The Reckoning That May Never Come

I spend a fair amount of time reading and listening to the Never Trump crowd. Lincoln Square Media, The Bulwark, The Atlantic, the various refugees from the Republican Party (Charlie Sykes, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens) who have spent the last decade wondering what the hell happened to the political movement they once considered home¹.

I don't always agree with them. Sometimes I think they're still remarkably blind to the Republican Party they helped build. But I respect that many of them recognized what Trump represented, opposed him at considerable personal and professional cost, and have remained consistent in their opposition.

One theme that keeps bubbling up is the coming reckoning.

Eventually, Trump will leave the stage. Either when his second term ends in January 2029, or when he consumes his final extra-crispy chicken leg from KFC. One way or another, the Trump era will end.

And there's a belief, sometimes explicit, sometimes merely lurking beneath the conversation, that American democracy will eventually force the Republican Party to confront what it has become.

Enough electoral defeats, enough voters becoming disgusted with the antics, enough demographic change, and eventually the party will have to reconsider its direction. Perhaps it will rediscover constitutional conservatism. Perhaps something new and more responsible will emerge.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that every Never Trumper wants to resurrect the Republican Party of 2015. Most, if not all have abandoned that fantasy entirely. Stuart Stevens has been particularly candid about his own complicity in building the party that ultimately embraced Trump. Jonathan V. Last has spent plenty of time wrestling with whether the conservative movement was ever what its intellectual champions believed it to be.

But whether the expectation is restoration or transformation, there seems to be a great deal of faith that democracy will eventually deliver a corrective.

I have a problem with that assumption.

What if the reckoning never comes?

Not because Trumpism remains popular forever. Not because the Republican Party never loses another election. And certainly not because the factions currently comprising MAGA will remain united once their orange-haired patron departs.

But because our electoral system doesn't necessarily impose consequences proportional to a party's loss of public support.

And even when it does impose consequences, there's no guarantee the people receiving the message will interpret it the way the Never Trumpers hope.

Trump didn't create these voters

I've been banging on about this for years.

In a piece I wrote back in June 2023, I was already mocking conservative commentators who believed Trumpism and Reaganism could be stitched back together once Trump was removed from the equation.

It was a ridiculous assumption then, and subsequent events haven't given me much reason to reconsider.

Trump didn't invent the Republican base's distrust of its leadership. He didn't invent its grievances, its susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking, or its willingness to prioritize cultural combat over traditional Republican economic doctrine.

He discovered those things were already there.

The Tea Party years should have been an enormous warning.

Starting in 2009, Republican voters increasingly demonstrated that they were willing to reject establishment candidates, punish politicians who compromised, and disregard the preferences of the party's intellectual and financial leadership.

Remember Eric Cantor? In 2014, the House majority leader lost his Republican primary to Dave Brat, an obscure economics professor backed by Tea Party activists.

The message couldn't have been much clearer. Being powerful within the Republican establishment offered surprisingly little protection from Republican voters.

Then Trump arrived.

He tossed aside free-trade orthodoxy, showed little interest in conventional fiscal conservatism, attacked Republican foreign-policy assumptions, and treated the party's traditional leadership with open contempt.

And he won.

The Republican electorate learned a rather important lesson: it didn't actually have to accept the entire ideological package that the establishment had been selling for decades.

Nor did it have to accept the establishment's preferred candidates.

This was a profound change in the relationship between Republican leaders and voters. More accurately, it was the culmination of a change that had been underway for years.

And why, exactly, would those voters voluntarily surrender that newfound authority?

They might eventually reject Vance, the Trump family, or whoever steps up to inherit the MAGA mantle. They might reject Trump's tariffs, his foreign policy, or his economic management.

But rejecting a particular leader or policy doesn't mean they're going to rediscover the wisdom of George Will.

That's quite a leap.

Another assumption lurking in the post-Trump conversation is that his departure will somehow reset the party's internal arrangements.

As though Trump will exit stage left, the slate will be wiped clean, and some responsible adults will arrive with a box of chalk to design the next Republican Party.

But the people and organizations that made Trumpism possible aren't going anywhere.

• The religious right has spent decades building churches, advocacy organizations, legal institutions, media operations, and political relationships. Christian nationalists are an important part of that ecosystem, though hardly all conservative Christians share their politics.
• The populists have their own media personalities, organizations, and constituencies. The immigration restrictionists have demonstrated that they can influence Republican policy even when their demands conflict with major business interests.
• And the billionaire technology crowd has been cultivating an entirely different generation of Republican political leadership.

Peter Thiel's role in JD Vance's career is particularly revealing. Thiel employed and mentored Vance, backed his investment activities, and contributed $15 million to a super PAC supporting his 2022 Senate campaign.

