The Never Trump Thing: It Really Ties the Room Together. They are a big part of why we're here
The Never Trump crowd built the machine, blessed the machine, and profited from the machine. Owning that isn't weakness, man. It's the whole goddamn point
Okay, so here’s the thing, man. Here’s the thing. And I think about this sometimes, usually around my second White Russian, when I’m not, you know, otherwise engaged — these Never Trump guys? The National Review cats, the Weekly Standard dudes, the whole think-tank bowling league? They built the lane. They oiled the lane. And then they’re standing there going, “Whoa, man, how did that ball end up in the gutter?”
That’s just, like, not a serious accounting, man.
What They Actually Did, Man
Let me be specific, because, you know, vague accusations are like, uh — they’re like a White Russian with no Kahlúa. Something’s missing and you know it.
These guys spent thirty years telling “real America” — you know, the white, non-coastal, Jesus-and-football crowd — that liberals were coming for their whole scene. Their rug, man. Their way of life. That wasn’t Trump. That was them. Nixon said it. They refined it. Fox News turbocharged it like somebody spiked the caucasian with something considerably stronger than vodka. The intellectuals built the framework, and the base just, uh, filled it in. And without that base, man, without those credulous millions who’d roll whatever ball you put in their hands, none of these guys had a lane to bowl in.
Then they built this whole parallel media thing. Closed ecosystem, man. Hermetically sealed. Fox, talk radio, the whole apparatus — explicitly designed so the faithful would never have to hear a discouraging word from outside the coalition. Charlie Sykes, man — Charlie Sykes — was a right-wing talk radio host. That’s not an accusation, that’s just his Wikipedia page. And now he wrings his hands about epistemics? Come on, man. You don’t get to spend twenty years building a room with no windows and then act surprised that the people inside it start seeing things.
And the Obama years, man. Oh, the Obama years. The Tea Party thing. The debt ceiling hostage situations. Obamacare repeal with no replacement, just — just vibes, man. Pure obstruction vibes. They trained the base like you’d train a, uh — look, I’m not gonna complete that metaphor, but the point is: you train something to value fighting over governing, you get a fighter who doesn’t govern. That’s not complicated. That’s just, like, causality, man.
And they kept backing flawed candidates, holding their noses, telling themselves the platform was the thing, the person didn’t matter. Ends justify the means, man. For decades. You build a culture like that, and eventually somebody comes along with no principles at all and just inherits the whole operation. And you’re standing there going, “This is not what we wanted.”
Yeah, well. The Dude’s rug didn’t want to get peed on either, man. And yet.
What Honest Accounting Would Actually Look Like
Here’s what they’d have to say, man, if they were being real about it. If they were, like, sitting across from me at the bowling alley, drinking something, being honest:
“We built institutions that ran on grievance. We optimized for outrage because outrage won elections. We told ourselves the serious people were steering. We were wrong, and here we are.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. David Frum’s gotten close, man, closer than most — but even he tends to locate the original sin somewhere down the food chain, in the populist wing, not in the intellectual establishment he personally ate lunch in for thirty years. There’s this great bit of research — Saldin and Teles — where they nailed it: conservative intellectuals thought they were doing “system maintenance.” Keeping the coalition together. Managing the grassroots.
Except the grassroots had jumped containment, man. And they just kept... maintaining.
What you mostly get instead is like, one paragraph of “yeah, we maybe could’ve done some things differently” followed by seventeen paragraphs about how correct and noble their current position is. Goldberg’s gestured at it. The Dispatch has nodded at it. National Review has occasionally and very carefully acknowledged that perhaps the movement has some things to answer for.
It’s pro forma, man. It’s accountability-flavored. It inoculates against the charge of having none without doing any of the actual uncomfortable work. It’s a near-beer of reckoning.
Why This Matters, And I Say This As A Dude Who Cares Deeply About Bowling
Here’s the thing about trust, man. It’s like your approach to the lane. You can’t just walk up there and wing it every time and expect strikes. You gotta have the right form. Credibility is form.
The people these Never Trump guys most need to reach — soft disapprovers, younger conservatives, right-leaning independents who didn’t grow up genuflecting toward the pre-Trump GOP — these people have no emotional investment in protecting the old establishment. None. Zero. So what they see is: guys who helped build something, watched it go sideways, and are now positioning themselves as the tour guides out of the wreckage. Without copping to their role in creating the wreckage.
That’s not a posture that generates trust, man. That generates, at best, mild interest. At worst, it generates the entirely fair response: why the fuck should I listen to you?
And here’s the other thing — and this really gets my dander up, man, I’m not gonna lie — a lot of Never Trump rhetoric just assumes Trump is the problem. Personally. Like he’s a unique corruption of an otherwise sound tradition, and once he shuffles off the stage, we can restore something resembling 2013 and go back to our regularly scheduled bowling.
That is, and I want to be precise here, man, a bummer of an analysis. And wrong. Trumpism is a response to real failures, real grievances, real structural rot that the conservative establishment helped build and consistently failed to address. A real reckoning with that history produces a different answer to “what comes next” than “well, we were right about the orange guy, so.”
The Bottom Line, Man
They were right about Trump. Early, and at real cost in some cases, and the record bears them out on the basic call. That’s genuinely worth something.
The Dude respects a correct take, man.
But being right about Trump is not the same as having somewhere useful to go, and the gap between those two things is, in large part, stuffed with unfinished business. The fingerprints are there, man. On the lane. On the ball. On the whole damn setup. And the reluctance to look at them — really look, not just gesture at them with a vague “we weren’t perfect” before pivoting to the newsletter subscription link — is costing them exactly the credibility they need to be useful at a moment when useful is in genuinely short supply.
They built a significant part of the machine, man. Owning that — really owning it, not just performatively acknowledging it to inoculate against the charge — wouldn’t make them weaker. It would make them the only people in American conservative politics who could credibly claim to have actually learned something.
That’s rare, man. That’s valuable. That’s a rug that could really tie the room together.
It’s a shame they seem so reluctant to unroll it.
The Dude abides.