Tom Nichols has a piece at the Atlantic today explaining why Never Trump didn’t really mean he’d never vote for Trump, it actually meant he’d never vote for Trumpism and that now includes all of the Republican Party.

In one of the most appalling appropriations of a political banner in years—or at least since Trump decided in 2012, after years of changing party registrations, finally to settle on calling himself a Republican—some of the conservatives hoping to salvage the GOP’s fortune after the 2022 midterms are trying to seize and redefine the term Never Trump to mean a rejection of “only Trump, and no other Republicans who are like him.” This is important not as some internecine fight among the right but because it is a preview of how many Republicans (and especially those coalescing around Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) intend to rehabilitate the GOP brand in 2024.

The strategy will be to make Trump the sin-eater for the entire party, designating him as the GOP’s sole problem, and then rejecting him—and only him. The goal will be to scrub away the stain of having accommodated Trump while pretending that the Republican Party is no longer an extension of his warped and antidemocratic views. This will require an extraordinary suspension of disbelief and an expenditure of gigawatts of political energy on the pretense that the past seven years or so didn’t happen—or didn’t happen the way we remember them, or happened but don’t matter because Trump, having escaped Elba to contest the primaries, will finally be sent to St. Helena after his inevitable defeat.

This will be the new Republican line, and it is nonsense.

As one of the original Never Trumpers—an appellation adopted by disaffected Republicans and conservatives who swore never to support Trump—I think I have a pretty firm handle on what the term means.

I don’t know though. Does he have a firm grasp on what it means? Does he really remember what it used to mean? Let’s jump back to the July 2016 article he wrote for the NY Times (linked above) and see what it actually says.

My brother heard I’d been saying bad things about Donald Trump.

A retired police officer with a cop’s bone-dry sense of humor, he still lives in our hometown, a small New England city hammered by deindustrialization and visibly altered over the past few decades by an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Trump has a lot of supporters there, and my big brother is one of them. When a local radio host mentioned a recent column I’d written criticizing Trump, he called and asked me about it.

I laughed. “Yeah, I wrote it. Does this mean I shouldn’t come home to visit?”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” he deadpanned.

Brothers can share that kind of joke, but for many people now in Trump’s camp, criticizing their leader is a serious offense, and I’ve been hearing from plenty of them. I am a Never-Trump Republican, as we’ve come to be known, part of the alliance of conservatives implacably opposed to the idea of Donald J. Trump becoming president of the United States. It’s a position that has estranged me from a plurality of my own party and put me at odd with friends, family, colleagues and a political movement that increasingly has taken on the character of an angry cult…

I formally came out as a Never Trump Republican in February, when I wrote a column for the conservative online publication The Federalist titled “I’ll Take Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump.” I made the case that Republicans could tough out four years of Clinton, but that neither the party nor the American conservative movement could survive even a single year of Trump.

He uses the phrase “Never Trump Republican” a couple of times in that old piece and as much as he complains about some of the reactions he gets from other Republicans, it does seem like a fight happening within the party not against the party. In the primaries, he was clearly open to voting for a GOP alternative rather than condemning them all en masse:

During the primaries, it was easier to find common ground among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters. At the outset of this election season, I knew very few people who were behind Trump; more often, I found myself in arguments about whether Marco Rubio was too young, whether Ted Cruz was too annoying, whether Jeb Bush was too … well, too Jeb Bush.

The Atlantic piece is different. He’s not a Never Trump Republican anymore and the concern is no longer Trump but, again, every Republican.

The Republicans know they have a problem. Many of them seem to believe their only recourse now is to say that they were all Never Trumpers in the hope that voters will somehow draw an unwarranted distinction between Trump and the party he has captured from top to bottom. But those of us who said “Never Trump” years ago—and meant it—know the difference.

I don’t care if Tom Nichols votes for Biden or if he changes his mind about what Never Trump means from what he was saying six years ago. That’s his prerogative. But I do think it’s silly to pretend he’s being perfectly consistent. It’s pretty clear to me that in 2016 “Never Trump Republican” did not mean “Never Republican” but in 2022 that’s pretty close to what it means to him now.

Finally, it’s worth nothing that all of this need to re-announce/revise his convictions was prompted by an exchange Nichols had with Dan McLaughlin from National Review on Twitter (which is why a couple of his tweets are linked in the text). I think it’s fair to say McLaughlin struck a nerve.

"Never Trump" was a statement of non-support for a candidate for election. The mounting odor of hysteria from people who turned it into their whole public & professional identity reeks of fear that he will go away some time soon & can't be replaced.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 28, 2022

Here’s a bit more:

If you're with the party that's been at war with the Constitution for a century & sees it as a musty relic of old white dudes, you're not actually interested in the Constitution as anything but a slogan with no content & no constraint on raw power. https://t.co/ZhvALE3odu

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 29, 2022

If you say "the Constitution!" but you actually just mean "the bureaucracy!" you don't actually care about the Constitution, or for that matter, democratic elections.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 29, 2022

So, you side against the stance taken by Pence, McConnell, Kemp, & the conservative Justices on the 2020 election? And thereby endorse the progressive notion that the text of the Constitution is irrelevant to constitutional law? https://t.co/u8fHd8quJT

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 29, 2022

For those of us who want a strong, united, substantively conservative, competently led, effective Republican party, there is a clear path forward. The choice will be with the voters, but it's our duty to do what we can to point in that direction.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 29, 2022

Anyway, I think when someone’s view of politics is that one party needs to absolve itself of sin we’re probably not going to get their vote and that’s okay. The GOP can do better and it can do it even without Tom Nichols.