The Never Trump Dilemma

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 03, 2024

 

For all the agita about last week’s tiff between The Dispatch and The Bulwark, there’s no daylight between us that I can discern about what it means to be “Never Trump.”

 

It means you believe Donald Trump is freakishly unfit for office, that he threatens the constitutional order, and that he’s unworthy of a conscientious citizen’s support. The daylight has to do with what sort of behavior logically flows from that belief: Should anti-Trump conservatives feel obliged to endorse his Democratic opponent?

 

Whether or not to support Kamala Harris isn’t the only point of disagreement between Never Trumpers, though. On Monday the Washington Post broached the difficult subject of the Maryland Senate race, where popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, is running even with Democrat Angela Alsobrooks in the latest poll.

 

Hogan is a longshot in a state as blue as that, but he’s made things competitive by separating himself politically from MAGA populism. His latest ad celebrates him as an “un-Trump Republican” who “never caved,” the Post reports, and touts the fact that Hogan ordered the Maryland National Guard to help restore order at the Capitol on January 6.

 

In an age of right-wing radicalization, he remains unapologetically centrist. A Never Trump conservative who lives in Maryland should have no qualms about voting for him. Right?

 

Conservative attorney turned ardent Trump critic (and Bulwark podcaster) George Conway read the Post story and isn’t so sure:

 

As a registered voter in Montgomery County, Maryland, I’m torn about this Senate race. A healthy American democracy requires two competing political parties that believe in the rule of law. One has to be center-right. 

 

Hogan exemplifies the kind of politician we need for a new center-right party. And I say this as someone who may be slightly to the right of him on an issue-by-issue basis. 

 

But to get to where we need to be, the current Republican Party needs to be obliterated so that it can be replaced. 

 

So I just may vote for Alsobrooks.

 

What’s the best approach to reforming the Republican Party?

 

Should it be “obliterated,” as Conway argues, with Never Trumpers lending their votes to sweeping Democratic victories down ballot? Or should some effort be made to separate “good Republicans” from bad ones and reward the former while punishing the latter?

 

To put that another way: To what extent does being “Never Trump” require one to be “Never Republican” for the indefinite future?

 

It’s an interesting dilemma. Let’s consider it in terms of increasing orders of strategic complexity.

 

Easy mode: The worse, the better.

 

Beating Trump isn’t enough, the Conway faction insists. Republicans won’t seek a new direction politically unless his leadership is repudiated emphatically at the polls, and the only way to do that is to inflict losses on it at every level.

 

After all, while it’s true that Republicans have underperformed in elections under Trump’s leadership, the GOP has had something to feel encouraged about in every cycle since his ascension. In 2016 it won both houses of Congress and the presidency; in 2018 it was swamped in House races but gained two Senate seats; in 2020 Trump overperformed his polling and the party cleaned up in competitive House contests, nearly flipping the chamber; in 2022 it regained the House despite disappointments in Senate and gubernatorial elections.

 

Republicans have done a lot of losing under Trump, but they’ve never been uncompetitive. And with the race between him and Harris tight, a proper repudiation is once again unlikely to happen—unless GOP candidates get crushed down ballot. A wave of defeats across the country might at last convince a party hung over from “rigged election” propaganda that something has gone badly wrong.

 

So conservatives shouldn’t overthink it. By voting straight-ticket Democratic this fall (apart from a few exceptions for Liz Cheney types, if there are any left), they’ll be administering the political equivalent of a vaccine to America. There might be some side effects policy-wise in the near term, but in the long term they’ll have immunized their country from the civic menace of populist authoritarianism.

 

That’s Conway’s position, as I understand it. The counterargument is this: How many times can you vote for Democrats “strategically” before you’re voting for them earnestly?

 

What people like Steve Hayes worry about, I wrote last week, is that “the conservative marriage of convenience with Democrats for the mutual goal of defeating right-wing populism will … become a love fest.” We’ve seen that phenomenon in reverse within the GOP: Reaganites like Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee who allied themselves with Trump initially for strategic reasons became true believers and reliable apologists over time. The political needs of the alliance and the reception the two received from friends old and new created psychological pressure that turned them into sincere converts, to all appearances.

 

Why wouldn’t the same type of indoctrination happen to Never Trump conservatives who’ve come to hate the right in its populist incarnation and to support Democrats in their shared antipathy to it? Before long, they too will be looking for reasons to justify sticking with their new tribe.

