Never Trumpers gonna nevertrump

Trump's great gift was his ability to out you.  Even you might not consciously realize where on the political spectrum you lie, but Trump was able, as president, to evoke such instinctively visceral reactions in people that those people's true character couldn't help but rise immediately to the surface.  People show their true selves in a crisis, and Trump was, for many, a walking crisis—a blustering, impolitic hurricane of New Yawk crassness and bluntness, plus his own unique blend of megalomania and narcissism.  This is how we ended up with such a huge contingent of Never Trumpers:  superficially genteel Republicans who simply couldn't see their way clear to giving Trump a chance, and who actively did what they could to abet the left-Democrats by hindering Trump's agenda at every turn.  Early opposition to Trump's border wall was, you may recall, more a function of Republican resistance than of Democrat resistance.  Why?  Because these superficial people were (and are) stuck on the level of decorum, refusing to recognize the pragmatic realities of politics.  The pragmatists, i.e., the ones who agreed with Trump's agenda, were quick to say of Trump that "he fights."  To them, this quality was far more important than whether Trump liked his steak well done or thought that not all "war heroes" deserved to be fetishized.  (Look at what a foul, vindictive creature John McCain revealed himself to be after Trump heedlessly smeared him.)

Basically, Donald Trump rubbed people the wrong way because he was Rodney Dangerfield's Al Czervik in "Caddyshack":  obnoxious, uncultured, direct, egotistical, and unfiltered.  Trump was a loud, lusty fart in a church; he was the stinky, horrifying smear of diarrhea in your underwear.  And unable to see past their own superficiality, the Never Trump contingent recoiled in disgust and longed for a return to the good old days of faux gentility and cautiously allusive speech.  The Never Trumpers weren't exactly wrong to see Trump as a danger to their way of life:  after all, Trump was, despite the recently added "R" behind his name, still very much a 90s-era New York liberal Democrat.  As president, Trump was pro-labor in a way that would have made Bill Clinton and his contemporaneous Dems proud.  Trump's concern for border security was also a reflection of his Democrat roots:  recall Bill Clinton's 1995 State of the Union address, in which Clinton emphasized the need for increased patrols and deportations of "illegal aliens," a phrase that hadn't been cancelled by the PC police back then (perhaps because a Democrat was the one uttering it).

If only the Never Trumpers could get past their delicate stomachs to see Trump's accomplishments, many of which did, in fact, dovetail with a traditionally conservative agenda.  But such a shift in attitude is nearly impossible for those who are weak of constitution.  The Never Trumpers pine for Reagan, but the days of Reagan are long gone.

From "Trump Was No Reagan?":

National Review has found yet another reason to hate Trump, whom it has attacked relentlessly for over four years. It seems that among his multiple shortcomings, according to Frank Lavin, a supporter of Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020, Donald Trump was not the Gipper. In fact, he caused the Republican Party to deviate grievously from Reagan’s policies; and so it now behooves us to save the GOP by returning to the proven “conservative” teachings of the president whose approval ratings approached 70 percent shortly after leaving office.

Given how the GOP aided and abetted the left during Trump's administration, I'm in no mood to save the Republicans.  Let the GOP die.  Let it wither and sift away like dust.  The GOP doesn't need an internal revolution; it's far too leprous.  What we need is a new party that represents the current orientation, which is no longer so much a left/right polarization as it is a nationalist/globalist one.  Ignore that reality at your peril.

Lavin offers a study in contrast between the Gipper and Trump. In most ways (except in his tax-slashing and deregulation policies), Trump dragged the GOP away from the firm foundations that Reagan bequeathed to his followers. For example, Reagan had “values,” while presumably the Donald has none that we can praise. While Reagan stressed cooperation with the opposite party, Trump was always at war with the Dems. Or as Lavin tells it: “Reagan occasionally found support from Speaker Tip O’Neill. Trump ended up with nothing from Speaker Pelosi.” The contrast continues with Lavin noting: “Reagan set the stage for NAFTA with his call for a ‘North American Accord.’ Trump sided with Bernie Sanders in withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

And here's what the Never Trumpers refuse to understand:

In the 1980s, the Democratic Party of Tip O’Neill bore little resemblance to the party that Trump had to confront as his relentless enemy. Back then, Democrats were still a party of blue-collar workers (a class that Trump tried to bring into his populist movement). Tip O’Neill was an Irish Catholic ward-heeler from Boston who represented a working-class base; Nancy Pelosi, by contrast, speaks for culturally radical San Franciscans in a transformed Democratic Party, which today features LGBTQ demands, anti-white hysteria, Green New Deals, and which fights the gender identity war. Why would anyone think that Trump would not have gotten along with Tip as well as Ronnie did; or that Reagan would have enjoyed a better relationship with the present Democratic Party than Trump has? We are speaking about different forces of opposition to the GOP in two different eras.

