The Anti-Anti-Trump Club: Conservatism's Most Spectacular Rhetorical Gymnasts

[Part 2 of a series on the Never Trump ecosystem. Start with Part 1 here.]

If the Never Trump crowd are the people who looked at Donald Trump in 2016 and said "nah bro, absolutely not, not ever, not under any circumstances," then the Anti-Anti-Trump crowd are the people who looked at the Never Trumpers and said "well, hold on now, let's not be hasty."

These are not the same thing as Trump supporters. They will tell you that, at length, with footnotes. They are critics of Trump. They find him distasteful, norm-violating, occasionally embarrassing. They said so, publicly, multiple times. They have receipts.

They just spend a weirdly large portion of their energy criticizing the people criticizing Trump rather than, you know, criticizing the ferret wearin' shitgibbon.

Welcome to the most intellectually contorted address in American political media.

Who we're talking about

The flagship outlets of this world are National Review, the granddaddy of conservative intellectual journalism founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, and The Dispatch, the subscription newsletter operation co-founded by Jonah Goldberg and former Weekly Standard editor Steve Hayes after they left National Review. Erick Erickson, who runs a conservative talk radio operation out of Atlanta and publishes a newsletter, occupies similar territory. So does a chunk of the broader center-right media world that considers itself too serious for MAGA but too conservative for the Never Trump brigade.

The thing to keep in mind is that these are not mass market operations. The Dispatch reportedly has somewhere around 100,000-150,000 paying subscribers, which is genuinely impressive for the newsletter model but is a rounding error against the 155 million people who voted in 2024. National Review, once described as "the bible of American conservatism," is now a boutique publication with digital reach in the hundreds of thousands. Erickson's Atlanta radio show has a regional audience. Collectively, this entire world probably reaches 1-2 million engaged readers, many of whom overlap with each other.

But, boy, if you dip your toe into this space, there is a lot of onanism and dick sucking amongst their circle-jerk.[1]

So: small audience, enormous self-regard, and a positional identity that requires them to hold several contradictory things true simultaneously. That last part is where it gets interesting.

The impossible position

Here's what the Anti-Anti crowd needs you to believe all at once:

One: Trump is bad, dangerous, norm-violating, and a threat to democratic institutions. They have said this clearly and on the record.

Two: The Never Trumpers are also bad, or at least annoying, hyperbolic, self-serving, and suspiciously cozy with Democrats. Someone needs to push back on them.

Three: Conservative policy ideas — tax cuts, deregulation, originalist judges, hawkish foreign policy — are still correct and worth defending, regardless of who's currently implementing them via chaos and vibes.

Four: They, personally, are the last honest brokers. The reasonable ones. The adults. (Frankly, this one gives me so much eye-roll that my doctor recommended concussion protocols)

Holding all four of those positions simultaneously requires a kind of rhetorical flexibility that would impress an Olympic gymnast. The New Republic captured it well, describing National Review's posture as trying to broker "détente with a Trump administration it cannot fully embrace" — a position characterized, with some generosity, as "incoherent within this cartoonish state of affairs."

One writer, not unsympathetically, described reading National Review after Trump's second election win as watching people in "spectacular agony" over an "impossible posture." I think that's about right.

The policy hostage problem

Here's the honest explanation for how they got here, and it's not entirely uncharitable: these people actually got the shit they wanted from Trump.

Tax cuts. A deregulatory agenda. Three (very conservative) Supreme Court justices. An aggressive posture (at least in rhetoric if not uniformly in actions) toward China. These weren't nothing. For people who spent careers arguing for a specific policy agenda, watching that agenda get implemented — badly, chaotically, by someone they found personally repugnant — created a genuine dilemma. Do you oppose the man so hard that you oppose the outcomes? Or do you take the wins and hold your nose on the character stuff?

I think you know the answer to that Faustian bargain...

Researchers Robert Saldin and Steven Teles put it plainly: "conservatives disgusted with Trump are being asked to give up quite a lot in policy terms in opposing him — something that critics on the left rarely appreciate sufficiently." That's a real tension, and pretending it isn't doesn't help anyone understand what actually happened to this class of people.

But here's where the rhetorical knot tightens: you cannot simultaneously argue that Trump's character and norm-violations are disqualifying and defend his policy agenda without eventually having to reckon with the fact that the chaos and the policy are not separable. The tariffs, the war, the institutional degradation — these aren't bugs in the Trump program that happen alongside the good policy stuff. They are the program. The Anti-Anti crowd has never really squared that circle.

The identity preservation racket

The deeper explanation, though, is simpler and less flattering: these people built their careers and identities as conservative intellectuals, and fully joining the Never Trump coalition would require admitting that the movement they spent decades building either failed catastrophically or was always, underneath the Buckley-esque intellectualism, something considerably uglier than advertised.

That is a psychologically costly thing to admit. So instead, they critique the critique.

Goldberg himself is the most interesting case study here, because he's genuinely smart and genuinely conflicted, and you can watch the tension play out in real time. He's been clear that Trump is dangerous, that Trumpism corrodes conservative principles, that the sycophancy around Trump is intellectually contemptible. In a recent piece for The Dispatch, he put it plainly: "Trump changes his positions constantly, and hordes of his supposedly principled intellectual defenders change their positions with him — and I'm supposed to be the deranged one for not doing likewise?"

If I was being charitable, I would concede that point. And yet Goldberg and his publication consistently spend as much or more energy targeting the Never Trump crowd and the mainstream media as they do targeting MAGA. The symmetry is telling.

Early in Trump's first term, Goldberg wrote a National Review piece declaring "Never Trump is over" — arguing it was always about the election, not a permanent opposition movement, and that he'd "give Trump a chance." The piece aged about as well as you'd expect.

What they're actually doing

What the Anti-Anti crowd has constructed is a comfortable perch from which they can feel principled without paying the full price of principle. It is like standing on the rim of an active volcano, pissing into it, and thinking they are helping. They get to say they opposed Trump on character grounds. They get to defend conservative policy ideas. They get to position themselves as the reasonable center against both MAGA excess and Never Trump hysteria. And they get to keep their conservative audience, which they would lose if they went full Never Trump, and their intellectual credibility, which they would lose if they went full MAGA. This leads to an ideological struggle where they think on the far side of <waves hands> all this, that they will be able to rise like the cream in non-homogenized milk, ready to assume leadership over the smoldering wreckage.

In that, it's a business model as much as an ideology. And it works, on its own narrow terms. The Dispatch is a financially successful operation. National Review still publishes. Erickson still has his radio show.

What it isn't, as we'll get into in the next post, is a political strategy with any meaningful chance of moving the electorate. But that's a problem for post three.

What do you think? Feel free to drop a comment and continue the discussion below.

1 - because I had some people forward me a few of Nick Cattogio's columns from The Dispatch, I subbed. Then I realized how fucking insane the whole publication is and while Nick can occasionally be cogent and clear eyed, he is in their mold. Or is it mouldering fetid rotten garbage.