In 2016, a group of Republicans broke ranks with their party to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency. Now they’re rallying once more to keep him from destroying the country. Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Never Trumpers.

Book parties in Manhattan tend to be overspillings of the workday. People stop by in office clothes on their way home—uptown, downtown, to Brooklyn, or out to the suburbs. But in D. C., book parties are social occasions, even when they involve business, which is to say politics, the only business that matters. One Saturday evening in late October, some of the brightest figures in Washington’s media elite streamed into a splendid Colonial Revival house on Foxhall Road in Wesley Heights. “Outer Georgetown,” someone clarified: The phrase implied more than it said, like so much else in this surreal time in American politics. Some of the guests were liberal journalists whose faces were as familiar as their bylines: Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Drew, Andrew Sullivan and David Corn. But among them, too, was a cadre of the uprooted and displaced, writers, intellectuals, and pundits who, had they gathered in Paris or London—well, Ottawa, anyway—might have worn the haunted glamour of émigrés and exiles, though in this case they are strangers in the same precincts where they once felt very much at home. Call them Republicans with a conscience, conservatives without a party, or simply, as most do, the Never Trumpers. Liberals and conservatives have always commingled easily in Washington, but a year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, old lines are blurring and new alliances are forming in remarkable ways. Exhibit A is the owner of the grand house on Foxhall Road: David Frum, a former hardcore conservative and speechwriter for George W. Bush. It was Frum who, with another Never Trumper, Michael Gerson (now a Washington Post columnist), coined the phrase “axis of evil” in 2002 and promptly entered the annals of liberal infamy. These days, however, Frum is better known as a heretic and outcast, primus inter pares of the Never Trumpers. As the party got under way, Frum and his wife, the author Danielle Crittenden—he in a dark-blue suit and white shirt; she in black pants and a sleeveless blouse—greeted their guests. With his broad forehead and Tory accent (“agaynst”), Frum still has the manner of the Toronto gentry in which he was reared. Standing near a pair of museum-quality African sculptures, he gently urged his guests down a small flight of stairs to the backyard, which was getting crowded and buzzy in the fading light. Esquire The week that had just ended was no more or less lurid than many others in the first year of Trump’s America, that bottomless tasting menu of national debasement. The day before, a video had surfaced proving that the administration’s Mr. Clean, John Kelly, the chief of staff universally praised for bringing soldierly order to an anarchic White House, had defamed an African-American congresswoman. Meanwhile, the week-old #MeToo movement had begun to fell big media names. (A no-show at the Frums’, though he’d been on the guest list, was Leon Wieseltier, the former New Republic eminence and literary monarch of Washington; his story would break a few days later.) Given all this, it didn’t seem odd to be celebrating, near a lighted pool with fountain spouts on a warm Indian-summer night, the publication of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (sample chapter: “Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”), which had just that week gotten a rave in The New York Times. As the Champagne fizzed and the “Eastern Europe–themed” hors d’oeuvres circulated on silver trays—smoked sturgeon, osetra caviar, borscht shots with vodka that went down like raspberry sherbet—the book’s author, Post columnist Anne Applebaum, gave brief remarks. She thanked her “beloved friends the Frums,” who “care about the things I care about,” and also reminded the guests of another book, From a Polish Country House Kitchen: 90 Recipes for the Ultimate Comfort Food, which she and Crittenden wrote in 2012. “We had a little discussion beforehand about whether we should talk about the cookbook in honoring a book about the famine,” Applebaum said. “After a famine,” Crittenden called out, “you want a cookbook.” Everyone laughed, but Applebaum, in a black cocktail dress, had serious things to say. For one, the lessons of the Ukraine famine, in which almost four million died, were more immediate than we might suppose. Consider: The mass starvation was not an accident but a plan—part of a policy designed by Stalin to stamp out rebellion in a region five hundred miles from Moscow. Stalin’s paranoia went back to the beginning of the Russian Revolution, which had inspired anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Ukraine and caused his predecessor, Lenin, to say, “We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance in the coming decades.” "Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything." Well, the decades kept coming, but so did resistance, in ever-changing forms. Today, it is the Never Trumpers who are holding out against “forced collectivization”—imposed by the leaders of their own party—and feel locked in an epochal struggle, with a great deal riding on the outcome. To them Trumpism is more than a freakish blight on the republic. It is a moral test. “We’ve seen a moment before when holders of property gambled that their best hope of retaining their property was to disenfranchise fellow citizens,” Frum told me. “We’ve seen before when important parts of society put their faith in authoritarianism. Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything—‘It’ll just happen automatically.’ ” This is not the sort of thing Frum said in his former life, as a wunderkind of the American Right. But for him, as for many of the guests at his party, the rise of Trump changed the old refrain “It can happen here” into something more dire and pressing: “It’s happening now and must be stopped.” One guest, the affable conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, has called Trump a “European-style blood-and-soil nationalist.” Another, the historian Ronald Radosh, has written that when he met Steve Bannon in 2013, at the so-called Breitbart Embassy in D. C., Trump’s future Rasputin told him, “I’m a Leninist. . . . I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” That establishment includes the Never Trumpers, and it’s a sign of how far things have come that these insiders have now become outlaws. Long before Trump was even nominated, when hopeful moderates were pointing to his encouragingly sane positions on abortion and health care and party elders like Bob Dole and Trent Lott were saying that Ted Cruz was the greater evil, a small but influential band of Republicans, not yet called Never Trumpers, were warning that he was an authentic global menace. One august figure on the Right, the Post columnist George Will, renounced the Republican party in June 2016, declaring himself unable to witness its submission to Trump. Others, such as longtime GOP operatives Mike Murphy and Rick Wilson, began appearing on MSNBC, where they swung hard at nominee and party alike. At the time, Trump seemed headed for a historic rout in the general election, and the spectacle of these chagrined oppositionists was a cheap-thrills sideshow to liberals, who chortled, if only to themselves, “So now you get it.” What was missed was the message the Never Trumpers were trying to send, and how genuinely alarmed they were. “There wasn’t a single conservative I talked with at the beginning of 2016 who thought Donald Trump was a remotely acceptable candidate for president,” says Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign-policy writer who served as an advisor to John McCain in 2008 and Marco Rubio eight years later. In March 2016, as Trump closed in on the nomination, another neocon, William Kristol, a founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to engineer a third-party escape hatch. It went nowhere. Two years on, Boot has quit the Republican party and says of his Never Trump confederates, whose numbers seem to shrink by the day, “Right now we could all fit in my living room.” Boot’s tone, plaintive but defiant, is common among the Never Trumpers. It echoes the cadences of another period in our history, when a generation of would-be communist revolutionaries were similarly blindsided—the Ukraine famine was only the first of several shocks—and subsequently abandoned the faith. Some of these apostates swore off politics altogether. The Never Trumpers have their own history to live down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism. Others went into retreat. Still others rejoined the fight but switched sides. They became counterrevolutionaries, spoiling for one last showdown. One of them, the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, predicted at midcentury that “the final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists.” A parallel conflict is unfolding today, as one sharp blow after another—from Trump’s humbling of Fox News to the reductio ad absurdum of Roy Moore—has deepened the enmity between the pro-Trump faction and its adversaries on the Right. This latter group sometimes sounds like liberals, but its members are in fact counter-Republicans who mean to take their party back, or blow it up. Others are seeking a third way. A group that includes Boot and Applebaum is creating a centrist sanctuary and talk shop, the Renew Democracy Initiative. They’re polishing up a manifesto and plan to bring out a book, “a kind of Federalist 2.0,” says one contributor, the columnist Bret Stephens, a Never Trumper exile from The Wall Street Journal. In April of last year, Stephens went to the Times and hasn’t looked back, except to toss grenades at Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, and the rest of what he calls “the bigoted, dipshit wing of the Republican party.” Stephens today sounds less disillusioned than emancipated—as though, in his words, he’s “walking away from a love affair gone bad.” The same is even truer of Frum, who outdoes all others in his born-again zeal, perhaps because he got there first and has the scars to show for it. His bill of particulars against the movement and the party he once championed long predates Trump and Trumpism. In the essays and columns he writes for The Atlantic, in his fluent commentary on MSNBC, in his smart Twitter observations (he has close to six hundred thousand followers), and in his new book, Trumpocracy, Frum’s sharpest jabs are aimed not at the “kleptocrat” Trump but at House and Senate Republicans whose “ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity” and were a “radical attack on American norms of governance.” His pages on the “Rigged System,” the Republican campaign to disenfranchise African-American voters in no fewer than twenty states, burn with the white-hot anger we would expect to read in The Nation, not in a book by a former Bush staffer who once teamed up with Richard Perle, the neocon “prince of darkness,” to write An End to Evil, a jeremiad heady with high-Cheneyist fumes. (“Mullahs preach jihad from the pulpits of mosques from Bengal to Brooklyn,” Frum and Perle wrote. “Our enemies plot, our allies dither and carp, and much of our own government remains ominously unready for the fight.”)

