By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 21, 2026
I never have liked, accepted, or used the label “Never
Trump.” That is not because I have any reservations about the principle that
one should never support a man with the character and temperament of Donald
Trump for any public office, much less that of president of these United
States. (That said, Donald Trump vs. Hillary Rodham Clinton might have made a
pretty good election for mayor of New York City, a job that either of those
sorry specimens might have done reasonably well and might have enjoyed.) Rather,
I prefer to describe myself and my views in my own words and resist the descent
into semiliterate hashtag-based conversation. “Never Trump” became both a
slogan and a team, and I am not much one for slogans or for joining
teams—being, as I am, one of those old-fashioned fuddy-duddy types who persists
in the outmoded belief that journalism and servile partisan hackwork are
supposed to be different things.
But the principle implied by the word “never” remains a
useful and lively one—and one that, given the immoral and lawless actions of
the two Trump administrations and Republicans’ ankle-grabbing submission to
them, is no longer limited to Donald Trump.
For conservatives estranged from the Republican Party in
its current debased form, there is not going to be a homecoming—not now and not
in the foreseeable future. It seems likely that the Republican Party will never
again be a legitimate vehicle for the advancement of conservative policy. That
is because Republicans do not have the guts or the brains to do the hard work
of reckoning with the Trump legacy, including the series of events that are
misleadingly abbreviated as “January 6.”
As I have argued at length in these pages, in the pages of the New York Times, and in such other
outlets as will have me, the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was
not exactly a sideshow, but it was not the most important part of the episode,
either—it was just the one that made for the most compelling video. In the wake
of losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump, abetted by prominent figures
in the Republican Party and conservative movement ranging from Rudy Giuliani to
Cleta Mitchell—and cheered on by the right-wing propaganda apparatus of which
Fox News is the bright Morning Star (for you traditional Mass enthusiasts out
there, we can use the Latin: Lucifer)—attempted to nullify the election
so that he could illegally remain in power as president. In other words, Trump
and Republicans attempted to stage a very traditional kind of coup d’état,
taking the familiar form of an autogolpe under legal pretext. In
practical terms, they tried to overthrow the government during their last days
running it.
Republicans such as the late Lindsey Graham and the
Christ-hawking J.D. Vance pronounced themselves outraged and righteously
indignant, but they were back on their knees soon enough, Graham as Trump’s
head sycophant in the Senate and Vance as vice president and envoy to the Judenhass
wing of the Trump movement, lately alienated as the Florsheim gang clashes
with the entrepreneurial gentlemen fabulously outfitted in their Louboutin
jackboots.
The Republican Party at large quickly made its peace—not
only with January 6 and the attempt to nullify the election but also with the
related conspiracy theories and the Trump administration’s blanket pardon of
the criminals involved, including violent felons. Corporately, Republicans have
at the very least passively accepted and more often actively abetted Trump’s
second-term excesses, which have been ... excessive: the enrichment of the
president and his family and his cronies; the campaign of wanton murder on the
high seas; the illegal war against Iran; the illegal war against Venezuela;
continued attempts to undermine confidence in our elections and to meddle with
their administration; the illegal imposition of a new national system of
taxation in the form of unconstitutional tariffs; a lawless campaign of
presidential aggrandizement that runs from the serious (supplanting Congress
with the pretense of ruling by decree) to the tellingly trivial (the
president’s obsession with putting his name on the Kennedy Center); the attacks
on allies undertaken while the president enabled actual literal enemies of the
United States of America, including the Vladimir Putin junta in Moscow and the
Kim Jong Un cult in North Korea; financial arrangements that run from the shady
to the illegal and that stretch from Caracas to Doha. There is much more, of
course.
In a sane world, we would not be talking about whether
the Democrats will impeach Trump if they win congressional majorities in
November but why Republicans have not done so already. But in the insane
world we actually inhabit, we already know the answer to that question: It is
because the Republican Party is dominated on the one hand by bigots and
authoritarians who follow Trump because of his high crimes and
misdemeanors and not in spite of them and on the other hand by cowards,
crackpots, sycophants, nonentities, degenerates, grifters, and hacks who put
their own interests—political, financial, celebrity-seeking—above the good of
the country and who have left their self-respect so far behind that they could
not catch a glimpse of it with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Here at The Dispatch, we spend a great deal of
time thinking about what a post-Trump American politics will look like and,
relatedly, what kind of post-Trump future the Republican Party and the
conservative movement will have. Speaking only for myself, I do not see how the
Republican Party has a post-Trump future. There are people I personally like
and—with qualifications—admire associated with the Republican Party, but
none—not one—of the Republicans who occupy positions of influence or who
currently hold significant elected office is willing to reckon with the
attempted coup d’état of 2021 or even to call it an attempted coup
d’état. A party that makes excuses for an attempt to overthrow the
government and that remains invested in defending the legacies of those who
attempted to overthrow the government simply cannot be a normal and legitimate
political party. Unless and until the GOP reckons with that, it must remain the
degraded and debased thing it is. And Republicans show no interest at all in
the kind of reckoning and reconciliation that is necessary—even as they prepare
for a midterm rout in November.
