CLEVELAND — Never Trump experienced its final defeat of the Republican nomination process, with their nemesis expected to formally become the party’s titular leader Tuesday night. But we also got a glimpse of their biggest win.
Yes, these party activists and conservative movement fellow travelers definitively failed in their ultimate goal of denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination. Almost 24 hours after GOP leaders brushed off their last-ditch attempt to force a roll call vote on amending the rules, treating them like they were lowly Ron Paul delegates, all most people are talking about is one purloined paragraph of Melania Trump’s speech.
All day Tuesday anti-Trump conservatives were jokingly contrasting the amateurishness of apparently cribbing from Michelle Obama for such an important (and otherwise quite effective) speech and the Donald’s promise to hire only “the best people.”
Trump’s managerial prowess is one of his biggest selling points. It’s his get-out-of-jail free card when he doesn’t know policy details or has an insufficiently development argument on some important national issue.
If Trump doesn’t know it, he’ll simply hire someone who will. And if his policy doesn’t differ materially from President Obama’s, the outcome will still be preferable because he will manage things better.
Relatively little about the Trump campaign operation screams competent management. At the top-tiered positions, there is also not much A-List talent. “Never Trump” can take some credit for that.
“Never Trump’s” electoral machinations were frequently mocked. They would float candidates who hadn’t agreed to run, who few Americans had heard of or both. Their strategies for derailing Trump over-promised and under-delivered until they began to resemble a cartoon villain’s implausible schemes for world domination that would predictably fail by the episode’s conclusion.
But “Never Trump” has succeeded in reinforcing their fellow Republicans’ and conservatives’ lingering doubts about the presumptive GOP nominee when they might have otherwise fallen in line. This is no easy task after eight years of Barack Obama in the White House, when Hillary Clinton — someone conservatives have dreaded for decades — is going to be the Democratic nominee and so much of the general election polling remains tantalizingly close despite Trump’s myriad problems.
Consequently, many high-profile conservative commentators have stuck to their “Never Trump” pledges even after Trump became the presumptive nominee. So have many Republican political professionals in spite of the money they could make by going to work for Trump, preventing the professionalization of his campaign.
Anti-Trump conservatives often bristle at the description of “Never Trump” as an elite phenomenon. They say, correctly, that their misgivings about the New York businessman are widely shared at the grassroots level and that millions of Republicans voted against Trump in the primaries.
All true. But the polling overwhelmingly suggests that not every Republican who chose someone else in the primaries is “Never Trump” and relatively few of them are indifferent to whether Clinton or Trump wins in November. A large majority of them prefer Trump.
Ambitious Republicans who could have tried to challenge Trump at the convention or run as independent conservatives know this. If they ran, there was a very real possibility they’d get an embarrassingly small percentage of the vote (think Pat Buchanan as the Reform Party nominee in 2000). Alternatively, they could do better, be blamed for electing Clinton and then be held responsible for all her liberal accomplishments over the next four to eight years (think Ralph Nader, also 2000, or Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996).
That’s why nobody especially noteworthy offered to run. But as conservatives used to know back in the days of Russell Kirk, there is nothing wrong with being elite. Where “Never Trump” has had its greatest influence is with the conservative journalists, Republican operatives and party leaders who could disproportionately help Trump and don’t.
So when Trump’s campaign stumbles, the conservative media and Twittersphere piles on with as much glee as their liberal counterparts. Top-notch Republican speechwriters aren’t knocking down the doors of Trump Tower.
Instead of being made to feel like traitors to their party or cause, they feel their ideological misgivings about Trump are understood by their peers to be true loyalty to the GOP and conservative movement. Instead of feeling like signing on with Trump is a good career move, they feel safety in numbers in continuing to oppose him — and maybe even a bit of peer pressure to hold firm.
Maybe Trump would have made poor hiring choices if given the full Republican rolodex to choose from. Perhaps no one could convince him that unlike a 17-way primary, a general election isn’t won by being the biggest fish in a small pond. Certainly, Trump has contributed to making his own personal brand more toxic, keeping many of his friends in business, entertainment and politics on the sidelines.
In its own way, however, “Never Trump” has made it harder for the newly minted nominee to run a normal campaign even if he suddenly became inclined to do so. That in turn makes it harder for Trump to deny them the last laugh in November.
