The Trials of a Never Trump Republican – The New Yorker

In 2016, Longwell opposed Trump in the Republican primaries but recognized the potency of his fear-and-anger platform. How could she not? It was as if he were working from Bermans playbook. During the campaign, Longwell happened to be the incoming board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans; she was the first woman to hold the post since the group was founded, in the late seventies, to advocate for gay and lesbian Republicans. The board felt intense pressure to endorse Trump, despite his selection of Mike Pence, an openly homophobic evangelical Christian, as his running mate. Longwell told me that she basically lay on the tracks to stop the group from backing Trump. Mostly, though, she watched the election unfold with dismay.

For me, the world changed in 2016, Longwell said. That summer, her first son was born. My wifes water broke the night of Melanias speech at the Convention, and a few nights later, after their sons birth, she watched on television at the hospital as Trump accepted the Republican nomination. I remember just how bad he made me feel, she said. Thats what I remember. I remember holding a new baby and feeling like this cant be whats happening. On Election Night, she was at a party in Washington, texting with another anti-Trump operative, Tim Miller, the former spokesperson for Jeb Bushs short-lived Presidential campaign. Hes going to win, Miller wrote to her. As the news sank in, she went outside and bummed a cigarette, although she no longer smoked.

Many people who opposed Trump in 2016 have their version of this story: the Election Night disbelief and shock, the litany of outrages that followed. But, unlike many others in Republican Washington, Longwell did not make her accommodations, political and moral, with the new President. When, on his second weekend in office, Trump issued an executive order banning entry into the U.S. for citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations, Longwell decided that Trump really was a danger to the country. I started thinking about: What can I do? she recalled. How can I get involved?

In the fall of 2017, Longwell was invited to a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, a semi-secret group of disaffected Republicans that had started gathering every other Tuesday in a basement conference room near Capitol Hill. The Never Trumpers were hardly a real movement, less an organized cabal than a cable-news-savvy alliance. Among them were longtime Party operatives, such as Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, who became regulars on liberal-leaning TV shows, and public intellectuals, such as Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and Max Boot, of the Council on Foreign Relations, who stopped writing for the Wall Street Journals increasingly pro-Trump editorial page and went to the Washington Post. With the exception of Senator John McCain, most Republican elected officials already either supported Trump or kept their mouths shut about him. Inside the Administration, some had qualms about the President, but they soon were fired or marginalized, or quit. The official Party apparatus had been taken over by the President, and Republican lobbyists, consultants, political operatives, congressional staffers, right-wing media commentators, and government job seekers quickly identified where their interests lay.

Jerry Taylor, who helped found the Meeting of the Concerned and the Niskanen Center, the think tank that hosts it, told me about the first time Longwell showed up. Sarah didnt know anyone in the group, he said. She had never really travelled in those circles before. Many of the attendees were well-known denizens of Washingtons TV greenrooms, who bonded over their disillusionment with the Party and saw the election of Donald Trump as just the thin blue line between us and the abyss, as Taylor put it. Longwell wanted more than this talky self-styled resistance. She told me, Everybody was sitting around having a conversation that I had heard lots of versions of at that point, which is: What happened to the Republican Party? When Bill Kristol, a Republican pundit and the founder of The Weekly Standard, spoke up, Longwell recalled, she interrupted him: Why dont we do something about it? And he was kind of, like, Well, what would we do? And I was, like, I dont know, but youre famous. Youre Bill Kristol.

Kristol has been a leader of the hawkish neoconservative wing of the Party since arriving in Washington, as a member of the Reagan Administration. In 2016, he made a well-publicized attempt to recruit a last-ditch independent candidate to run against Trump. Having failed to find anyone of stature, Kristol settled on an obscure former C.I.A. officer and congressional staffer named Evan McMullin, whose candidacy never rose above the level of obscurity. After their initial meeting, Kristol and Longwell went out for coffee, and she urged him to take action again. They started brainstorming regularly at the Madison Hotel.

Then Mueller happened, Longwell said, and the idea for their group, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was born. Trumps firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, in the spring of 2017, had set off the first major crisis of his Presidency, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. Longwell and Kristol decided that their group would try to insure that Trump did not fire Mueller or block the investigation; to do this they would pressure Republican officials in the capital. I did think someone needed to fight the fight within the Republican Party, that you cant just give up even though its a long shot against a Republican President, Kristol told me. Sarah agreed.

In February, 2018, as Trump was publicly attacking Mueller, Longwell set up Defending Democracy Together, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that could accept donations without having to disclose donors. Defending Democracy Together became the umbrella organization for Republicans for the Rule of Law and other like-minded projects that sought to combat Trumps policies. Longwell and Kristol worked his contacts and raised substantial sums of money, including from liberal donors such as Pierre Omidyar, the tech billionaire who funds the left-wing Web site the Intercept.

Starting that March, whenever Trump threatened Mueller or opened a new front in his fight against the Russia hoax, the group ran TV ads defending the investigation, many of them featuring quickly produced clips of news footage or Trumps latest tweet, with urgent pleas to members of Congress to stop the President. All told, before the Mueller investigation was over, Republicans for the Rule of Law had run more than a hundred ads, aimed at a narrow but important segment of persuadable Republicans in key states, seeking to convince Party leaders that even Trumps base would not go along with his firing of the special counsel. In the hope of getting directly to the President, Longwell also ran the ads in Washington on Fox News, which Trump watches addictively.

In 2018, at a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, Longwell met George Conway, the husband of Trumps White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway. A prominent conservative attorney, he had accepted, then declined, a senior position in Trumps Justice Department. Earlier that year, Conway had started tweeting his dismay about Trump, thus setting off a marital-political drama worthy of a reality-TV Presidency. Like Longwell, Conway was invited into the capitals Never Trump circle, but he, too, decided that the meetings were often frustrating exercises in therapy. He craved action. (Look, theres a lot of benefit just to catharsis, Jerry Taylor joked to me, especially given that the alternative is to become an alcoholic, which is easy to do in this town now.)

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The Trials of a Never Trump Republican - The New Yorker