I have friends who are Republican Party supporters of
varying degrees of political and financial significance, and many of them make
entirely reasonable-sounding, pragmatic arguments, which largely amount to: The
Democrats are likely to do lasting damage to the country, especially to the
business environment, and it is still possible to work toward a Republican
Party that is more like John Cornyn than Ken Paxton. That is a reasonable
argument for supporting the better kind of Republicans, but I am not sure it is
a true argument. On the former point: The Trump administration is doing
tremendous economic damage to the United States, from creating an environment of
utter unpredictability in trade and related matters to pursuing a policy of actual
socialism in the form of having the federal government take ownership
stakes in formerly private firms to inflicting lasting damage on the wealth of
an entire generation of Americans through policies that have ensured the
persistence of high inflation. Ironically, those industries whose leaders have
given Trump and Trumpism the most generous hearing are among those that will
suffer the most from his policies: energy, manufacturing, and agriculture. On
the latter point: It may be possible to reform the Republican Party, but there
is not much evidence in support of such a hope—Republicans did, after all, put
forward Ken Paxton rather than John Cornyn in Texas, and Republicans largely
have made similar choices in other races. The GOP is the Bo French party, not
the David French party.
Understanding here that I am not talking about my own
money or time, neither of which I invest in party work or in political
campaigning per se, it seems to me that the resources currently being put to
work in the effort, so far fruitless, to reform the Republican Party probably
would be better used working to dismantle it. Some of that work probably should
consist of trying to persuade responsible Democrats where they are
persuadable—beginning with trade, security, and international relations—and
continuing work toward a consensus-oriented model of reform where it is
possible, as in the matter of higher education.
Those who say it is impossible to build a third party
should appreciate that the Republican Party began precisely that way and that
the party it displaced—the Whigs—declined and disappeared for reasons that very
much call to mind the current GOP: The Whigs were morally and politically
incapable of dealing in a meaningful way with the most important issue of their
time, and, instead, the party declined into a morass of corruption and
complacency, acting as very little more than a distributor of spoils. Donald
Trump is very much enamored of the phrase “to the victor go the spoils,” which,
as a political matter, is right up there with his insistence that his favorite
Bible verse is “an eye for an eye”—the president remains a little unclear on
the concept, as it were.
(Trump’s lack of clarity is encompassing: The president recently observed that he remembered the Falklands War in
spite of his having been a “young boy” when the conflict took place; as a
matter of fact, Argentina surrendered to the United Kingdom in that conflict on
Donald Trump’s 36th birthday, when he was a “young boy” with a wife
and two children. The remarkable stupidity and utter ignorance of the U.S.
president remain significant geopolitical facts.)
About the complicity and enabling of Trump by various
organs of the conservative movement, as opposed to the Republican Party, there
is much to be said and written, and I expect to turn to that in time. For the
moment, I will note only that the cases are roughly parallel, which probably is
to be expected.
As I wrote at the beginning, I have never embraced the
term “Never Trump” and do not now—not because it is too definite but because it
is too limited. Trump is not the whole of the problem. And while there may be
some unforeseeable circumstance in which I might be tempted to look favorably
on some political aspirant with an “R” next to his name, from the vantage point
of the here and now I cannot see it. Never means something, and what it
means to me right now is when I hope to see another Republican win an election.
In Closing
Bo French, the Republican candidate for a seat on the
Texas Railroad Commission (the name is a historical curiosity; the body in
question is the state’s main oil-and-gas industry regulator) who infamously
lamented the sight of young Indian American students at the University of
Texas cheering their football team’s victory, is a bigot, of course, but let’s
not overlook his stupidity. French is among those who talk about immigrants as
a colonizing force crowding out more deserving white people but—the fact is
worth noting—the majority of Indian Americans under the age of 27 are
native-born American citizens. They are not immigrants. It is perhaps not
surprising that the majority of Indian American voters are not much interested
in India: A Carnegie Endowment study conducted during the 2024 presidential
election found that only 3 percent of Indian American voters chose U.S.-India
relations as their most important issue, making that second to last, behind
only sexism. It is interesting to me that your average Indian American voter
cares a good deal less about U.S.-India relations than do a fair number of
U.S.-born cracker-type policy nerds, including your favorite correspondent.
Bo French and I have something in common: We both are
University of Texas dropouts. He finished up at Texas Christian University,
which is … fine. I moved to India, where I have no doubt that some BJP-voting
Indian version of Bo French complained about surly white men coming to steal
Indian jobs and resources like some redneck second coming of the East India
Company. Of course, I was able to do that thanks to help from an Indian friend
at the University of Texas, who thought I might enjoy working at an Indian
newspaper for a while. Bo French, the son of a Midland oilman, went on to be a
private-equity dork whose great claim to fame before the “Eek! Brown people!”
stuff was being such a despicable appropriator of the name and likeness of
American war hero Chris Kyle (with whom he had a business relationship) that
Kyle’s widow eventually sent him a cease-and-desist after having sued
him at one point: American Sniper meets American Schmuck.
It’s enough to get Karl Rove to publicly admit—in the pages of the Wall Street Journal—voting for a
Democrat. Good on you, Karl.
Rove writes:
The GOP has a growing number of
Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas. Conservatism and the party it dominates have
an increasing number of bigoted advocates of a “heritage America” composed of
white descendants of the original European settlers. There are “just asking
questions” Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy
nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate
between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots.
These people are diminishing the
Republican Party, not building it. I’ll have no part of it.
Funny thing: Political operatives such as Rove are
supposed to be the slick, oleaginous, triangulating truth-spinners, but Rove is
one of the few men on the contemporary Republican scene with the guts and the
brains to say what needs saying and to say it straight.
Do you know what Ted Cruz said about Bo French’s tweet? “I wish he hadn’t sent it.” Profile in f’n’ courage right
there, Senator.
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