The death rattle of the Never Trumpers

You can lament this. You can try to fight it. But the fighting needs to be undertaken with intelligence, with a clear-sighted acknowledgement of reality. That means recognizing that the struggle for control of the Republican Party is over. The faction that ran the show from 1981 until 2016 — the faction of Reagan and (George H. W.) Bush and (George W.) Bush and (Jeb) Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake and James Comey and Bill Kristol — is finished, caput, dead, and buried. It has been overthrown. The voters are done with it. Even Romney — a former presidential nominee and current Utah senator who has long been revered in Utah — finds himself with his approval rating underwater because he dared to speak out against the president for treating his office like a racket run by a two-bit mob boss.

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Jonah Goldberg, Michael Gerson, and George F. Will could talk the ghost of Ronald Reagan himself into challenging Trump in 2020, and Trump would trounce him.

The sooner the remaining Never Trumpers accept this, the sooner they’ll stop indulging in fantasies and start putting their talents and commendable moral revulsion at the president and state of the party to more productive use.

What would that look like? Well, for one thing, they could drop the pretense that the remaining primary challenges to Trump are serious efforts at winning the Republican nomination with a more acceptable candidate when they are actually kamikaze missions out to take the president down regardless of the consequences.

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