That's a fuckton of investment in the political future.

Then there are the younger Republican activists and political operatives, many of whom have spent their entire adult political lives inside the Trump-era, consequence free, Republican Party.

The October 2025 Young Republicans group-chat scandal exposed overtly racist and antisemitic exchanges among aspiring Republican political professionals. Vance's response largely minimized the behavior as offensive jokes, although other Republicans condemned it and several participants faced consequences.

It would be wrong to treat those individuals as representative of an entire generation. But the scandal certainly doesn't support an assumption that the party's younger activists are universally eager for a return to respectable constitutional conservatism.

These factions have different agendas. Some are fundamentally incompatible.

• The tech right wants access to skilled immigrant labor. The immigration restrictionists are considerably less enthusiastic.
• The religious right has moral and social priorities that don't always align with the more libertarian elements of the technology world.
• The foreign-policy hawks have serious disagreements with the America First isolationists.
• And the business establishment still wants the low taxes and favorable regulatory treatment it has always wanted.

Whoever follows Trump will have to negotiate among these constituencies.

Trump's departure creates a succession struggle, not a clean slate.

And none of those factions has any particular obligation to make the Never Trump intelligentsia happy.

Democracy doesn't require a majority to win

Now we get to the part that really bothers me.

The expectation that elections will eventually force a Republican reckoning assumes that sufficiently unpopular political behavior will produce sufficiently severe electoral consequences.

But that's not necessarily how American elections work.

Shall we consider the presidential record?

Since 1992, Republicans have won four presidential elections: 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2024.

Of those four victories, only George W. Bush's 2004 reelection produced an outright majority of the national popular vote.

In 2000 and 2016, the Republican candidate won the Electoral College while receiving fewer votes than the Democratic candidate.

Sure, in 2024, Trump won the popular vote against Kamala Harris, but he received just under 50% of all votes cast. Not a majority.

This isn't evidence that Republicans are incapable of assembling national majorities. Nor does it mean the Electoral College will always favor them.

But it demonstrates that a party can secure the presidency without winning an outright majority of the electorate. Comfortably and repeatably. And that is a workable strategy, proven and reliable.

And the presidency is just one part of the system.

The Senate gives Wyoming and California the same number of senators. Two each, despite the enormous difference in their populations.

That wasn't an accident. It's part of the constitutional bargain that created the Senate.

But it means the political preferences of voters in less populous states carry considerably greater weight per person in that chamber. Given the contemporary geographic distribution of Republican and Democratic voters, that arrangement can provide Republicans with substantial institutional advantages.

Then there's the House.

Here, the decennial census determines how many representatives each state receives. But within the states, congressional district boundaries are frequently determined by political institutions controlled by one party.

The 2010 elections were extraordinarily consequential in this regard. Republicans won control of numerous state legislatures just before the post-census redistricting process, allowing them to influence congressional boundaries for the following decade.

And it wasn't simply a matter of voters naturally sorting themselves into Republican and Democratic neighborhoods.

There was deliberate political engineering involved.

North Carolina offers a particularly vivid example. In 2022, under a court-ordered congressional map, voters elected seven Democrats and seven Republicans.

After the state Supreme Court's partisan composition changed and the Republican legislature adopted new boundaries, the 2024 delegation became ten Republicans and four Democrats.

Three seats changed hands, with redistricting playing a central role.

Think about what that means.

You can change congressional representation dramatically without anything resembling an equivalent change in the underlying political preferences of the electorate.

And for members of Congress representing safely Republican districts, the most serious threat may not be a Democrat in November. It may be a more ideologically committed Republican in the primary.

So whose preferences are those members going to prioritize?

The broader electorate, or the relatively small subset of Republican voters who can end their careers?

This is a system in which a political party can lose national support while retaining substantial institutional power, and in which many of its officeholders can remain insulated from the consequences of national electoral setbacks.

That doesn't make electoral accountability impossible.

It makes the relationship between public opinion and political consequences considerably less direct than the conventional democratic-reckoning argument seems to assume.

Of course, there are ways to reform some of these arrangements. Independent redistricting commissions, changes to how congressional seats are allocated, and alternative voting systems could make electoral representation more responsive to voters.

But proposing a reform and actually implementing it are two very different things. The institutions that would have to approve many of these changes are frequently controlled by the people who benefit from the current arrangements.

That's an argument worth exploring separately.

For now, there's another problem with the expectation of an eventual Republican reckoning.

Even if the party starts losing elections badly, what guarantees that it will learn the lesson its critics expect?

