For four years, Sarah Longwell has been hoping for Donald Trump’s downfall. But nothing has triggered it. Not the Mueller investigation into his dealings with Russia. Not his coverup of hush-money payments to a porn star, or the profiting from his office to benefit his personal businesses. Not even a Ukraine extortion scheme that resulted in just the third impeachment and trial of a President in history. He has proved immune to every scandal. Will the coronavirus pandemic be any different?

I spoke to Longwell on March 13th, barely an hour after Trump declared a “national emergency” to combat a once-in-a-century outbreak that he had spent the previous few weeks claiming to have completely under control. Pundits were already calling Trump’s botched initial handling of the crisis “the end of his Presidency.” Longwell, a forty-year-old conservative Republican who has spent the Trump years in an increasingly isolated fight within her party to end his Presidency, was not yet convinced. “How many times have we seen that headline before?” she asked.

Longwell is a Never Trumper, one of the stubborn tribe of Republicans who have refused to accept the President as their leader. In 2016, virtually the entire Republican Party opposed Trump in the primaries, but since his Inauguration only a shrinking group has persisted in publicly taking him on.

To Donald Trump, the members of this small but highly visible resistance are his real enemy, even more than the opposition party. He often tweets his contempt; one day last fall, he described them as politically weakened and “on respirators,” but nonetheless “worse and more dangerous for our country” than the Democrats. Trump concluded with a furious flourish: “Watch out for them, they are human scum!”

Longwell embodies Trump’s darkest anxieties. Relentless in her loathing of the forty-fifth President, she has turned her Never Trump-ism from a passion project into a full-time profession. Starting last September, as Trump faced impeachment by the House of Representatives and a trial in the Senate, Longwell raised and spent millions of dollars on ads advocating his removal from office. After his acquittal, she launched a new effort, raising several million dollars in a matter of weeks to turn out “disaffected Republicans” in the Democratic primaries, a first step toward building a “coalition of the center” to defeat the President in November.

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Longwell sees Trump’s failure to respond early and decisively to the coronavirus as a case study in “the crisis of leadership” that she has warned fellow-Republicans about. She believes the new political reality of the pandemic moment is deeply problematic for Trump and for the Party leaders who have so fervently embraced him. As Trump was denying that the virus would afflict the country, millions of suburban voters—including many Republican women like Longwell—were helping former Vice-President Joe Biden take a commanding lead in the Democratic primaries over Bernie Sanders. She hopes now that Biden can be the instrument of Trump’s defeat, enabling a “restoration” of the America she still believes in. Longwell told me that, for the Republican establishment, which has for all intents and purposes fully sold out to Trump, “this is their worst-case scenario.”

A lifelong conservative, Longwell grew up in a Republican family and town in central Pennsylvania and began following politics in high school, during the impeachment, in 1998, of Bill Clinton. In her eyes, Clinton was a “dirtbag” for having an affair with a former intern who was not much older than she was. After graduating from Kenyon College, in Ohio, in 2002, she went to work for a conservative group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in Delaware. She soon found herself promoting a book for “intellectuals who find Darwinism unconvincing” and went on tour with Senator Rick Santorum to help sell his book “It Takes a Family,” whose retrograde views led a reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer to describe it as the product of “one of the finest minds of the thirteenth century.” At the time, Longwell was coming out to her friends and family as a lesbian. She decided that she could no longer work at such an organization with someone she considered “the most visibly anti-gay politician in the country,” and she quit.

Still deeply conservative, she moved to Washington in 2005, and was hired by Richard Berman as a junior staffer at his communications firm. Berman, a legendary Republican lobbyist turned P.R. man, specialized in helping food and beverage companies by setting up industry front groups to fight regulatory efforts. Longwell loved the work, and in the course of fifteen years she rose to become senior vice-president and was in line to run the company. Together, they opposed everything from raising the minimum wage to stricter drunk-driving laws. “Sarah always had a knife in her teeth,” Berman told me.

Early in her time at the firm, Longwell persuaded Berman to agree to be interviewed by “60 Minutes.” The story portrayed Berman as the “Dr. Evil” of the Washington influence game, willing, on behalf of a range of undisclosed corporate clients, to attack workers, healthy-eating proponents, and even activists for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Berman still has a link to the “60 Minutes” episode on the firm’s Web site, accompanied by a quote calling him “the industry’s weapon of mass destruction.” He keeps a “Dr. Evil” nameplate on his desk. “If they call you Mr. Nice Guy, would that be better?” Berman told me. “I don’t think so.”

Berman taught Longwell to discredit the opposition before it discredits you; to be edgy, memorable, and funny; and to always play offense, because, as Longwell put it in a 2014 presentation, “defense over time loses.” He devised an acronym for the firm’s approach to “managing” public opinion: FLAGS, for fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of those, he told me, fear and anger are the most effective: “Nobody likes negative ads, but everybody remembers them. I absolutely believe it.”

Longwell readily acknowledged that Berman was “almost like a bogeyman” to opponents. But she admired him. “Rick is the kind of person who is, like, ‘I will stand up, I will say what I think, and I will defend my positions.’ I believe that, too,” she said. “I believe that, if you are opposed to this President, there are so many people in this town, so many people in Congress, they want to say, ‘I think he’s terrible,’ whatever. They won’t say it out loud. I think that Rick helped me understand how to have the courage not just to say what I believe but, when people come at you for that, to say, ‘Well, this is who I am, this is what I believe.’ ”

The experience of being a lesbian in conservative circles also taught Longwell the virtues of plain speaking. An advocate for marriage equality despite the Republican Party’s stance against it, she married her girlfriend in 2013. “I got comfortable with everyone being mad at you,” she said. “To be a gay Republican was to recognize that Republicans were going to dislike you because you were gay, and Democrats were going to dislike you for being Republican, and you had to walk your path because you felt like it was the right thing to do.”