DIVISIONS HAVE OPENED UP within the parties as well. But it is the division within the Republican Party that should be the first concern of Americans disturbed by the radicalism of the Obama years. Although Republicans finally “came home” to provide Trump with his margin of victory, a cohort of “Never Trumpers” did not. In 2012, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, had avidly sought Trump’s endorsement, saying, “Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works to create jobs for the American people. He’s done it here in Nevada. He’s done it across the country. . . . I spent my life in the private sector. Not quite as successful as this guy.”1 But in 2016, when his country’s future was on the line, Romney led renegade Republicans in sabotaging the party’s nominee: “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.”2 Romney’s eruption, like many similar attacks from “Never Trumpers,” was hard to explain. Romney certainly had never said anything as harsh about Obama during the 2012 campaign. Predictably, Democrats featured his outburst, along with those of several other disgruntled Republicans, in attack ads against a candidate who had won more primary votes than any Republican in history.
Former presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush sat on their hands throughout the campaign while making their displeasure with the candidate clear. A month before the November election, defeated primary candidate Jeb Bush pronounced Trump beyond the pale over an 11-year-old video that had been released by the pro-Clinton Washington Post in an effort to derail the Republican’s campaign. The video showed the candidate talking boorishly in a private conversation with Jeb’s cousin Billy.3 Trump apologized for his remarks, but Bush refused to accept his apology. “As the grandfather of two precious girls,” he tweeted, “I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump’s reprehensible comments degrading women.”4 This denial of forgiveness to Trump seemed somewhat inexplicable given the Bush family’s well-known embrace of Bill Clinton, whose sexual abuses, unlike Trump’s, were actions rather than boasts in private and were committed by a sitting governor and president and then exposed in front of a whole nation of precious girls.5
Claiming to be outraged by the video, as well as by other casual Trump remarks, some former members of the George W. Bush White House went so far as to announce that they were voting for the Democrat, Hillary Clinton. A former policy director for the House Republican conference, Evan McMullin, even launched a presidential run in Utah in the hopes of blocking a Trump majority in the Electoral College. All these defections raise troubling questions: What was it that these Republicans didn’t understand about the Democrats and their responsibility for the present perils of the nation? What did they not understand about the destructive agendas of the left that threatened its future?
Were these “Never Trumpers” intimidated by the massive barrage of baseless, malicious, and overblown attacks on the candidate’s character, which permeated the media and the culture at large? Or did they withdraw simply because they lacked the stomach for the fight? One prominent conservative concluded that they simply didn’t have the will to win. “The Republican Party is not interested in winning,” Rush Limbaugh told the millions in his radio audience.
It clearly is not interested in winning. And if you want to be even more specific than that, it is paramountly obvious that they’re not even interested in defeating the Democrats. It’s just mind-boggling. All of these years I’ve been doing this program I was under the impression the Republican Party wanted to beat Democrats. And as the years have gone by, it’s become obvious to me that that’s not their No. 1 objective. We have Republicans—to one degree or another—working as hard as the Democrats are to defeat Donald Trump. The country we know and love is being torn apart and rebuilt in ways that we don’t want, and the Republican Party doesn’t even seem to care about that. The Republican Party seems just as eager as the Democrats to pronounce their voters as extreme kooks.6
Here Limbaugh was echoing a populist theme of Trump’s campaign—that a political class had rigged the system. As both men argued, the problem was not a flawed candidate but a failed party. The loss of nerve that had handcuffed the Republican opposition to Obama’s second term was not restricted to the Republican leadership. Republicans generally didn’t understand the threat posed by the Democrats or didn’t have the will to resist it—or both. It was a failure of nerve by the entire party, which, despite landslide victories that had given them their biggest majority in the House in nearly 100 years, would not use their power to block Obama’s socialist agendas.