Even defeat doesn't guarantee the lesson

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Republicans begin suffering significant, sustained electoral defeats.

Maybe Trump leaves office with the Republican brand in terrible shape. Maybe the next presidential nominee loses badly. Maybe Democrats gain congressional seats and state legislative chambers.

Surely, at some point, the Republican Party has to reconsider what it's doing? Right?

Perhaps.

But what lesson would it learn?

Would the populists conclude that the party had become too extreme, or that it had compromised too much with the billionaire class?

Would the Christian nationalists interpret defeat as a rejection of their ambitions, or insist that the party hadn't fought hard enough for them?²

Would the technology billionaires decide that their investment in nationalist politics had been mistaken, or simply look for a more effective candidate?

Would conventional business Republicans regain influence? Would immigration restrictionists become more powerful? Would younger activists embrace constitutional restraint?

There's no reason to assume all these groups would reach the same conclusion.

And there's certainly no reason to assume they'd reach the conclusion preferred by the Never Trump crowd.

I've suggested that it might take three consecutive presidential defeats, accompanied by sustained losses in congressional and state elections, before the Republican coalition experiences the sort of pressure that could fundamentally alter its internal balance.

That's not a scientific threshold. It's my sense of how durable these political arrangements have become. This is an evolution, I originally thought it was at minimum a generation of convincing losses and painfully slow rebuilding.

One defeat can be blamed on a bad candidate. Another on the economy, the media, or an unpopular policy. Even a string of defeats can produce arguments about tactics rather than ideology.

And an electoral setback severe enough to produce genuine soul-searching still doesn't determine what that soul-searching will reveal.

There's another complication.

In our winner-take-all political system, a third party attempting to peel away a substantial portion of the Republican coalition faces enormous obstacles.

The incentives of single-member districts and plurality elections push political factions toward the two established parties. A third party might act as a spoiler, but translating that influence into durable legislative representation is considerably harder.

So the dissatisfied Republican factions have strong reasons to remain inside the party and fight over its direction.

They don't need to create something new.

They can try to take over what already exists.

And that's precisely what they've learned to do.

The reckoning

None of this means the Republican Party is immune to democratic pressure.

It isn't.

Political coalitions change. Parties lose elections. Voters reconsider their priorities. Institutions can be reformed, sometimes against considerable resistance.

The Republican Party itself has changed enormously over the past half-century, and the Democratic Party has undergone transformations of its own.

Nor am I suggesting that Trumpism must survive unchanged after Trump leaves.

Indeed, I expect the different factions currently sheltering beneath the MAGA umbrella to fight rather enthusiastically over the inheritance.

But that's not the same thing as the democratic reckoning so many of Trump's conservative critics seem to anticipate.

The Never Trumpers who warned about Trump's authoritarian tendencies, his contempt for constitutional norms, and his willingness to subordinate public institutions to personal loyalty have a substantial record to point to.

Many paid meaningful professional and social costs for their opposition.

That record deserves acknowledgment.

But being right about Trump doesn't mean Republican voters will eventually reward them for having been right.

And being right about the dangers of a political movement doesn't guarantee that American democracy will impose consequences severe enough to change that movement's behavior.

That's the assumption I keep returning to.

We have a political system in which a party can exercise considerable power without commanding a national popular majority. A system in which state-level control can influence congressional representation for years. A system in which safe districts can reward ideological intensity, and in which reforming the rules can require the cooperation of the people benefiting from them.

And a two-party system that gives political factions enormous incentives to fight for control of an existing party rather than walk away.

Trump will eventually leave the stage.

The Republicans will fight over what comes next. Some will try to preserve his movement, others will modify it, and still others will attempt to steer it in directions that have little to do with traditional Republican conservatism.

Perhaps the party will moderate (I am not holding my breath). Perhaps it won't. Perhaps it will change in ways none of us currently anticipate.

But I don't see any reason to assume that democracy will necessarily force the Republican Party to confront its past and emerge with a renewed appreciation for constitutional government.

Democracy provides opportunities for accountability.
It doesn't guarantee repentance.

And the Never Trumpers waiting for the Republican Party to come to its senses may discover that the reckoning they've been counting on was never guaranteed to arrive.

Research:

• National Archives: 2000 election, 2016 election, and 2024 election for the presidential comparison.
• North Carolina General Assembly redistricting records for the 2022 and 2023 maps.
• Rucho v. Common Cause and Moore v. Harper for the Court's differing approaches.
• National Archives: Article V for amendment requirements.

¹ - I even read a smattering of the Anti-Anti's when my blood pressure meds are working well enough.

² - this is also the perennial clash between the progressive left and the more mainstream "centrist" Democrats.