Last Wednesday, the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar aggressively questioned Elliott Abrams, the Trump Administration’s envoy for Venezuela, about Abrams’s previous government service. As an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, he was heavily involved in policymaking regarding Latin America. In Guatemala, he supported the rule of Efraín Ríos Montt, who was later indicted for crimes against humanity and genocide. In El Salvador, he supported the training of the country’s military, which carried out extensive human-rights violations, including the infamous El Mozote massacre, in which as many as a thousand civilians were killed. Abrams disputed the atrocity, asking Mark Danner, who reported on the massacre for The New Yorker in 1993, “If it had really been a massacre and not a firefight, why didn’t we hear right off from the F.M.L.N.?” In Nicaragua, Abrams was intimately involved with trying to seek funding for the Contras; he later became enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair, pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress, and was eventually pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.

After video of Omar’s questioning went viral, a number of commentators and members of the foreign-policy community rose to Abrams’s defense. Among them was Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (from which Abrams is currently on leave due to his Administration work), a CNN analyst, a Washington Post columnist, and one of the most prominent Republican anti-Trumpers, who, last year, published “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right.” (Abrams himself was also critical of Trump during the 2016 campaign.) I recently spoke by phone with Boot to discuss why he thinks Abrams should be defended, whether America has a history of standing up for democracy, and the state of #NeverTrump conservatism. An edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.

Where does Never Trump conservatism stand today?

In some sense, you could argue that the Never Trump movement has gotten smaller, because you’ve had a number of people who were once opposed to Trump embracing him. For example, there was just an endorsement of Trump’s reëlection from the former RedState guy. What’s his name?

Erick Erickson.

Erick Erickson. Thank you. On the other hand, I think that, in some ways, the Never Trump movement is bigger than ever, because I think what you saw in November was that an awful lot of Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents defected from the Republican Party, especially in the suburbs, and they led to a landslide defeat for Republicans in the House, a loss of forty seats. And now there’s polling to indicate that about thirty to forty per cent of Republican voters would like to see an alternative in the primaries to Donald Trump, even though eighty to ninety per cent of Republicans still continue to support him.

So I think in some ways it’s gathering steam because, if you remember back to when Trump was first elected, there were a lot of hopes that he would grow into office, that he would become more Presidential, that he wouldn’t be this bombastic buffoon that he was on the campaign trail, and those hopes have been dashed because he has, in more than two years in office, not gotten one iota more Presidential, and anybody with an ounce of intellectual honesty has to acknowledge that, even if most Republicans are not willing to act upon that belief.

What is it in his actual governing that you are most opposed to?

Where to start? I think the fact that he has, from a foreign-policy perspective, undermined the twin pillars of the post-1945 international order, which has been based on American security alliances with countries in Europe and East Asia and on free trade, and he is hostile to both of those and is doing great damage to the credibility that we have with allies. Then at home I think the damage that he is doing to race relations with his incessant racism and xenophobia is serious and long-lasting. The harm that he is doing to our democracy with his attacks on the media as the enemy of the people, his espousal in alternative reality, his obstruction of justice and attempts to politicize the Justice Department, and now this bogus state of emergency, where he is launching a direct assault against Article I of the Constitution.

Which of these is the most dangerous? You know, I think it’s all of them in combination. This is really an unrelenting assault on the norms of our democracy that he is continuing to undertake, and, in some ways, he’s even worse now than he was when he started because he’s less restrained. There’s no longer this axis of adults around him. He feels free to be his Trumpiest, and there aren’t advisers like Jim Mattis to hold him back anymore.

One of the people who is around him now, in terms of foreign policy, is Elliott Abrams. Abrams just had this spat with Ilhan Omar. Why did you feel the need to defend him?

I know Elliott. He has been a colleague of mine at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I think that he is a very smart person. I think he is basically a good person and he is somebody who I don’t see as being terribly ideological. I really see him as a foreign-policy professional who has served the country a long time. I think you can certainly attack him for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. I think that’s legitimate. The fact that he did plead guilty in two misdemeanor offenses of misleading Congress, that’s never O.K., but I think it’s unfair of Congresswoman Omar to suggest that he is somehow an enabler or an apologist for genocide, because, in fact, anyone who knows anything about the history of American policy since the nineteen-seventies knows that Elliott has actually been one of the most influential and eloquent voices for putting human rights and democracy front and center in American foreign policy.

Now, he would be the first to acknowledge that the U.S. government is not an N.G.O. It has to make compromises. It can’t be morally pure. And so the U.S. government has to deal with reprehensible regimes, and I would think that people on the left would recognize that, because they were very critical of the Reagan Administration’s dealing with the government in El Salvador, but they wanted to deal with the government in Moscow, where the Soviet Union had created far greater human-rights abuses than El Salvador ever did.

I think there’s a difference between wanting to have negotiations with Moscow, as many people on the left did during the Cold War, and a situation like El Salvador, where America is putting up a large chunk of El Salvador’s military bill and Abrams himself called into question the existence of a massacre carried out by troops the United States was supporting. Don’t you think that’s a difference?

I think every situation is unique. You know, there’s no question that the Reagan Administration wasn’t some unique offense on Elliot’s part. I think the Reagan Administration did call into question the veracity of the reporting on the massacre, which was borne out by subsequent investigation, but you have to ask: What is the proper response to human-rights abuses by an allied regime, which in this case is battling a communist insurgency? That certainly would not have been preferable on any kind of human rights or democratic grounds.