The Never Trumpers Are Clear on Their Goal

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

The choice of Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy one for the Never Trumpers who really meant  never .

A Sense of Coherence

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what   never   meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant   never   as in “absolutely never.” As   the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and   Washington Post   columnist Marc Thiessen   declared in a post on X . “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

Thiessen’s assessment of Harris is wholly exaggerated. The caricature is useful for the group  that I have called  anti-anti-Trumpers: those who claim to be Trump skeptics but find ways to rationalize his behavior by attacking his critics or those he’s up against. But at the core of Thiessen’s argument is the perception that Harris poses an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for  The   Atlanta Journal-Constitution , Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia,  acknowledged that endorsing Harris   “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most   dominant political position   of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

This past weekend, Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro   very likely embraced   election fraud to cling to power. In America, over the same weekend, a former president told supporters that if he returned to power, voting in future elections wouldn’t be necessary. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump said at an event for religious conservatives in Florida on Friday. As   Brian Klaas   writes in   The Atlantic , “Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely, if ever, has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.”

We’ll find out soon whether Never Trumpers can truly align around Harris, or if policy-related infighting will get in the way. Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance. But at least the staunchest members of the movement seem to be cohering around support for Harris. For Never Trumpers who have been in the political wilderness for nearly a decade now, this is not the time to quibble over tax rates, the Green New Deal, fracking, or pronouns.

Harris is far from their first choice, but when your kitchen is in flames, you reach for whatever extinguisher is at hand. You can worry later about washing the dishes or whether you need a new garbage disposal. Put the fire out now.