Some NeverTrumpers Giving Up The Old Grift, Starting Their New Grift

Just before the election that made me proud to be an American for the first time since 2008, Politico wrote about NeverTrump.

They didn't talk about the existential threat facing NeverTrump grifters: Either Trump would lose and their grift would be over, or Trump would win and their grift would be over.

But Politico chose instead to play up all of the great things NeverTrump could do in the future.

NEVER TRUMP FACES THE EVER AFTER -- We're nine days away from the end of the presidential election (and potentially a few days more away from knowing the victor). But within one of the defining political factions of our era, the possibility of a Harris win is already prompting an existential question: Are we in the last gasps of the Never Trump movement?

Never Trumpers are having probing conversations about that very question.

"I would trade anything for me to not have to beat the drum of a Trumpian threat anymore," TIM MILLER, host of The Bulwark Podcast and former adviser to Our Principles PAC, told Playbook.

One of the biggest bets of Harris' hundred-day campaign is that if she can capture even 5 to 10 percent of NIKKI HALEY's protest vote share...

That bet didn't pay out. Whoops.

CHARLIE SYKES, the Never Trump conservative and former talk radio host, has spent time with Harris for events on the campaign trail, and says he is taken with the "seriousness with which they're trying to create a big tent -- which is not the vibe we had from Democrats in the past."

"Standing there with LIZ CHENEY, we're all really aware of how unusual this alliance is, and I think it just underlines the five-alarm emergency of the campaign," he told Playbook.

If it doesn't work, of course, there is certain to be significant second-guessing of the strategy -- and the time -- the Harris campaign invested into wooing disaffected Republicans.

But even if it does work, it's an open question just how durable this alliance is if Harris wins and Trump recedes from center stage.

....

Far from dissolving, Never Trump could "be more energized if it is responsible in some of these states for dealing a knockout blow to Trumpism in places like the Pennsylvania suburbs and Arizona," [Heath] Mayo said.

Whoops.

If that happens, would the movement have the power to extract policy concessions from a potential Harris administration?

It didn't happen and also "no," they could not have extracted policy concessions.

"This is the million-dollar question," Mayo said. "After she wins, how do we use this political leverage -- because we will have delivered her the White House -- how do we use that leverage to communicate what it looks like for a Harris administration to tack in our direction? What does that mean for NATO and our commitments to our allies abroad? What does the foreign policy look like? What does an economic policy look like?"

It's more like two-bit question.

OLIVIA TROYE, a former Trump administration national security official, said Harris has signaled she wants to foster the coalition on more than just a transactional level.

"She's been very receptive on domestic stuff, immigration, and in the homeland security space," Troye said. "I have no reason to believe that she won't fulfill the promises that she's made about commitments. She said she wants to establish a bipartisan advisory council. She's really been committed to this outreach."

Others are more skeptical.

From its earliest days, the Never Trump movement has been an odd duck in American politics, a hodgepodge coalition that exists to achieve a political outcome that would obviate the need for its own existence.

...

And that's one reason to think that this ad hoc coalition has permanently realigned with Democrats -- Cheney, after all, gave $2.5 million to American Bridge 21st Century, the Democratic research shop, as Trumpian Republicans revel in pointing out.

They have permanently realigned with Democrats, who they always agreed with except on the point of American militarism. And yet the media keeps insisting they're Republicans, outside of articles like this.

Even in a world where that happens, there would still be a conceivable use case for the coalition.

"I would like to think that we could kind of close up the stand, have a garage sale and go back to our lives," Sykes told Playbook while driving to Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party. "Then the conservatives in the Never Trump movement would shift into the loyal opposition again. But I don't see that happening."

I can't find a cite now, but just a couple of days after the election, if my memory is correct, Rick Wilson of the National Man-Boy Lincoln Association announced a new grift: Pay him money and he will run ads against Elon Musk and conduct "investigations."

Wilson saw that the NeverTrump grift was hitting its expiration date and so he immediately started up a NeverMusk grift.

Bret Stephens, one of the OG NeverTrumpers who parlayed his party-flip into a well-paid gig writing anti-Trump opinion pieces for the NYT, tries to walk back his Trump derangement.

Eddie Scary for The Federalist:

The media don't get to bounce back into the conversation and be taken seriously just by suggesting they've learned something meaningful.

In hopes of remaining relevant to the political discourse, some big-name people in the media are professing a change of heart or newfound enlightenment that, coincidentally, only arrived after the election, when it no longer matters.

After noting that Joe Scarborough and Steven Smith, the loudmouthed know-noting ESPN gasbag, are saying some supportive things about Trump and offering some criticisms to the Democrats, Scary discusses Bret Stephens' Strange New Respect for MAGA.

...

Of greater interest is someone like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, the self-identified conservative who has rooted against Republicans in virtually every nationwide election since at least 2012. Stephens wrote on Tuesday as a once proud "Biden conservative" that it's "time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement." He wrote of a newfound understanding that Trump's voters are largely animated by resentment for 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."

He's just getting this now?

That's why he works for the NYT and you don't -- the important thing isn't getting it right. The important thing is getting it right at just the right time, when the leftwing lunatics all media caters to finally starts to realize they've been hoodwinked.

The key is to jump out right in front of the parade after the parade has begun marching and pretend that you're leading the parade.

Stephens concluded by pledging to "enter the new year by wishing the new administration well, by giving some of Trump's cabinet picks the benefit of the doubt, by dropping the lurid historical comparisons to past dictators, by not sounding paranoid about the ever-looming end of democracy, by hoping for the best and knowing that we need to fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we fear, that whatever happens, this too shall pass."

That's a pleasant sentiment, but it also comes just a few days too late. Which is to say, weeks after a decisive election. Before that election would have been the opportune time for adopting a more charitable view of your fellow citizens who are concerned less with Jan. 6 and more with their dwindling savings and a southern border overrun by destitute foreigners requiring care courtesy of the rundown American taxpayer.

...

Their status is diminished. That's the price they have to pay. Their audiences should ensure they pay it for a long time to come.

Cenk Uguyr (or whatever) is a leftist who's suddenly courting MAGA:

posted by Ace at 02:41 PM

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