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, began to break with Republican orthodoxy after the 2008 presidential election. Today, he is among the most outspoken of the Never Trumpers. Getty Images

The Never Trumpers have their own history to live down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism. Jacob Heilbrunn, who wrote a skeptical history of neoconservatives and their swaggering approach to foreign policy, says Frum and the others are “back on old and comfortable terrain as intellectual renegades, issuing apocalyptic warnings about a totalitarian threat to democracy. They want to make neoconservatism great again by championing regime change—this time in Washington itself.”

On the Right, “neoconservative” carries a second, explicitly cultural depth charge, as Boot acknowledges when he says that “Jewish conservative intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been pretty stalwart.” That’s not surprising, given the anti-Semitic odor that clings to the alt-right pockets of Trumpism. It also stirs troubling memories of the long history of white ethnocentrism on the American Right, from the Depression-era demagoguery of Father Coughlin through the “Christian Front”–style offensives against the civil-rights movement in the fifties, up through Pat Buchanan’s attacks on the pro-Israel “Jewish lobby.”

This may explain the Never Trumpers’ defensiveness. “I’m a registered Republican,” Frum told me recently, as if trying to convince himself that the party he once belonged to still exists . . . somewhere. Across the continent, possibly? “If I lived in California,” he speculated, “I’m sure I’d be voting for Republican members of the state legislature or a Republican candidate for governor”—but not, he allows, if he lived in Alabama.

Of course, Frum knows very well that Republicans have no power in California and frighteningly much in Alabama. And one can scour the conservative press—which tends toward either robust Trumpism or evasive anti-anti-Trumpism—and not feel the urgency that one finds in Frum’s Trumpocracy, with its despairing plea to an audience he worries is deaf to the approaching thunder of the Cossacks. “Maybe you don’t care about the future of the Republican party,” he writes, addressing an imaginary liberal reader. “You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

Frum dates his apostasy to the 2008 election, which he wrote about as a conservative journalist (for National Review) and policy expert (for the American Enterprise Institute, the Beltway’s premier conservative think tank). Everyone knew it was going to be a tough year for the Republicans. Bush’s second term—Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the subprime-mortgage crisis—was catastrophic. The Democrats had a charismatic presidential candidate in Barack Obama. John McCain, the Republican nominee, was overmatched and showing his age. In desperation, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. “When McCain picked her, you could understand how they arrived at that decision,” Frum says today. “She’s a woman. She raised taxes on the oil industry. I was briefly sold on that idea.”

Not for long, though. McCain’s team hadn’t vetted Palin with any rigor, but Frum did, informally. “YouTube was still a very new thing,” he recalls, “and I remember watching all the video I could find. There wasn’t much, maybe three hours.” It was enough to see the obvious. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about Alaska.”

Palin’s ignorance alone was disqualifying. Even worse, Frum remembers, she had a brilliant but disturbing campaign style. “She had a genius for finding the stress points in American society and turning people against people,” he says, meaning her insinuating praise of small-town “real America” and her accusation that Obama, the nation’s first black presidential nominee, had been “palling around with terrorists.” Palin didn’t invent this style of demagoguery. But she was, in Frum’s telling, the purest practitioner.

