And how do we know this? Because they moved on to candidates like Joe Walsh, who were also not staunch defenders of conservative principle, but just another vessel for more book sales and CNN cable news hits. Walsh’s biggest backers on the right claim to stand on principle and values while ignoring Walsh’s own history of endorsing and promoting an actual white supremacist in Paul Nehlen. Trump is not an ideological opponent of the anti-Trump political class. He’s a mirror.
The NeverTrump movement has been corrupted as much as Trump himself. As his loudest critics on the right decry the culture of Trump that has infested the GOP, they also sit on Morning Joe segments and beg for Jeff Zucker’s table scraps — the two men in the entirety of media more responsible for Donald Trump as he exists today, tweeting from the Oval Office, than any CPAC invitation. Sure, people like Bill Kristol, Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols or Rick Wilson will happily sit on these panels without the principled temerity to call out Joe Scarborough or Jeff Zucker for their own roles in paving Trump’s way to the White House with billions of dollars of free media, because trolling Trump into an early morning rage tweet becomes paramount to their own personal brands for profit. Sound familiar?
Choose the form of your destructor.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “The NeverTrump movement has been corrupted as much as Trump himself.” Except there’s no evidence of corruption on Trump’s part — despite a lot of digging — and there’s more with the NeverTrumpers, who have mostly sold out everything they claimed to stand for in the name of media exposure and tribal solidarity.
UPDATE (From Ed): as Charlie Martin asks at the PJ Mothership: Seriously, #NeverTrump, What Will You Give Up to Own Trump?