Did #NeverTrump need to happen?

In short, imagine a Trump campaign that was noisy and rude and Trump-ish, but also fundamentally responsible, in the sense that behind the bluster, the candidate knows what he’s talking about, and knows how to demonstrate on a consistent daily basis that he understands what conservatives want and wishes to deliver some of it to them.

Would conservative writers, activists, and leaders have flocked to Trump in the primary? Would he have rolled up a lot more mainstream endorsements? No, probably not. I can’t see myself, or a lot of others, choosing to pass over a lot of candidates with real records of accomplishment and principle in favor of a political amateur with a ton of baggage and a longer record of supporting liberals than of doing anything at all for conservative causes. So yes, conservative opposition to Trump in the primary was surely inevitable, just as it was for Mitt Romney and John McCain and Bob Dole.

Right now, the major conservative argument for Trump is instrumental: Not that Trump would be a good president, but that Hillary would be against us on everything — whereas Trump is a wild card who would probably support at least some of the conservative legislative agenda coming from congressional Republicans, and appoint at least a few judges and executive-branch officials who would be good conservatives, and reject tying the U.S. to transnational progressive causes and agreements. Trump would be half a loaf, while Hillary would give us nothing.

It’s a seductive argument for a party out of power eight years, and if the president’s sole job was signing things sent to him by Congress, I might well swallow hard and buy the risk, much as I did in backing Romney. But a huge amount of the president’s job is national security and running the executive branch and appointing judges, tasks in which he takes the initiative rather than receiving proposals from the Hill. And even in Congress, it’s easy for Republicans to slide away from conservative principles when the White House is pulling them away rather than pushing them. Trump’s first congressional primary endorsement (who went down to defeat at the hands of grassroots conservatives last night) shows how little interest he has in the types of policies the GOP Congress supports, so long as it supports him personally.