NeverTrump was futile from the start

“We fight for every inch,” declared Nikki Haley after she won her first primary in the District of Columbia last week. Her fight didn’t last long. The former governor of South Carolina managed to win one state primary on Super Tuesday, handing the presidential nomination to Donald Trump. Haley’s campaign is over — and with it went the hopes of the NeverTrump movement.

Why did the attempt to reclaim the Republican party from Trump fail so badly? There are 340 million people in the US: all the NeverTrump campaign needed to do was find one who’d make a more convincing Republican candidate. Not only did no candidate emerge, no one came close. Almost from the get-go in the Republican primaries, there has been no contest.

It hasn’t helped that the NeverTrump movement has been essentially faceless. Serious people — including former Republican presidents and presidential candidates — have spoken out against Trump over the years, but no one has wanted to lead the charge against him. You can understand why: it often doesn’t end well for those who stand up to him. (The Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney lost her seat when she did it.) But if you’re going to try to take on a man who has a bigger political profile than any living politician, you need a charismatic challenger.

Instead, the struggling movement quickly became a desperate one. Awful candidates were presented as Republican saviors. Ron DeSantis was given a free ride from the start, as if primary voters wouldn’t notice that he struggles to perform on a national stage. The Florida governor’s authoritarian streak for going after private businesses such as Disney and Bud Light for their politics — something the NeverTrump movement should loathe — was glossed over.

Vivek Ramaswamy was billed as a Trump-lite candidate, though his ideas on foreign policy, such as suggesting that the US could allow China to seize Taiwan after 2028, are far more dangerous than almost anything Trump has said about America’s role abroad.

Haley ended up the most successful challenger to Trump because she had the most consistent political voice. As a former ambassador to the UN, she also had stature and a view of America’s place in the world which the old Republican guard found palatable. But her shortcomings were quickly exposed: she struggled to immediately name three provinces in Ukraine where she was calling for more US military intervention. It was an uncomfortable throwback to the Bush-Cheney era which bombed without discretion.

The NeverTrump movement also made the fatal assumption that the many criminal charges against him would damage his chances. Instead, the lawfare served only to strengthen his claim to be the nemesis of the establishment. The bizarre idea that Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election — denounced by the Mueller Report — stopped many voters taking any lawsuits against him seriously. The January 6 charges and his attempts to stop the count in Georgia don’t carry the weight they might once have done.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the NeverTrump movement is that it turned on fellow Republicans. The original anti-Trump push from within the party was on the principle that his attacks on Gold Star military families, on people of different races, on journalists with disabilities or on female reporters had no place within modern Republican politics.

This quickly descended into an obsession with smearing Trump’s supporters in a manner reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” The Lincoln Project, for instance, was founded by NeverTrump supporters as a digital campaign to draw attention to old Republican values. It soon turned into a vehicle for demonizing the GOP — comparing Republican voters to the most extreme MAGA politicians.

This strategy was never going to beat Trump. As a Republican voter who said “Never Trump” from the start of this saga, I wasn’t looking for an equally negative alternative. Fear is Trump’s game, and he’ll always win it. Unfortunately, much of the NeverTrump movement tried to play. It’s no surprise they lost.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.