While it was immensely satisfying to watch the utter humiliation of the TRUMP TREASON COLLUSION RUSSIANS! liberals, that joy paled in comparison to the schadenfreude that came from watching the crestfallen Never Trump bitter-enders as they saw all their dreams die.
Donald Trump is not going to be impeached; heck, it looks like he’s going to be reelected. And the Fredocon losers who went all in on opposing him because “Oh well I never!” are flat busted.
Now, it’s not really fair to imply that the Never Trumpers hate Trump solely because he’s vulgar and crude – or, as normal people see it, unwilling to meekly take the guff the Never Trumpers’ country club class pals dish out like a proper gentleman should. They do find him aesthetically displeasing, but it also gnaws at them because every time he stands up to the garbage Democrats, the garbage press, or the garbage jerks and pervs of Hollywood, his refusal to knuckle-under reminds Team Fail that they don’t have the stones to do the same. He shames their cowardly weakness.
It’s clear, in retrospect, that George W. Bush’s supine acceptance of the abuse the elite heaped upon him was not because he was too classy and too decent to respond in kind. Since Obama left office and he rediscovered his vocal cords, Bush has had zero problem trashing Trump and Trump supporters who, like many of us, stood by Bush in the '00s while Bush was treading water in a sea of mediocrity. No, it’s clear that W was afraid to fight back against fellow members of the ruling class. He cared about being part of the club. Not The Donald. Trump, by fighting, demonstrates that the establishment GOPers are weak. And it eats at them.
But besides providing a manly contrast to their own gimp-like submission to the leftist establishment, Trump infuriates the Never Trumpers for another reason. He’s kicked them out of their comfy sinecures. One of Trump’s magical powers is to make his enemies reveal their own grift complicity, and boy, have they ever. As a result, while once the mandarins of Conservative, Inc., traded on their insider influence and privilege, under Trump they are outsiders. Copies of the Weekly Standard used to be all over the Bush White House. Now, if its inept crew had not slammed it into an iceberg, you would be lucky to find a few pages at the bottom of Barron’s pet iguana’s cage.
Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and all the rest are nobodies, relegated to occasionally joining CNN panels and fighting with Ana Navarro over the doughnuts in the green room. Where’s Bob Corker now? Jeff Flake hasn’t even got an MSNBC gig; I think last week he was the dude who offered to supersize my order.
They are reduced to occasionally popping up on Twitter to inspire a session of Weakheart Whack-A-Mole from actual conservatives. Just look at Senator for Some Reason Mitt Romney. The guy I am sorry I voted for in 2012 is always eager to say something prissy about the president to try to please the same people who, back in 2012, accused him of being a racist and giving a lady cancer. For his obedience, he gets a tasty treat and a pat on the head, like the good doggie he is. But everyone knows that if the elite ever thought that the Distinguished Gentleman From Whatever State He Thinks He Can Get Elected In Next might actually pose a threat to the status quo, he’d be figuratively caged up and driven to Canada on the roof.
So, what is the future of the Never Trump brand of failure-phile cons, since they do not have one in our party – at least not in the short-term? Except for the loudest and dumbest among them, they will lie low and bide their time. Being Never Trump means never giving up the notion that someday the unwashed masses of the conservative base will someday come to their senses, grow tired of winning, and beg the same coterie of feckless failures, whose dismal inability to conserve anything led to the base selecting Donald Trump in the first place, to return to power.
On Capitol Hill and in the agencies and think tanks, there are secret Never Trumpers hoping to wait out this madness, counting the days until some squishy Jeb!-ish nominee named something like Marco will usher in a bright and beautiful new era of efficiently managed decline. Because that’s what they do – slow down the inevitable victory of the progressives while maximizing their own power and privilege. Trump’s refusal to be satisfied with merely losing slower infuriates them. They not only get tired of all the winning – they actively hate all the winning.
So, we must remain vigilant. We must strike ruthlessly when we detect these weak and defeatist tendencies in our conservative leaders, both inside politics and in the conservative media. Never Trump is really Never Win. To the extent that “Trumpism” means fighting for victory, being woke to the fact that the establishment is garbage, and not giving a damn what our much-worse betters think, we must be Always Trump.
Want to see what America would be like if the Never Trump losers had succeeded in handing our country over to Hillary just because Trump is so mean? Check out my action-packed (and occasionally hilarious) novels about the United States split into red and blue, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. Spoiler: It’s not pretty, but the books are great reads! And no less than the Cap’n Stubbing of the sinking cruise ship SS True Conservatism™ hailed them as “appalling,” so you know they’re good. Ahoy!