Daniel DePetris

Never Trumpers are back. Here’s why they will fail again

From the moment Donald Trump stepped onto the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States, there have been people in the Republican party who have sought to bring him down.  

During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican national security officials wrote scathing and embarrassing open letters against him. Conventional Republican strategists and commentators like Karl Rove, Bill Kristol and Spectator USA’s own Rick Wilson blasted him as an incompetent, indecent, moron who shouldn’t be ten miles from the Oval Office. Trump’s primary opponents even tried to scuttle his nomination at the convention, an attempt that fizzled out before it really began.

Three years later, these Never Trumpers are at it again. Bill Kristol, the former editor of the now shuttered Weekly Standard, has been texting with ex-Trump communications adviser-turned-Trump-foe Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci in an early plot to dump Trump at the top of the ticket.

Committed anti-Trump conservatives like Wilson and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough are using their status as talking heads to pound the president every day on the airwaves. Ex-GOP office holders, from David Jolly and John Kasich to Carlos Curbelo, have been sniping at him as “childish” and unfit for the office. Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois, all but begged in the New York Times for someone in the GOP to challenge Trump for the 2020 nomination: “We need someone who could stand up, look the president in the eye and say: “Enough, sir.” 

Pushing for a primary challenge to an incumbent president is not as crazy as you might think. It has been done before. Gerald Ford had to fend off Ronald Reagan in the 1976 GOP primary. Unpopular president Jimmy Carter faced off against Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 1980. Pat Buchanan gave George H.W. Bush a run for his money in 1992.

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