The Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want Donald Trump to be renominated in 2024 so that Republicans will lose the general election, leaving progressives in charge of everything. It’s not surprising, because these Never Trumpers are mostly Beltway grifters, and people who live inside the Beltway have selfish reasons for wanting the Democrats to win. When Democrats win, the government gets bigger, which means more government jobs and contracts in the Washington metropolitan area. That increases the home values and wages of Beltway grifters.
As Dan McLaughlin points out at the National Review (he dislikes Trump, but dislikes the Democrats even more):
A lot of people publicly said they were horrified by Donald Trump’s rise in American politics. Some of us meant it. We may talk about Trump and the events he inspired because they are still newsworthy, but fundamentally, we are looking forward to a post-Trump Republican Party. For others, however, Trump was either just a convenient club with which to bash Republicans, or a meal ticket. It has been obvious for quite some time now who is in the latter camp: those people in the Resistance or the Never Trump factions who won’t stop obsessing over Trump and won’t let him go away. We saw that in people who actually preferred Trump to Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio in 2016. We saw it in people who opposed Glenn Youngkin’s brand of post-Trump rather than against-Trump Republicanism.
Talking to CNN’s Gabby Orr and Steve Contorno, Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project gave the game away:
“Some Trump foes have picked up on the former President’s jealousy and are using it to advance their own objectives. Next week, Palm Beach televisions, perhaps including those in Mar-a-Lago, will once again air a commercial by the Lincoln Project intended to remind Trump that DeSantis is the new GOP “it” guy. Rick Wilson, one of the ex-Republicans behind the Lincoln Project, is hoping to provoke a very specific reaction from Trump. “We want Trump to kill his own babies,” Wilson said. “We believe if we narrow the field and it’s only Trump in 2024, it’s an easy choice for Americans to say ‘no.’” ”
As with a number of Resistance and Never Trump organizations, the Lincoln Project’s fundraising is so pervasively built around being Against Trump that its leaders cannot abide by the idea of having no Trump around to be against. Just remember, the next time these folks lecture people about what a bad thing it is to have Trump in American politics: They want it that way.
In 2020, Republicans in down-ballot races generally got a bit more of the vote than Trump did, as a percentage of votes. Trump was so unpopular with Americans as a whole, that he became the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover to both lose his race for reelection and cost his party control of Congress, too.
In 2016, Never Trump “Republicans” who were actually Democrats in disguise deliberately helped Donald Trump win the Republican Primary in hopes that he would cost the GOP the general election. But Americans hated Hillary Clinton so much that Trump managed to narrowly win the election. The Washington Post’s fake Never Trump “conservative,” Jennifer Rubin, actually was a staunch progressive on most issues, as LU’s Jerome Woehrle chronicled in detail.
Rubin apparently thought Trump winning the primary would harm the Republican Party and help the Democrats win the general election. So she constantly attacked Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries for wanting to curb illegal immigration and for supporting a border wall with Mexico, even though any idiot would know that these were popular positions with the Republican base. People like Rubin were indispensable in helping Trump win the 2016 presidential primary, by reminding conservatives of Trump’s conservative positions. And as a result of Trump’s winning the election, and his inability to appear presidential, centrist suburbanites turned against the GOP, costing conservatives control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 Congressional election, and costing the GOP control of Congress and the presidency in the 2020 election.
Rubin opposed repealing ObamaCare and DACA, denounced GOP proposals to cut welfare spending, and celebrated the passage of a Congressional spending deal that increased the budget deficit to over $1 trillion. Rubin had supported liberal John Kerry for President in 2004. In June 2017, she attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for ending the corrupt Obama-era practice of funneling money from federal settlements to politically-connected left-wing groups.
In 2017, she called the Trump administration’s budget “monstrous” because of its spending cuts — even though Trump didn’t actually cut spending. She trashed senators who have sought to repeal ObamaCare, or even sought to make it less burdensome or costly. On July 18, 2017, she wrote that “it would be cruel and unwise to pull the plug on the Affordable Care Act.” Later, she attacked Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who proposed legislation to soften Obamacare and return some decisionmaking about healthcare to the local level, for supposedly violating the “Jimmy Kimmel” test. (Kimmel is a liberal entertainer). On August 2, 2017, she attacked moderate Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada for voting for a “‘skinny’ repeal” of Obamacare, considering even that partial repeal of Obamacare too much to bear.
A conservative LU blogger actually convinced some readers to vote against Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries. He never attacked Trump for having conservative stances on immigration. Instead, he told readers, over and over and over again, that they should vote against Trump, because Trump polled worse against Hillary Clinton than Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or John Kasich did, and thus had a lower chance of winning the general election. A few readers actually found this persuasive, although Trump may have won a plurality of votes among LU readers (Trump and Cruz got the most votes among LU readers).