After the election, he began to rethink. The trouble wasn’t McCain’s drubbing. It was the conservative embrace of Palin, which seemed tied to “the collapse of support for the Republican party by the young and the educated,” as he later told The New York Times. He left National Review with an idea to revive a more moderate Republicanism. His vehicle was a now-defunct website called the FrumForum.

John McCain and Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about Alaska,” Frum says of Palin. But she also “had a genius for finding the stress points in American society and turning people against people.” Getty Images

During the first months of the Obama presidency, Frum says, he noticed that an odd silence had settled over his colleagues at AEI. The country was locked in debate over the Affordable Care Act, the most ambitious legislative initiative in a generation. Why wasn’t AEI more vocal about it? Frum thought he knew: Many of the policy experts at AEI supported the bill but were afraid to say so, lest they anger their allies—and donors.

In fact, there was every reason for conservatives to like the policy, in principle at least. Its cornerstone, the so-called individual mandate, was the stepchild of an idea dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation, the number-two conservative think tank in D. C. Today, Republicans from Trump on down vehemently denounce the mandate—it was a casualty of the tax bill the Senate passed late last year—but it was designed as a market-based approach to health care, a near carbon copy of the plan Mitt Romney had enacted as governor of Massachusetts. These resemblances were no secret. On the contrary, they were supposed to be a selling point for Obamacare. “It was a compromise measure, crafted with the buy-in of the pharma and insurance companies, with a lineage stretching back to Richard Nixon’s proposal, and based on the Heritage-Romney plan,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a chronicle of the modern Republican party. “It was an alternative to the Medicare-for-all that the Democrats surely would have preferred.”

Conservative opponents of the ACA were well aware of the bill’s provenance. But since attacking Obamacare worked at election time, they pretended otherwise, inventing the fiction of “repeal and replace.” The same dishonesty explains why they couldn’t come up with a workable substitute: Obamacare was the GOP plan. “The Republicans never had a health-care alternative,” says Ross Douthat, the New York Times op-ed columnist who counts himself among the Never Trumpers.

All of this is obvious today, but Frum saw it happening in real time. Though he is by temperament and talent an intellectual pamphleteer, he’s also a first-rate wonk. His book Dead Right, published in 1994, stripped bare the myth of Ronald Reagan as the vanquisher of big government. And he knew that the Democrats had been serious about health-care policy, dating back at least to Hillary Clinton’s attempt in 1993. “Hillarycare” has entered history as a dismal flop, but it was a political defeat, not a policy failure. We forget that Hillary dazzled legislators of both parties in early hearings, and that the task force she set up brought the full spectrum of experts into “the process.” The program crashed only after Republicans launched a media campaign to destroy it.

“There’s a part of me that knows I should write in a blander way,” Frum says. “It would be healthier. I know that and then I just won’t do it.”

Frum understood this because he’d been on the other side, fending off the evils of big government, but by 2010 he was looking at things less ideologically. To begin with, the country was still digging out of the Great Recession. The economy had been shedding five hundred thousand jobs a month—and when people lost jobs, they lost medical coverage. They needed help. But Republicans couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. Congressional hotshots like Paul Ryan were calling the economic crisis a boondoggle for tax-and-spend Democrats.

Republicans vowed that health care would be Obama’s Waterloo. They all but ignored the excitement he inspired, and the discipline of his congressional majorities, who had learned from the mistakes of Hillarycare. All this indicated that the ACA was going to pass, which meant Republicans should bargain hard for the pieces they wanted—especially since Obama preferred a bipartisan bill. Instead, the GOP stonewalled. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing,” Frum wrote on his website in March 2010. “We went for all the marbles, we ended with none.”

The Obama White House delightedly tweeted Frum’s post, and then came the angry barrage. First, Frum was eviscerated in a Wall Street Journal editorial. No matter that he had been an editor there during the first Bush presidency, and had edited columns by Paul Gigot, who had since become the Journal’s top opinion-page editor. “Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role,” the Journal said. “He’s peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics.”

