Though conservatives still debate what use or function the Never Trump movement has had since President Trump’s election, there’s no question that it’s a mere fraction of the force it had been in 2016. For plenty of conservatives, the entire conceit rested on the immediate sunk cost of electing Trump to the presidency in the first place, thus rendering opposition to him functionally useless once he actually occupied the Oval Office. In this way, a significant number of Republicans who abhor Trump, both on a personal and political level, have been forced either to move away from the political space or to spend the better part of the past two years defending him from a fairly insane conspiracy theory whose drumbeat is a 24-hour affair.
Two and a half years ago, despondent Democrats could have decided either to take advantage of Trump’s ideological malleability, courting his big government proclivities to pass spending packages or entitlement expansions. Alternatively, they could have spent every waking minute allowing him to revel in his own faux pas and establishing themselves as the sane, stable, grown-up opposition to the Trump sideshow. All the while, they could have been grooming their own presidential replacements, focusing their efforts solely on garnering positive press for their top 2020 contenders.
Instead, they decided to relitigate 2016 over and over and over and over again. And they still haven’t accepted the outcome.
The Russia investigation itself wasn’t a travesty. As liberals correctly maintained until 24 hours ago, Robert Mueller was the consummate investigator, a professional who ran a watertight operation devoid the leaks that have plagued the Trump White House and half of Congress. The Russian government did orchestrate an unprecedented attack on the democratic bastion of our republic, and American intelligence had an obligation to investigate the matter, regardless of Trump’s involvement or lack thereof. Moreover, recall that Trump ultimately brought the Mueller appointment on himself, not just by firing James Comey as FBI director, but also for publicly linking his firing to the Russia investigation on national television.
So the investigation had to go on. The true tragedy was the rabid #Resistance and their media underlings’ full-scale embrace of a conspiracy without facts. The Mueller investigation provided ample evidence that Trump ran a disastrous campaign complete with idiotic criminals and personal corruption. Yet, even given the highly questionable Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, the special counsel decided there was no evidence that Trump or anyone in his campaign conspired or colluded with the Russians.
Rather than treat the Russia investigation for what it was — a secretive, apolitical probe into whether a foreign adversary successfully interfered in our elections — livid liberals and their media envoys inflated the Mueller probe into a final ruling on Trump’s fitness to govern. That makes it all the more painful to them that he’s just passed it.
In a normal world, Trump’s Republican skeptics would have to confront Trump’s continuous debasement the office of the presidency, the fact that he paid off two of his mistresses during the campaign, his failure to repeal and replace Obamacare while controlling every branch of government, and most significantly, the utter breakdown of his key campaign promise to build a wall. Instead, they find themselves defending the reality T.V. president who can’t make a deal to save his life from baseless and conspiracy-mongering about Trump offering up the U.S. as a Soviet satellite. Is it reasonable to expect any conservative to stand with mainstream crazies, rooting for a sitting president of the United States to be waist-deep in a criminal conspiracy with a foreign adversary?
Yes, the Democratic Party’s sharp leftward pivot might have nuked the Never Trump movement all on its own, because it is leaving no sane alternatives to Trump. But how could anyone conservative by temperament and concerned with truth, and by this I mean specifically to exclude crazy birther types, sit by amid the the media’s emotionally fueled debasement of facts and obsession with the Russia investigation? Criticism of the media obsession with Russiagate wasn’t about the defense of Trump; it was about the defense of facts and reality.
