As a former Republican I still find it shocking how debased and horrible the Republican Party has become. As noted be for, in my view, the party's decline correlates with the rise of Christofascists within the GOP. Not coincidentally, the rise of the Christofascists also correlates with the rise of open racism withing the GOP. These factors are what paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Cruel, racist, dishonest people embraced a cruel, racist, morally bankrupt candidate. Some in the GOP left early on as I did as soon as I realized where the Christofascists and racists were steering the party. Other moderate and sane Republicans mistakenly believed that they could fight a rear guard action to save the soul of the GOP. Now, these former Republicans are working to defeat Trump - a man who embodies everything wrong with the GOP today. Whether they succeed or not, their efforts are proving welcomed by both Democrats and former Republicans who fled the GOP as a matter of conscience and morality. A New York Times column looks at these efforts which may not save the GOP but with luck will lead to a horrific defeat for Trump and his GOP enablers in November. Here are column excerpts:
Should you have any doubt about how passionately George Conway and the other Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want to defeat the president, check out their ads.
There are dozens at this point, and the best are minute-long masterpieces of derision, miniature operas of contempt, designed to get into President Trump’s head and deep under his skin. That’s exactly where they’ve burrowed.
They don’t hope to regain control of the Republican Party, because they expect that Trump-ism will survive Trump and that Trump himself won’t shut up simply because voters shut him down.
“I personally think that the Republican brand is probably destroyed,” Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
But the Lincoln Project’s full-court press for Joe Biden, which involves social media and grass-roots organizing as well as internet and television ads, doesn’t mean that Conway and company are looking for a welcome mat in the Democratic Party. Not at all.
They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
It’s easy to miss or minimize how remarkable the Never Trumpers — at the Lincoln Project and elsewhere — are. That’s partly because they’ve been around almost since Trump’s presidential campaign commenced, so they’ve lost their novelty and some of their luster.
But they’ve gained in ranks and grown in determination, to a point where you have to go back to 1972 — when many prominent Democrats endorsed President Richard Nixon, a Republican, over George McGovern, the Democratic nominee — to find anything close.
And even that precedent doesn’t quite hold up. As the historian Timothy Naftali told me, the Democrats for Nixon split with him primarily along ideological lines, and they weren’t trying to undermine an incumbent president. Never Trumpers are doing precisely that, and while they have ideological quibbles with Trump, they’re motivated principally by their belief that he’s something of a monster.
“It’s an unprecedented moment,” said Charlie Sykes, a founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark, a Trump-bashing publication begun in 2018 by Trump-disgusted Republicans like him. Sykes no longer considers himself a Republican. He described himself to me as “a politically homeless contrarian conservative.”
The Bulwark shares personnel and DNA with Republican Voters Against Trump and Republicans for the Rule of Law, all bastions of Never Trumpers. There’s also a new super PAC called 43 Alumni for Biden, a reference to George W. Bush, the 43rd president. It comprises scores of alumni of his administration who want to see Biden beat Trump, and it intends to release testimonials from former senior Bush administration officials.
As for the Lincoln Project, it’s helmed not by a ragtag band of renegades but by a cluster of strategists who worked for Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney and were well-connected Republican insiders until Trump’s takeover. The anti-Trump rebellion is distinguished by the pedigree of the rebels.
[S]ome political observers see what the Lincoln Project and its kin are doing as an exercise in protracted political suicide. Even if Trump and his minions get a resounding comeuppance in November, “It seems unlikely that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh will apologize to the Cassandras and say, ‘You were right all along!’” Matt Lewis, a conservative, wrote recently in a column in the Daily Beast under the headline “The Never Trumpers May Destroy Him. Then What?”
Sykes at The Bulwark conceded: “It’s naïve to think that the Republican Party is going to snap back to sanity anytime soon. The fact that people are talking about Tucker Carlson in 2024 shows you how far they’ve gone.”
There’s an especially rapt audience for takedowns of Trump from conservatives, and Never Trumpers have found themselves in high demand as commentators and book authors.
[W]hen I look at them, I see patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed atonement.
Trump’s election made him revisit how he and other Republican strategists had paved the way for Trump. For instance, Weaver worked for the man who was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump for president.
Sykes spoke of “a revelation” that he has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values. I can disagree with you on eight out of 10 issues, but if you’re an honorable, honest, empathetic human being, we can do business.” Trump is none of those things. Biden is most or all of them — and will get Sykes’s vote in November.
In exile he and other Never Trumpers have found clarity. They cut to the heart of the matter. That’s reflected in a Lincoln Project ad from late May that begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One Wrong President.”
I don’t know that they’ll tip the election. But they sure as hell tell it like it is.
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