Next came a call from AEI. “Time for me to come in and have a chat with the powers that be,” Frum recalls. He had a meeting with AEI’s president, Arthur Brooks, the next day. According to Frum, Brooks “told me I was welcome to keep my title but I should give up my salary and my office and not come to work anymore. I was mad about it at the time. In retrospect, I don’t know that he had any choice.” Frum means he’d asked for it. “There’s a part of me that knows I should write in a blander way,” he says. “It would be healthier. I know that and then I just won’t do it.”

AEI president Arthur C. Brooks. Getty Images

It helps that he doesn’t have to. With children not yet of college age, Frum would have preferred to keep his $100,000 AEI salary. But he didn’t need the money. His father, Murray Frum, was a Toronto real-estate tycoon and one of North America’s major art collectors (hence the exquisite African sculptures), and he led a consortium that came close to buying the Blue Jays in 1997. Barbara Frum, David’s mother, was a revered CBC journalist.

But while Frum didn’t have money worries, others did. “The economy of the conservative world in 2009 and 2010 was very difficult,” he told me. “A lot of think tanks were shrinking. And a lot of people were scared. They didn’t want to be seen with me. It felt dangerous.” As he was pushed further out of the circle, something inside him was freed up. He began to reinvent himself as a conscientious objector to the Republican party, criticizing it from within. In 2011, he wrote a blistering cover story for New York magazine in which he said the GOP had “lost touch with reality.” All its policy ideas, he said, boiled down to a single fetish: “more tax cuts for the very highest earners.” (Six years later, Trump’s GOP made a prophet of him with its tax “reform” bill.) Frum also wrote a takedown of Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek. “That was really out of bounds,” he told me with a laugh. “I’d committed various infractions against orthodoxy and people were genuinely mad,” Frum says. “It was lonely and disorienting. I lost a lot of friendships. Suddenly people I spent a lot of time with weren’t around.”

All political movements contain the seeds of their own ruin. Either the leaders of the movement sue for peace with the establishment, or they keep pushing the envelope ever further, until the fringe displaces the center. Both those fates combined to undo “movement conservatism.” Its first theorists and publicists, a small nucleus well aware that they were outnumbered in their efforts to roll back history, ran interference for dubious causes and rabble-rousing politicians. In the fifties, William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, both Yalies, wrote a book defending the below-the-belt slugger Joseph McCarthy and arguing that the true hysterics were the “enemies” who were out to get him. Barry Goldwater, the GOP presidential nominee in 1964, defended the crackpots of the John Birch Society as doughty patriots while insisting that the actual extremists were liberal intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Still later, when talk radio became big, Republican elites championed Limbaugh. “Dear Rush,” Ronald Reagan wrote in 1992, “thanks for all you’re doing to promote Republican and conservative principles. Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you’ve become the number-one voice for conservatism in our country.” Soon enough, Limbaugh was on the cover of National Review, with the headline “The Leader of the Opposition.” From there it was a small step to Palin love. After her debate with Joe Biden in 2008, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote, “I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked at me’. . . . And her smile . . . sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”

“Every major non–Wall Street Journal columnist was against Trump. The Weekly Standard was against Trump. National Review was against Trump. None of it mattered.”

The high-low fusion was risky—a kind of unsafe political sex. With each compromise, movement elites gave up more ground. “You can tell this story as one of a changing media environment,” says Ross Douthat. “From Buckley to Roger Ailes”—the longtime head of Fox News—“you go from a time when the leading media impresario was intellectual and high-minded to someone who was primarily interested in making money.” Buckley and company had an old-fashioned belief in institutions, and were confident the movement would remain a top-down operation. The ideas began with them. Why wouldn’t power accrue to them, too? “What you have in Buckley and Reagan is a desire to have what the liberals have had,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice. “Buckley doesn’t want a second-rate New York Times. He wants an actual conservative Times that has the same standing, same quality and reputation as the liberal Times. Reagan does not want a conservative president in office who’s going to have a less capable government than the liberals have had before.”

That illusion crumbled in 2016. “The election proved elite conservative media doesn’t matter,” says Douthat. “Every major non–Wall Street Journal columnist was against Trump. The Weekly Standard was against Trump. National Review was against Trump. None of it mattered.”

