As the DNC meets in Chicago this week to formally anoint its selected presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, consider the unexpected pass that the “Never Trump” phenomenon — comprised of apostate Republicans and self-described conservatives — has come to. The Never Trumpers initially appeared during the 2016 campaign, owing to candidate Donald Trump’s heterodox policy positions, colorful personal history, and norm-defying approach to politics. That Trump emerged as the Republican presidential nominee from a large primary field comprised of conventional conservatives and successful Republican politicians came as a shock to many who had so willingly backed Mitt Romney only four years previously. The elevation of a thrice-married real estate developer turned TV personality, in what was widely seen as a winnable election given a term-limited outgoing president, gave reasonable pause to many who wondered if nominating a former Democrat of no known fixed ideological bearings was the best Republicans could do. As this polyglot group of campaign consultants (think Lincoln Project), media pundits, and Republican officeholders withheld support for the Trump campaign, they found safe harbor in the Hillary Clinton camp. Clinton, a bete noire of conservatives for decades, was believed to be the considerable lesser of two evils. This was due in part to a reexamination of her husband’s legacy, as the Bill Clinton presidency came to be seen as meaningfully less radical with the passage of time, especially as compared to the then-concluding Obama years. Never Trumpers also took comfort in Hillary Clinton as an establishment doyenne, unlikely to “fundamentally transform” the country as candidate Obama had once promised. After Trump’s stunning win in 2016, the Never Trumpers seamlessly joined the “Resistance” to his administration. While on policy terms Trump cohabitated reasonably well with Republican majorities in Congress from 2017 to 2019 and governed as a fairly conventional conservative (with the occasional nod to populism), controversies both real (a revolving door of White House staff) and imagined (the Russian collusion hoax and farcical “Ukraine phone call” impeachment) continued to fan the Never Trump flames. Democratic efforts to clear the primary field to prevent a Bernie Sanders victory led to the nomination of Joe Biden in 2020. For a second time, “Scranton Joe” offered just enough of an establishmentarian, transactionally centrist profile to Never Trumpers to gain their support while credibly touting their continuing conservatism. Biden largely held on to this support going into the 2024 election, despite largely abandoning any centrist instincts he may have once possessed and governing from the left, with no significant defections prior to his withdrawal from the race in late July. Now, the Never Trumpers have a Kamala Harris candidacy to consider, and a Kamala Harris presidency to contemplate. One notable characteristic among the Never Trump crowd is their steadfast refusal to keep their own counsel. There is little shame in sitting out an election, or voting third-party, if the candidates of the two major parties are unacceptable. I have no doubt some of my (and your) friends and neighbors, whom we might otherwise consider to be reliable partisans, have (and will) decline to pull the lever for either of Trump or Harris, which they’ll keep to themselves. While acknowledging they are public figures more prone to sharing their views, what sets the Never Trumpers apart are a) the urge to state one’s affiliation with a party or ideological movement (in their case, as Republicans or conservatives) while supporting the “other side’s” standard bearer, and b) the need to broadcast this prolifically. I will confess that I’ve never really understood political apostasy of this sort. You’ve had a change of heart about the issues and want to switch parties? Fine, it happens; that said, it is always curious when a grown man or woman with presumably fully formed political inclinations does so. What is far more curious is the apostate who, having vocally advocated for a particular policy agenda, supports the party standing in opposition to that agenda — without ever renouncing their positions. I’d imagine the cognitive dissonance in the minds of David French, Bill Kristol, or Adam Kinzinger to be overwhelming, assuming the original ideological profile was ever held in good faith. The Kamala conundrum leaves open another possibility, which I’ll wager we’ll see in full flower over the next 80 days. With the Harris candidacy, any fig leaf that a candidate Clinton or Biden may have offered of “moderation” as contrasted with the intemperate Trump falls away. Her ideological bona fides, while inflected with the rank opportunism for which career politicians are typically known, are incontestable. Although a machine Democrat from a one-party state, Harris reaffirmed her place on the extreme left of the political spectrum in her first major economic address in North Carolina last week. The many public policy statements from her first presidential candidacy in 2020 present a damning body of evidence of the collectivist ethos that would govern a prospective Harris administration, no matter the effort her campaign and a compliant media put into obfuscating such positions in the coming weeks. And therein lies the contradiction at the heart of the Never Trump coalition in 2024. For all the whingeing over Trump’s norm-defying behavior, nothing in the conduct of the Biden presidency — from the coordinated lawfare against candidate Trump, the disgraceful exit from Afghanistan, the incessant lies from the White House about inflation and the border, and the unprecedented removal of Joe Biden from the 2024 ballot — much less the unsavory manner in which Kamala Harris began her ascent in California politics — suggests that Donald Trump represents some otherworldly “bridge too far” necessitating cashiering one’s values in order to performatively support the Democratic candidate, particularly when that candidate has no record of even so much as paying lip service to bipartisanship or centrism. To support the Harris–Walz ticket gives the lie to one’s purported “conservatism” or membership in the Republican fold. It suggests the fiction of maintaining this allegiance, while actively supporting its antithesis, is animated by grift — as the media (and producers of campaign ads) love nothing so much as an apostate: “Look, even his own team are against him!! How can anyone support him?” Being the token Never Trump Republican on MSNBC, CNN or The View may not be particularly honorable, but it pays well. There’s nothing wrong with heterodoxy or iconoclasm; in my own life, I’ve made a vocation of them. But marching to one’s own drum begins with intellectual honesty, something now in the process of being revealed to be in infinitesimally short supply among the Never Trump crew. Richard J. Shinder is the founder of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy. READ MORE: How Trump Can Win (Or Lose) Joe Biden Addressed the DNC, Not As His Party’s Nominee Biden Says Anti-Israeli Protesters ‘Have a Point’ at DNC The post Never Trumpers Are Revealing Who They Really Are appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.