 

For instance, no matter how brutally Trump’s party is beaten in November, elements of Trumpism will linger for years to come. Even if we end up with a respectable conservative like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as the party’s next nominee, there will remain unsavory constituencies to whom he’ll need to pander to defeat fringier alternatives. (Right, Gov. DeSantis?) To a conservative who’s voting for Alsobrooks over Trump-hating centrist Larry Hogan this year, won’t Kemp’s future MAGA panders become an excuse to vote against him in four years as well?

 

Will there ever again be a conservative pure enough to warrant supporting?

 

The Conway strategy of voting Democratic down ballot will inevitably lead Never Trump conservatives to feel more comfortable with cross-party voting into the future. That’s not altogether bad—more swing voters means more reason for candidates to moderate—but it’s destined to erode the ideological commitment of those Reaganites to some degree as they set up political residence in the center. Today’s strategic Alsobrooks voter is, potentially, tomorrow’s Alsobrooks enthusiast.

 

And all of this assumes that the radicalized right is even capable of learning lessons from being repudiated at the polls in 2024. A Conway-style beating for the GOP down ballot could inadvertently feed into Trump’s next “rigged election” fairy tale by encouraging the belief that only fraud can explain Republicans losing so many races.

 

“There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” it’s said. If, after multiple electoral kicks to the face, Republican voters don’t want more sober leadership already then there’s no reason to think one more this fall will matter.

 

Intermediate: A matter of incentives.

 

If you want to encourage the GOP to promote better, saner candidates, voting for Alsobrooks over Hogan is maybe the worst thing you could do.

 

That’s because a national bloodletting in which moderate Republicans take the same sort of beating as populists do would communicate nothing about their relative electoral appeal. If Hogan and Arizona’s Kari Lake were to each lose their Senate races by 10 points, say, right-wing voters wouldn’t conclude that there’s a systemic problem stemming from Trump’s toxicity, as Conway hopes. What they’d conclude is that the supposedly electable moderates like Hogan are actually no more competitive than the fire-breathers like Lake are, in which case they might as well keep nominating fire-breathers. (Yes, a Republican losing by 10 in Maryland is quite different from a Republican losing by 10 in Goldwater-and-McCain country, but good luck explaining that to them.)

 

The ideal outcome for Never Trump conservatives, I think, is if populists perform miserably while Reaganites and centrists beat expectations. That means voting for Democrat Ruben Gallego over Lake in Arizona—and for Hogan over Alsobrooks in Maryland.

 

It’s also the ideal outcome if you hope to embolden more right-wing politicians to stand up to Trump. Hard lessons were learned in 2022 when Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was crushed in her primary; making an example of her was Trump’s way of showing congressional Republicans how steep the price could be for “disloyalty.” A victory for Hogan would show that, in the right state or district, “disloyalty” is an advantage. A party that suffers from endemic cowardice needs to see with its own eyes that courage pays sometimes.

 

The problem is that it’s not clear how courageous Sen. Larry Hogan would actually be.

 

He would be in some respects, if only as a matter of self-preservation in a state whose electorate is heavily Democratic. If a bill imposing national restrictions on abortion came to the floor of the Senate, Sen. Hogan would be a safe “no” vote along with his new best friends Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. On some policy matters, he’d be a true independent.

 

But what about on nominations?

 

As liberal as Maryland is, Hogan would still owe his victory there primarily to the Republican voters who gritted their teeth and turned out for him despite his animosity toward Trump. He stands a chance in November only by dominating on the right and peeling off a small but meaningful minority of the left.

 

Those Republican voters will expect things from him in return for their willingness to let bygones be bygones. So when President Trump nominates Aileen Cannon or Mike “Brain Worms” Lee to fill a Supreme Court seat, would Sen. Hogan dare vote no—especially if he ended up as the deciding vote, a scenario that’s not unlikely given how tight the Senate next year is shaping up to be?

 

I suspect he’d vote yes, feeling a duty to support his party in certain high-stakes confrontations ahead of his next Senate primary and wanting to reserve his political capital as an independent-minded centrist for other fights. And if he did, he’d have repaid the support of the Never Trumpers in Maryland who voted for him by … giving Trumpism a presence for decades to come on the highest court in the land.

 

Justice Cannon might be there 40 years from now, still handing down rulings. And she never would have been confirmed had Reaganite conservatives listened to George Conway and voted for Angela Alsobrooks instead.

 

There will be many dubious yet consequential nominations like that for executive and judicial vacancies in a second Trump term, and in some cases the core criticism of the nominee will simply be that he or she is too willing to do the president’s bidding. Is Larry Hogan, a member of the Republican Party, really going to disqualify Trump’s candidates for no better reason than that they’re “too loyal” to the leader of that party? I’m skeptical.

