In a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose for PBS, Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance proclaimed himself to be a “Never Trump guy”. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Vance called Trump an “idiot”, “noxious” and “reprehensible”. In private, he went much further. Vance said Trump could become “America’s Hitler” in a string of Facebook messages to a former roommate who is now a Democratic lawmaker in Georgia. You have likely read these comments before, and know that since then, Vance has expressed regret at those past statements. He would have had to, of course, or it is very unlikely that he would today be the Vice President of the United States.

JD Vance is perhaps now the most prominent member of what I am calling “The Converts” - the once vehemently anti-Trump Republicans who now tow the line, and are closely aligned with the President. At one point, these Republicans made up a substantial percentage of the party in terms of its key stakeholders, donors, power brokers and elected officials. After the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape in 2016, then Chair Reince Priebus ordered the RNC to suspend all of its support operations for Trump’s campaign. Republican office-holders across the spectrum denounced Trump’s comments, and while many at the very top levels stopped short of dropping their endorsement for their nominee, the response was overwhelmingly negative. Within four days of the release of the tape, nearly 20 Republican Senators stated publicly that they would not be voting for Trump. When Trump won the 2016 election, many of the leading voices against his candidacy from inside the party were silenced. Many more simply changed their tune and hoped for the best. 

Since then, the “Never Trump” movement has waned in influence within the Republican Party so significantly that it would simply be bad practice to even refer to it in our current moment as an ongoing “movement”. Those Republicans who stood on their principles and remained aligned either firmly or unsteadily against the President have, for the most part, either been successfully primaried, retired from politics, or had their political influence completely diminished. Others still have folded themselves into the Democratic tent. To say that Donald Trump has an iron-grip of control over the Republican Party today is a deep understatement. No American President in recent memory has so effectively purged voices of dissent from within his own ranks while simultaneously acting in a manner that totally disregards the wants and needs of the individual members of his party. 

With the Never Trump Republicans having been thoroughly annihilated a number of years ago, we can now look back at where some of the voices of dissent have ended up. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve broken up this former faction of the party into four distinct groups.

The Converts

Leading figures:

• JD Vance
• Marco Rubio
• Ted Cruz
• Lindsey Graham
• Nikki Haley

As mentioned, these are the leading Republican voices that at one-time were deeply against Trump, his candidacy, his values or his Presidency itself, but have since come around to the MAGA-sphere. 

Chief among these converts is JD Vance, who first made a name for himself in Republican politics at least partly through his opposition to Trump. Marco Rubio is another, who famously mocked the size of Trump’s hands (implying this correlated with another part of his body), called him a con-artist, and said that the conservative movement needed to do all it could to resist his candidacy. Now, Rubio exists in a Kissinger-esque position of power within the second Trump administration, serving as Secretary of State and acting in a number of other “temporary” positions to fill vacancies at agencies that the President created as a result of political circumstances. Rubio, a Jeb Bush acolyte, wrote in 2016 that the US should be arming and training Ukrainian soldiers to stand against the threat of a Russian incursion. This is the same Rubio who in 2024 voted against increasing aid to Ukraine in the midst of the Russian invasion, and sat in the meeting earlier this year when Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on national television with an extremely glum look on his face. 

Another former Russia-hawk turned Trump-coded isolationist is Lindsey Graham, who has performed an about-face on the President so many times that listing them all here would probably necessitate at least another two to three articles worth of copy. 

Many of us remember Ted Cruz addressing the Republican National Convention in 2016, telling delegates and the national electorate to “vote your conscience” in November. Between Trump attacking the Senator’s wife via his Twitter account, his linking of Cruz’s Cuban father to the Kennedy assassination, and the general level of vitriol between the two campaigns in the primary, these remarks seemed justified - even somewhat restrained. It would only take a couple of months before Cruz was universally mocked for a photograph of him phone-banking beneath a Trump/Pence campaign placard, and today the Senator is virtually in lockstep with the President - going so far as to publicly defend Trump’s calls to acquire Greenland just days before his second inauguration. 

The final figurehead to represent this group of Republicans is Nikki Haley, who like others has changed her views towards Donald Trump several times over the years - having both been a vocal critic and serving in his first administration as UN Ambassador. What makes Haley particularly interesting is her role as the de facto “Never Trump” face of the 2024 Republican Primary. In her primary campaign, she essentially stood as the last chance that the Never Trump faction was ever going to have of holding power within the party again. Of course, this was a last ditch effort that proved to be too little, too late. Despite this, Haley still received 19% of the vote nationally, and won the state of Vermont. That victory specifically likely came on the heels of Democratic and Independent voters, many of whom crossed party lines and supported Haley in states with open primaries. When Haley suspended her campaign in March 2024, she notably did not endorse Trump, but that non-endorsement ended up not mattering at all when the former South Carolina Governor caved for a final time, vocally throwing her support behind the President at the 2024 Republican National Convention and saying, “You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him”. This moment, at least the way I see it, is when the Never Trump Movement officially died. Rest in peace. Press F to pay respects. Remember Haley’s quote here, as we will return to it in part two. Since the election, Haley has returned to being at least somewhat vocally opposed to actions taken by Trump in his second term, but it just doesn’t matter anymore. Her influence has been utterly destroyed, and this almost qualifies her to be placed in another category that will be expanded upon later in this feature.

