Last year, on December 4th, the screenwriter Brian Koppelman posed a question to Evan McMullin, who, a month before, had received roughly half of one per cent of the vote in the Presidential race. Koppelman, who built up a large social-media following with daily “Six-Second Screenwriting Lessons,” describes himself as a liberal Democrat. “What can the average American do, right now, in a real way, to resist the authoritarian moves that are about to commence?” he asked McMullin on Twitter. McMullin spent most of his career in the C.I.A., followed by stints at Goldman Sachs and on Capitol Hill; when he announced his independent bid for the Presidency, last August, few people knew who he was. He responded to Koppelman with a list of ten tips, which included, “Read and learn the Declaration of Independence,” “support journalists, artists, academics, clergy and others who speak truth,” and “never lose hope.” Each item was retweeted thousands of times. The next day, a writer for Slate declared that McMullin had “done more than almost any Democratic figure to organize opposition to Donald Trump’s kleptocratic and Constitution-hostile tendencies.”

After the election, as the vast majority of Republican lawmakers either celebrated Donald Trump’s victory or kept quiet, many people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt a deep desire to forge anti-Trump ties across the traditional political divide. A handful of “Never Trump” conservative commentators continued to express concerns about the President-elect, but many of those writers had low standing with Democrats, given what they’d advocated in the past. McMullin seemed to offer himself as a bipartisan symbol of opposition—and he was saying all the right things. Trump “has empowered the white nationalist movement in America,” he tweeted. Mike Pence is his “enabler in chief.” And on Thanksgiving, “Feeling grateful for artists and a free press this year.” On December 6th, the actor and activist George Takei tweeted to his two million followers, “We need strong voices from all political persuasions to help curb the excesses and dangers of Trump. Evan McMullin is one such voice.”

McMullin’s critique of Trump began quietly, when he was serving as the chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, in 2015. Trump announced his candidacy that June, and right away, McMullin saw in Trump “telltale signs of authoritarianism,” he said. “Attacks on the press. Probably even before that, attacks on Hispanics and African-Americans. Those two things really concerned me.” He began writing posts against Trump on Facebook. He anonymously designed anti-Trump images, and paid to promote them on Facebook, targeting states where primaries were taking place. After Trump won the nomination, McMullin tried to persuade a congressman he knew to enter the race as an independent. (The Washington Post reported that it was Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois; McMullin declined to confirm that.) The congressman asked him if he’d run himself, and pointed him to Better for America, a nonprofit organization that was trying to get an independent conservative on the ballot. McMullin spoke with the group’s founder, Joel Searby, then consulted friends and family, as well as people he knew in the media. He prayed. At what he believes was the last possible moment—the deadlines for getting on state ballots had already begun to pass—he quit his job, got on a train to New York, and announced that he was running for President of the United States.

The bid was so quixotic that a handful of observers, some suspicious of McMullin’s C.I.A. background, wondered if someone was pulling the strings. “Who put him up?” Sean Hannity asked on his radio show in late October. “The Bush people? The Romney people?” At the time Hannity was asking these questions, the polls had tightened in Utah, where McMullin, who’s Mormon, had based his campaign, with an eye on the one, exceedingly unlikely path he had to the White House: If the race were close, and he prevailed in a single state, he might prevent Trump and Hillary Clinton from attaining an Electoral College majority. In that case, the House of Representatives would decide the next President, and, who knows, maybe they would settle on him.

He didn’t finish higher than third in any state. But by then Trump had publicly complained about “that guy in Utah,” and when Trump went on his “victory tour,” in December, he blasted “McMuffin” repeatedly, boosting McMullin’s stature. For those who aren’t conspiracy-minded, this is the more plausible doubt to harbor about McMullin: that taking a stand was also a way of kickstarting his career. “Frankly, I think that’s a good question,” he said, when I asked whether he was opportunistic. “And it goes back to my belief that influential institutions should have constant scrutiny. Well, so should people who seek to lead us.” McMullin tends to talk this way, with an almost unrelenting high-mindedness. He explained that the attention is simply a necessary vehicle for the work he’s trying to do: to encourage civic engagement; point out the early signs of authoritarianism; and demonstrate, by example, that it is still O.K. to vociferously criticize, and even to mock, our leaders. “Right now my platform is Twitter,” McMullin told me at one point, with a small chuckle. (“That’s going to change,” he added.) I had asked about the pushback he got there after posting an anti-abortion message; he noted the difficulty of addressing, in a hundred and forty characters, more complicated kinds of policy, the sort that require compromise and extended discussion. Still, the medium is handy for proclaiming the grand principles of American democracy.

Last week, McMullin and his running mate from the campaign, Mindy Finn, launched Stand Up Republic, a 501(c)4 nonprofit. When we met, it was still in the planning stages. The goal, he said, “would be to engage people in defense of democracy and our Constitution, which means engaging with Congress and their leaders to advance things or to stop things, or whatever.” He said that they also want to promote “truth and some democratic principles and you know, respect for the Constitution. I mean, broadly, I would think of it as digital media plus movement. Movement plus media.” This week, they asked their followers to urge Congress to fight the executive order on immigration, which, McMullin said, “is a Muslim ban.”

When McMullin becomes more specific about policy, he sometimes loses people. That anti-abortion post, for instance—and a more recent one congratulating Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch—seemed to cost him a few followers on the left. He lost some fans on the right, meanwhile, when he praised Sally Yates for defying Trump’s immigration order. So far, though, Stand Up Republic reflects his continued effort to somehow find common ground. As part of the launch, the group released two videos, one of which, a black-and-white ad that questions Trump’s ties to Russia, first ran in New York and D.C. during “Morning Joe,” which Trump watches. The other video, which is running online, features a clip from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address, in which he speaks of “the survival and the success of liberty,” and then a longer clip from a speech Ronald Reagan gave that same year, in which Reagan says that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” As we listen to this studiously bipartisan pairing, the camera cuts between a diverse group of Americans, seemingly scattered across the country. They look thoughtful, optimistic. The video ends with the simple words: “Join Us.”

McMullin hasn’t gotten used to being recognized, though it has begun to happen more often. “In the Agency we called ourselves gray men because we’re neither white nor black, we just—we blend,” McMullin told me when we met for breakfast at a former bank lobby turned bakery in Manhattan. He wore jeans and a navy-blue sweater over an Oxford blue button-down, and drank sparkling water. He told me that he had experienced growing pains in becoming a public figure, but that he didn’t want to go into “too many details, because they’re just too personal.” When I asked him, after we’d been talking for a couple of hours, what he did for fun, he paused. “You’re looking for color, like what do I like to do?” He looked up and off to the side. “Really, the biggest thing that I like to do is just spend time with friends and family,” he said.