Posted on Thursday, February 20, 2025
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by Andrew Shirley
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0 Comments
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The “Never-Trump” movement has never been more politically impotent than it is today. But Democrats just won’t let it die – even after it may have cost them big last November.
Rewind to nine years ago, the summer of 2016. Donald Trump’s stunning capture of the Republican presidential nomination initially seemed to fracture the party. High-profile GOP figures declared that they would support Hillary Clinton over their party’s nominee, creating a faction of “conservatives” who branded themselves “Never-Trumpers.”
Democrats were quick to amplify these voices, touting them as evidence that Trump was “dangerous,” a “threat to democracy,” and “unfit to serve.” The thought in liberal circles was that this apparent splintering of the GOP would doom the party to a permanent minority.
But then Trump won the 2016 election, lost a contest rife with alleged irregularities in 2020, and stormed back to the presidency in 2024. Far from dividing the party, Trump has unified the Republican base behind him – and against his establishment detractors.
Throughout all this time, Democrats have continued to prop up the Never-Trump movement, even as it became obvious that its adherents held no sway with voters, Republican or otherwise. Vice President Kamala Harris even spent the final days of her 2024 campaign on the trail with former Rep. Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was the vice chair of the infamous January 6 Committee and a strident Trump critic.
The Harris campaign hoped that Cheney would open the door to moderate female Republicans. They theorized that these women despised Donald Trump so much that they would vote against their values in record numbers for Harris. But as John Nichols pointed out in a post-election op-ed for The Nation, the ploy utterly backfired.
“While many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less,” Nichols wrote. “The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.”
Still, however, Democrats couldn’t quit their obsession with Never-Trumpers. Not long after Election Day, Biden awarded Liz Cheney the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a blanket pardon – again angering much of the Democrat base.
Following his second inauguration, Trump has delivered one of the most successful first months of any administration in history. Opinion polls show that he is more popular than ever, and Americans broadly approve of his policy agenda.
But that hasn’t stopped Never-Trump organizations like The Lincoln Project from continuing to churn out anti-Trump content to an increasingly disinterested audience. Founded in 2019 by former Republican consultants, the political action committee was explicitly sold to liberal donors as a vehicle to win over a proverbial bloc of Never-Trump Republican voters.
Now that mission is a moot point – Trump has won the White House twice and is term-limited. Yet The Lincoln Project is continuing to solicit donations to fund the “resistance” against Trump.
Despite The Lincoln Project raising more than $90 million in the 2020 cycle, only a small fraction of those funds were spent on actual anti-Trump advertisements and voter outreach. Reports revealed that approximately $50 million in donations went to firms controlled by the organization’s leaders. Moreover, Trump managed to grow his GOP voter support in 2020, undermining the group’s stated mission of swaying Republican voters against him.
In 2024, the Lincoln Project spent millions backing Kamala Harris and finished the year with $863,000 in unpaid invoices. Clearly, the group has entered a political quagmire. Yet these Never-Trumpers are still sending out scores of fundraising emails and texts, attempting to rally support against Trump’s cabinet picks.
Another Never-Trump staple, The Bulwark, has fared slightly better. Founded as an anti-Trump news and opinion site by former Republican operatives in 2018, the platform is reportedly “amassing between 700 and 1,000 new paid subscribers about every day or two,” according to New York Magazine.
The site claims its growth is because the outlet is “centrist.” A brief review of The Bulwark’s video titles, however, immediately casts doubt on that assertion. Such headings as “WATCH: Tim Miller WRECK Trump Apologist LIVE!” or “Tim Gets Piers Morgan to ADMIT Republicans Are HYPOCRITES Over Elon Musk” hardly seem “centrist.” Far from appealing to disaffected Republicans, it seems more likely that The Bulwark’s growth is thanks to the same Democrat partisans already binge-watching CNN and MSNBC.
Ultimately, propping up the Never Trump movement was never truly about winning over disgruntled establishment Republicans. It was always just a coping mechanism for Democrat elites to justify their rabid hatred of Trump – even to the point of using lawfare to attempt to impoverish and imprison him.
But in the process of cozying up to their former political opponents to advance a personal vendetta, Democrats may have unintentionally placed themselves in the political no man’s land that Never Trumpers have been mired in from the very beginning.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
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