Never Trump, Forever

It was an evening of people breaking with tradition, though. The Bulwark was launched last year by prominent anti-Trump Republicans, including the GOP strategist Sarah Longwell and the former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller. Most were now rooting heartily for Biden, and some didn’t even want Republicans to keep the Senate.

After Charen’s outburst, the Zoom chat window filled with “MONA!” cheers from Democrats and Republicans alike who were watching the panel, feeling “physically sick” and “completely panicked” at the thought of a Trump victory.

Around 10:45, Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark’s editor in chief, begged everyone to remain calm. “We’re all freaking ourselves out here,” he said.

“Well, for good reason, Charlie,” said Miller, who once served as communications director for Jeb Bush. “Trump might be the president for four more years. That’s something to be concerned about.”

I don’t know whether that was the last time Charen swore that night, because I drove home about an hour later, when things were still not looking great for Biden. But as I left, Charen said that she was feeling bad, and that she hadn’t felt good about a presidential election since 2004.

I went to Charen’s house on Election Night because she once considered herself too conservative for George H. W. Bush, yet she committed herself so wholeheartedly to booting Trump out of office that she even voted for Democrats in down-ballot races this year.

“I want the Republican Party to feel spanked, so that it reforms and makes a U-turn,” she told me. She struggled to name the one thing that most disgusts her about Trump and his Republican enablers. It came down to “Are you a decent human being? Do you mostly tell the truth instead of mostly not?”

People like Charen are a tiny sliver of the GOP. Just 6 percent of Republicans supported Biden this year, according to a late-October Economist/YouGov poll. However, some anti-Trump Republicans might no longer consider themselves Republican, which would mean the true number of Never Trumpers like Charen is actually higher.

[Read: Naming and Shaming the Pro-Trump Elite]

They are repulsed by the president’s boorish behavior (“shithole countries”), his ineptitude at governing (“a big, beautiful bill”), and his rejection of fiscal conservatism (sad!) However, by far the biggest turnoff about Trump, says Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, is “just who he is.”

Switching parties, in general, is a rare phenomenon in American politics. True, Ronald Reagan attracted some working-class “Reagan Democrats,” but we’ve since had four long decades of ideological sorting. In that time, Americans have been “dividing with increasing distinction into two partisan teams,” as the political psychologist Lilliana Mason writes in her book, Uncivil Agreement. Political parties have become Americans’ entire identity, to the point that voting for an opposing party’s candidate is less like picking a different tax policy and more like betraying your family.