Although Reagan faced critics in the leftist media, as someone who briefly served in his administration, [I] assure Mr. Lavin that this sniping was nothing like the nonstop, venomous attacks to which Trump was subjected from the moment he declared his candidacy for the presidency. I have no idea how anyone but an absolute saint would not have exploded in the face of such slander; and it was directed not only against the president but also against his wife and young son. Never in my long life have I seen such a feeding frenzy.

Attacks on Trump as another Hitler and calls for assaults on him became commonplace over the last four years; and I strongly suspect that if Reagan [had] been forced to deal with such adversaries, his approval rating and his temper would both have taken a hit. Reagan left office with a 63-percent approval rating, which by 1989 went up to 68 percent. We might ask what that approval rating would have been if the media [had thrown] dirt at him incessantly, and if his congressional opponents [had] incited riots against him throughout his presidency. Please note these attacks occurred not just because the Donald was intemperate in his language. The Left wanted power, and it was necessary to destroy Trump’s presidency to achieve it.

Finally, I would note that, unlike Reagan, Trump tried to be a transformative president who took his own party kicking and screaming into the populist form that he gave it. Although an honest, dedicated leader, Reagan transformed nothing.

Trump had ulterior motives for adopting the "R" label.  In his own calculating way, he had figured that he'd get further as a Republican than as a Democrat, and he'd do it by being a troll, a true maverick, unlike John McCain, who was no maverick at all despite his undeserved reputation as one.  (McCain was, in his better moments, a conciliator, which is how he gained his reputation as someone willing to work across the aisle.  His problem was that he traversed the aisle and basically became the first-ever Never Trumper, serving as a tool of the far left.  Something similar happened to Mitt Romney.)  So, yes:  Trump's agenda, when it finally became clear, was not entirely congruent with that of the old-guard GOP.  And yet it was very pro-America, which you'd think the GOP would appreciate.  Apparently, the GOP didn't:  they had gone too far down the globalist rabbit hole, which is the same route taken by all the rich left-liberals, thus making it difficult to frame issues in terms of left versus right.  The concept of NAFTA was very old-school GOP; free-trade agreements were seen as an extension of free-market thinking that would increase competition, bring prices down, and further promote the globalistic agenda.  Along came Trump with a different idea:  the pro-labor Democrats were right, and Americans would need to come first, from now on, in whatever international deals we made.  This meant bringing manufacturing back to the States; it meant not relying on foreign slave labor to make American products (right, Apple and China?).  Throughout Trump's term, and especially during the still-ongoing pandemic, it also meant not relying on other countries for essential products like fuel and medicine.  Trump was aiming for energy-independence as well as pharmaceutical independence.

The GOPe (GOP Establishment/Elite), as Never Trumpers and other old-school GOPers are scornfully called by Trump loyalists, dug their heels in at every turn, horrified at seeing their way of doing things turned upside-down, and equally horrified at being asked to keep the promises they'd made to the electorate.  And in setting themselves against Trump, they stood in the way of bettering America and proved that they were perfectly happy with the globalist project, perfectly happy to collude with Democrats, and perfectly happy to watch their constituents go under like the poor saps in steerage in the Titanic.  The voting public is still sorting through the wreckage of Trump's single term, but I'm hopeful that, given enough time, opinions will begin to coalesce, and a platform for a new party—perhaps the Patriot Party—will emerge and dominate.

All I know is this:   the GOP in its current form has to go.  It's a disgusting beast composed entirely of malice and inertia—lazy, cowardly, and evil.  Even the conservative judges appointed by Trump did nothing to stand in the way of leftist encroachment, which is perhaps a sign that Trump proved not to be the best judge of character after all.  Everyone needs to be replaced, including the GOP who, far from helping Donald Trump drain the swamp, proved to be as much a part of the swamp as the leftists currently blighting our government.

Will it take a civil war to cut out this much cancer?  Can the swamp ever truly be drained?  I honestly don't know, but DC is a hopeless mess, and like Al Pacino's Frank Slade in "Scent of a Woman," I'd happily take a flamethrower to this place.