The Never Trump Movement’s Surprising Core

The Never Trump movement, encompassing conservative groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, is an undertaking grounded in political morality. The central premise of the effort is that President Donald Trump is irredeemably corrupt and spectacularly incompetent. It views Trump as a moral and American abomination.

Never Trumpers are right, of course. But it’s a little counterintuitive that the main people making the case are not Republican luminaries but Republican political consultants. After all, the consultant class — “hired guns,” “mercenaries,” “hacks” — is supposed to be everything that went wrong with American politics. In popular culture, they are the money-grubbing amoral schemers who wag the dog and transform a republic into a circus.