morning in America' ad that ran in 1984 when Ronald Reagan crushed former Vice President Walter Mondale.

In a night that saw a nightmare ending (or beginning) for the Democratic party in Iowa, one thing became resoundingly clear — Donald Trump will still of course be the nominee for the Republican party in 2020. The NeverTrump cable news showcase candidacies of Bill Weld and Joe Walsh, kept afloat by a handful of anti-Trump donors (Bill Kristol) and scam PACs, are over with, and with them any notion that a NeverTrump delegation of leftover 2016 has-beens will serve any purpose besides on Don Lemon’s panel show for personal giggles. The professional NeverTrump contingent cared more about opposing Trump than they did preserving their brand of conservatism or trying to win over voters.