Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank, said: “There’s not really a Never Trump movement. There is a collection of people who aren’t for Trump’s continued domination of the Republican party. They tend to be on various sides of what we would have recognised pre-Trump as establishment Republicans.”
But, notably, even Trump’s Republican critics rarely denounce his policies on border security, crime, immigration, taxes, voting rights or issues such as abortion or how race is taught in schools. Pence, for example, tempers his rare dissent with paeans to the accomplishments of the Trump administration.
Olsen, author of The Working Class Republican, added: “Centrist Republicans have to ask whether or not they want to be leaders of this Republican party or of the Republican party they wish they had. The centre of the Republican party today is broadly pro-Trump policies, but preferring to move beyond Trump personally.”
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