The Sorting Is Complete, and Nobody Told the Never Trumpers

[Part 3 of a series on the Never Trump ecosystem. Start with Part 1 or catch up on Part 2.]

Here's something I've noticed watching the Never Trump media ecosystem over the past several years: they talk a lot about persuasion, but they're almost entirely talking to people who are already persuaded.

This isn't a small observation. It's actually the central strategic failure of the Never Trump political project, and understanding it requires being honest about something the Never Trump commentariat seems genuinely reluctant to acknowledge: the sorting is done. It's over. The Republicans who were going to leave have left, and the ones who were going to stay have made their peace with it, one way or another.

What actually happened

Between 2016 and 2024, American voters - particularly Republican-identifying voters - went through an extended, brutal sorting process. Every major Trump controversy became a decision point. The Access Hollywood tape. Helsinki. January 6th. The indictments. The conviction. North of seventy-seven million votes in 2024 went for Trump despite all of it. In fact, the shift of votes to Trump accelerated in 2024.

At each of those moments, the Never Trump argument was: surely this is the thing that breaks it. And each time, the Republican base absorbed the shock, rationalized it, and came out the other side more committed than before. The people who couldn't rationalize it left — changed their registration, voted Democratic, sat out. The people who could rationalize it stayed, and the rationalizations got more elaborate and more load-bearing with each cycle.

What you're left with is a Republican Party whose remaining members have, by definition, already decided that whatever Trump is, it's acceptable to them. The 15-19% of Republicans who currently view Trump unfavorably in polling — PRRI puts it at around 19%, YouGov at 16% — are not waiting to be persuaded by the next Bulwark podcast. They've already processed the information. They just haven't left yet, for their own reasons.

The three rhetorical strategies that aren't working

The Never Trump media operation has essentially three moves, and all three have serious problems.

Move one: appeal to the remainers. This is the core of the project — making arguments aimed at Republican voters and officials who are still nominally in the party, hoping to peel them off. The problem is that the people still in the party have already survived every previous version of this argument. They've heard the character case, the constitutional case, the democratic norms case, the January 6th case. They've heard it all and "nah bro, I like it just fine here". Rhetoric doesn't easily dislodge people who have already done the cognitive work of rationalizing their position. You're not going to out-argue someone who has spent three years building an elaborate internal justification for why the guy with 34 felony convictions is actually fine.[1]

Move two: try to push the Democratic Party rightward. This one is at least strategically coherent on paper - the idea being that if Democrats moved closer to pre-2016 Republican orthodoxy on some issues, they could attract the educated suburban conservatives who left the GOP over Trump. Goldberg and others have been fairly explicit about wanting something like this. The problem is that it requires the Democratic Party to reorganize itself around the preferences of a few million already-departed Republicans, which is not a compelling pitch to the activists and base voters who actually control Democratic primary politics. You may want this outcome, but you cannot demand it of a party whose own constituents have other priorities. Yet they persist in this quixotic quest.

Move three: moar self-congratulation. This one isn't a strategy so much as a habit, but it's a costly one. A significant portion of Never Trump content is essentially a victory lap - we were right about Trump from the beginning, here's why we were right, here's the receipts, here's the contrast with the people who were wrong. This is deeply off-putting to the audience they most need to reach: people who are only now becoming persuadable. Nobody likes being told "I told you so" as their first introduction to a political argument. It positions Never Trump voices as a club that's proud of itself rather than a coalition that wants to grow. Or even can grow.

The gettable universe was always finite

Pew Research data does show genuine, recent erosion in Republican confidence in Trump — his approval among Republicans slipped noticeably through late 2025 and into 2026. So it's not like no movement is happening. But erosion in approval is not the same thing as voters becoming Never Trumpers. Most of those soft disapprovers, as analysts who track this stuff have noted, don't see the Democratic Party as a viable alternative. They're increasingly dissatisfied with Trump yet unwilling to cross over. They're in a kind of political no-man's land. Listen to one of Ms. Longwell's "Focus Group" podcasts to realise that this is a hard kernel of truth, no matter how much she argues that they are gettable.

That no-man's land is actually the most interesting persuasion target available right now, and it's not one the Never Trump coalition is particularly well positioned to reach, precisely because Never Trump as a brand implies a destination — either stay Republican and resist, or leave the party. Neither option appeals to someone who is quietly pissed off about tariffs and the Iran war but isn't ready to vote for a Democrat (and may never be ready for that step).

What would actually work

If we're honest with ourselves, the answer is that electoral persuasion at the margins is less important right now than building durable institutions and arguments for what comes after Trump. Trump is 79 (turns 80 in Jule, 2026). The coalition he assembled is genuinely fragile — Manhattan Institute research shows that nearly a third of his 2024 coalition were "new entrant Republicans" whose loyalty to the party is substantially weaker than the core base. The post-Trump Republican Party is going to be a genuine battleground, and that's where the Never Trump project could matter.

But to matter in that fight, they need credibility with people who don't already agree with them. I call that "breathing your own exhaust" and the Never Trump coalition has that in spades. Getting over that hurdle requires something that is, at present, in short supply in this particular corner of political media.

It requires accountability.

Which brings us to post four. It's gon' be LIT fam...

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1 - Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark has a book publishing later this year that is on this topic, titled: "How to Eat an Elephant One Voter at a Time" but it seems that she as well as the whole Never Trump ecosystem haven't realized that they ain'g got the cards in their hand that they think they have.