They didn’t like the way Donald Trump talked. They objected to his “character.” Trump’s tweets annoyed them. He lacked intellectual sophistication. Trump didn’t play by their Washington rules. He wasn’t “presidential” enough. Trump had the temerity to criticize their promotion of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Suddenly, after years of parading their influence in the imperial capital, they were confronted with a president who didn’t care what they said or wrote. So they attacked Trump in their columns. They started magazines and organizations (the Lincoln Project) devoted to anti-Trumpism. They endorsed Trump’s opponents. They joined with the hysterical Left (MSNBC, CNN, PBS, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Times, and others) to portray Trump as an autocrat, a dictator, a fascist, a Hitler-in-waiting. And what they helped produce was four years of perhaps the worst presidency in American history led by a man who was in obvious cognitive decline.
Who are the Republican (or former Republican) anti-Trumpers who helped make a Biden presidency possible? Former Bush speechwriter David Frum (writes anti-Trump pieces for the Atlantic), former National Review editor Jonah Goldberg (co-founder of the anti-Trump The Dispatch) and for that matter the whole National Review crowd, MSNBC contributors Charlie Sykes, Joe Scarborough (former GOP congressman), Nicole Wallace (former George W. Bush communications director), and Michael Steele (former RNC Chairman), former GOP speechwriter and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (who edits the anti-Trump Bulwark), conservative columnist George Will (whose Washington Post columns often suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome), former GOP Rep., Vice President, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney (who played Democratic lapdog on the Jan. 6 committee), former President George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, and numerous other Never Trumpers. Those among them who endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and/or refused to endorse Trump cannot escape blame for the disaster of the last four years.
The Biden presidency is the political legacy of the Republican anti-Trumpers. It is a legacy of corruption, incompetence, geopolitical failure, wokeism, far-left activism, and, yes, anti-conservatism. Four years of the Biden administration has left our country less safe from criminals at home and from geopolitical adversaries abroad. From Afghanistan to China, Biden’s foreign policy record is one of failure. Our institutions have been infected with DEI and are less trusted by the American people, our borders are less secure, military and police recruitment are down, inflation is up, and mortgage rates keep climbing as buying a house becomes more and more unreachable for young adults.
The Biden administration targeted police while granting thousands of pardons and commutations to drug traffickers, sex traffickers, violent criminals, a corrupt judge, Biden’s criminal son Hunter, and in a last-minute confession of guilt preemptively pardoned Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, and all Jan. 6 committee members. It declared “white Christian nationalism” and parents concerned about subjects being taught to their young children threats to democracy. Biden appointed hundreds of far-left judges who will influence our laws for decades. The whole agenda of the far left was imposed or promoted by the Biden administration — everything the Never Trumpers once opposed, they effectively voted for. They sacrificed their conservative principles simply because they don’t like Trump.
It wasn’t as if Joe Biden was a mystery to them. He’d been around since the 1970s. Back in 2014, Robert Gates informed them all that Biden had been wrong on every major foreign policy issue for four decades. His run for the presidency in 1988 was cut short by well-founded accusations of plagiarism. President Obama once remarked about Biden’s ability to “F things up.” None of this mattered to the anti-Trump Republicans. The only thing that mattered to them was beating Donald Trump. And for that, they were willing to abandon their conservative principles.
It is likely that the anti-Trumpers will go into opposition again during the next four years. Trump’s conservative agenda will be denounced because it is Trump’s agenda — an agenda made possible by the very “democracy” that the anti-Trumpers claim to defend. Their influence will continue to decline. Their audiences will get even smaller. Their political legacies are in tatters in the Age of Trump.
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