 

And while he’s been admirably steadfast in keeping Trump at arm’s length relative to practically everyone else in the GOP, we’ve all seen too many body-snatcher-type conversions since 2016 to feel completely confident that Hogan will remain the stalwart “un-Trump Republican” that he is today. He’ll never go full MAGA like Lee (I think) but the Conway faction of Never Trumpers might fairly warn us that no one who’s stuck with the party for this long can be totally trusted.

 

If your top priority as a Maryland voter is a senator who’ll always resist Trump when the chips are down, Alsobrooks is the only game in town.

 

Difficult: The long game.

 

At this level of strategic thinking, it’s not enough to consider what burning down the GOP would do to the GOP. We also need to consider what it would do to the other party.

 

Democrats have a beast of a task in trying to retain their Senate majority this fall but a significant number of Never Trump crossover votes would open up possibilities. Perhaps the Conway approach would lead Sen. Jon Tester to eke out a win in Montana. Or it might send Democrat Colin Allred to an upset victory over Sen. Ted Cruz with help from Texas conservatives (like me) who believe that abetting a coup attempt should carry an electoral penalty of some kind.

 

Angela Alsobrooks could plausibly be the 50th Democratic vote in the Senate, propelled to a narrow victory in Maryland by Never Trump conservatives. And if the bloodletting down ballot is enough for Democrats to hold the Senate, it’ll also surely be enough to flip the House and carry Kamala Harris to the presidency.

 

Consider what their party might do with unified control of government once the left began calling in favors from the White House for helping Harris to victory.

 

The filibuster would be nuked in short order as the president and her Senate allies scrambled to make good on her promise to restore the Roe regime on abortion. With the supermajority requirement gone, progressives would soon demand action on the massive voting-rights package the party proposed in 2021. Calls to grant statehood (and two new senators) to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico would follow. Some sort of court-packing scheme would be pushed.

 

There won’t be any Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in the new Senate majority to say no.

 

Maybe the new and improved centrist-y President Kamala Harris would say no (probably not to the abortion revival, though), causing a bitter rift on the left and driving her job approval into the toilet. But even if she did, progressive agitation for the sort of power grabs I’ve described would send the right into a panic. A party that might have fractured after losing yet another presidential election in 2024 will be pulled together by its shared horror and rage at Democratic overreach.

 

In that scenario, imagine the sort of candidates that the unified, even more radicalized right will nominate in 2026 to try to take back Congress from Harris and her party. It won’t be Hogan-esque moderates or Reaganite conservatives, as all of those would have been culled in the burn-it-all bloodletting of 2024. It’ll be insurrectionist cranks as far as the eye can see.

 

Granted, Democrats had good luck fending off those cranks in the 2022 midterms, but the result that year was the exception to the modern rule. The Conway approach of straight-ticket anti-Republican voting this fall could feasibly produce a fringier GOP within two years that’s nonetheless capable of riding anti-incumbent sentiment to a congressional majority, particularly if there’s an economic downturn between now and then.

 

And that result would have implications for 2028. If mainstream Republicans are “obliterated” this year and a radicalized class of candidates prevails in 2026, that’ll make Brian Kemp’s electability case for old-school conservatism a lot less persuasive in the next presidential primary. Moving on from Trump might be impossible for the GOP under the best of circumstances, but it’ll be that much harder in a world where Larry Hogan is losing elections while Laura Loomer types are winning them.

 

So, yeah: In the end, I’d vote for Hogan in Maryland this year.

 

If he’s destined to lose, and he probably is, better that he make an impressive show with as many votes as possible in order to create an instructive contrast with dismal MAGA failures like Lake. And if he wins, that’s fine too: A Republican Senate takeover, especially one where the balance of power lies with centrists like Hogan, Collins, or Murkowski, would give Harris an excuse to govern from the middle and would undermine Trump’s coming “rigged election” pageant to some degree. (It’ll make for more sensible policy too, in case anyone cares about that.) Depriving the right of a pretext to focus on left-wing excesses for the next two years might lead it to do a little more soul-searching about the electoral cost of its own excesses.

 

But “might” is the most we can hope for in an age where one party prefers fantasy to reality to explain election disappointments. Until Trump is gone and Republicans no longer feel obliged to defend their leader’s honor by mirroring his narcissistic paranoia, it probably doesn’t matter how extensive GOP losses down ballot are. Vote for Hogan if you believe he’d be the better senator, not in the idle hope that some lesson will be learned. It won’t be.