And if those publications don’t matter, why fund them? Even as Trump taunts the “failing” New York Times, it’s the boutique right-wing media that’s truly in peril, now that its lack of influence has been exposed. When National Review—the country’s most venerable conservative journal—published its celebrated “Against Trump” issue just ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2016, the blowback was considerable. On a fundraising cruise last August, donors and subscribers objected fiercely to the issue. (NR editors and writers pointed out that it had been a one-off.) Today, Rich Lowry says that reports of financial pressure have been exaggerated. But at the time there was serious concern. “There were complaints and cancellations,” says Jack Fowler, National Review’s vice-president, though he adds that the magazine has since rebounded.

It has done so by splitting the difference on Trump. NR writers Kevin Williamson and Jay Nordlinger oppose the president, while their colleague Ramesh Ponnuru looks for places where Trumpism intersects Reaganism or George W. Bushism. Meanwhile, Lowry, who has sometimes pushed an anti-anti-Trump line in his own columns, tries to keep NR’s pages in balance. “I watch the tone and the volume,” he says of attacks on Trump. “But, more or less, people can say what they think. We’ve probably had more internal debates than we’ve had in a while, but that’s a symptom of the times.”

The other option is to capitulate, which is what happened at The Wall Street Journal. Much has been written about friction between the Journal’s down-the-middle, just-the-facts news reporters and its highly ideological editorial department. But the more significant story—an obsession for the Never Trumpers—is the rupture within the Journal’s editorial pages and the exodus that resulted.

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When and how are the dummies at the @WSJ going to apologize to me for their totally incorrect Editorial on me. I want "smart" trade deals. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2015

Bret Stephens, who won a Pulitzer in 2013, was the defector with the highest profile. He was deputy editor when he jumped over to the Times, where he was soon joined by his editor at the Journal, Bari Weiss. The Journal’s books editor, Robert Messenger, is now at The Weekly Standard. Sohrab Ahmari, a foreign-policy writer, went to Commentary. Mark Lasswell, an editor, was told not to return from a book leave.

Those were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors, was the Journal’s skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win. Several sources pointed to the editorials by one writer, James Freeman. “All-in for Ted Cruz” during the primaries, Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.”

“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe. They’re not Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.”

Since then, the Journal has gone further. Even jaded readers were startled to see the editorial-page call for Robert Mueller, who is leading the Russia investigation, to resign. And when an op-ed urged Trump to issue blanket preemptive pardons for the accused, John Yoo, the theorist of the expansive “unitary executive” and author of the Iraq War “Torture Memos,” warned in the Times that the Journal’s advice would place Trump on the road to impeachment. (Neither Gigot nor Freeman replied to interview requests.)

“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe,” says Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post writer who has declared war on both Trump and his GOP. “They’re not Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.” It is ideological groupthink, the Right’s own political correctness. And it gives credence to the old argument, rooted in the culture wars of the nineties, that a great many conservative writers and policy experts are intellectuals manqué, tightly leashed by wealthy donors, just like the Republican politicians they promote.

But in truth, “Conservatism, Inc.” was never the luxury gravy train its critics depicted. It was closer to a Soviet-style nomenklatura, with a good deal of ideological policing. “I had the president of a small conservative think tank tell me he admires my anti-Trump position but he just can’t be identified that way because his donors would cut him off,” says Boot. Even now, the Never Trumpers I talked to, though freed from the grip of the old dogma, were constantly going off the record or pleading, “Protect me.” Who can blame them? For all their resources, they are indeed outnumbered—unwanted and unloved.

So it was in an earlier time, too. “We ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about,” Arthur Koestler, another of the great apostates, said long ago to liberals disinclined to take him and his ilk seriously. The good news is that the Never Trumpers are getting a close hearing. Whatever mistakes they made in their time of devotion, they have emerged as the best exegetes of the conservative god that failed. No one else understands it so well—its means, its ends, its methods, its costs. “The problem with the devil’s bargain is that the devil never delivers,” Frum says. “That’s the point of the story.”

This article appears in the February '18 issue of Esquire. Subscribe

