The Long Tail of Never Trump

• In Event: Parties and Ideologies in American Politics

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2016 campaign, the “#NeverTrump” movement seemed like an insurrection that failed. Launched originally to stop the nomination of Donald Trump, and then repurposed as an effort to deny him the presidency and prepare the way for redirecting the party away from Trumpite populism, the movement woke up the day after the election a failure. Powerful forces pressed on its supporters to get with the team and support a Republican administration that, whatever Trump’s idiosyncrasies were, was planning on doing a great number of traditionally Republican things. But while there have been a few NeverTrumpers who have shown a "strange new respect” for the president, what is remarkable is the breadth of continued opposition to the president among the president’s internal party opponents, especially those in the conservative movement’s broader institutions. As we will argue based on extensive interviews over the last two years with the leaders of the movement, the NeverTrump movement has shown a “long tail” of significant institutional ferment and innovation, and an ability to hold onto its opposition to the president against powerful internal pressures to bend the knee. We will argue that this demonstrates intriguing capacities of the parties to maintain factional opposition to their own president, and will speculate about what this means for American party politics and constitutional government.

Authors

• Steven M. Teles

• Robert P. Saldin, University of Montana