The five figures listed here are by no means even close to the total number of Republican politicians and stakeholders who have flipped on their feelings towards Donald Trump since 2016, but they are certainly representative of the whole. Embracing Trump following his first victory, and especially so in the years since, despite its obvious risks, has proven to be the most politically beneficial move for most Republicans. Along with these leading figures, the Republican electorate has also almost uniformly embraced Trump, despite initial opposition. 

Republicans have become a lot more enthusiastic about Trump since 2016

YouGov has asked respondents in their polls of the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections to gauge how enthusiastic they felt about the potential of a Trump victory. Note the 17% of Republicans who said they would feel "dissatisfied" with a Trump victory in 2016.

Many Republican voters in 2016 likely reluctantly came around to Trump in a “lesser of two evils” decision, with a YouGov poll finding only 42% of Republicans were enthusiastic about the prospect of a Trump Presidency just weeks out from the election (which was in-line with the vast majority of other polls from this cycle). When the same poll was conducted in 2020, that metric had risen to 67% - and in 2024, an overwhelming majority, 76%, said they would feel enthusiastic about a second Trump term. In 2025, MAGA IS the Republican Party, not simply a faction of it. The factions of the party and its voters which exist today are mostly just different flavors of MAGA itself.

The Turncoats

Leading figures:

• Bill Kristol
• Joe Walsh
• Joe Scarborough
• Rick Wilson & Steve Schmidt
• Geoff Duncan

Aligning with Trump rhetorically and ideologically has generally become the most politically beneficial strategy for survival as a member of the Republican Party. To not do this, in many places, is to essentially leave the party itself, which provides many more risks and potential challenges to a political career than simply towing the line. This is likely why, despite Trump essentially turning the party on its head, we have not seen any real examples of national elected officials actually doing what is described above - leaving the Republican Party. The closest we have seen to this are some down ballot officials, and a good deal of once influential Republican pundits, consultants, donors and talking heads. In the Democratic sphere, these stakeholders have found a permanent place with which to join the ranks of the party in a state of big-tent broad opposition to Donald Trump. They have largely been welcomed with open arms by Democratic leadership, and their voices now carry at least some sort of weight on this side of the aisle. 

Bill Kristol is a great example to look at here - at one time, the Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. After departing this role, Kristol became a longtime media commentator, having started his own conservative news magazine, making regular appearances on cable news to back the Bush administration, and writing as a columnist for Time Magazine and the New York Times. A leading proponent of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq both at the time of its origination and as late as 2009, it is very striking to see the same person now openly calling Trump a fascist, and calling for the Department of Homeland Security to be abolished. To be clear, Kristol has not described himself as a Democrat - but the way he speaks about the current political moment places him firmly with Democrats, and his influence within Republican circles is now effectively non-existent.

When Tea Partier Joe Walsh defeated three-term incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean in 2010 for Illinois’ 8th Congressional District, figures like him were seen as the activist wing of the party. Walsh was an extremely vocal critic of Barack Obama in his home-state, and described himself as pro-life without exception. Following his loss to Tammy Duckworth in 2012, Walsh became a conservative talking-head on Twitter, and a backer of Donald Trump in the 2016 election - calling Obama a Muslim, and stating that “if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket”. Unlike his peers who came up in the tea party movement, Walsh slowly but definitively moved against Trump throughout his first term, going so far as to launch a zero-chance primary bid against the sitting President in 2020. Today, you’ll see Walsh’s account on Twitter with a “No Kings” profile picture, and vocal praise from the former member of congress for figures like Zohran Mamdani. He voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris in 2024, and formally registered as a Democrat in 2025. This shift from Walsh would not be notable whatsoever if he was not a former member of Congress - his voice today carries very little real heft, but is interesting because of how much it deviates from the standard Republican evolution on Trump. He is an exception, not a rule.

Joe Scarborough and Morning Joe have been talked about far too much both during and after the 2016 election, so we will not dwell too heavily on this entry, but he is worth at least mentioning as another former Republican member of Congress who turned against his own party in the wake of Donald Trump. What separates Scarborough from somebody like Joe Walsh is that he was a vocal Never Trumper when it was “cool” to be one, writing in August of 2016 that the party needed to “dump Trump”. Since that point, Scarborough has not been nearly as vocal in his opposition to Trump as others, but formally left the Republican Party in 2017 and maintained much of his influence as a media talking head. 

Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt both come to mind in this category as well, having once run and served at the highest levels on Republican Presidential campaigns and down ballot Republican campaigns across the country, the two are listed together here for their involvement in creating and operating the Lincoln Project, which began ostensibly as a conservative anti-Trump PAC, but now does little more than produce and run ads which firmly back an aggressive anti-Trump position within the Democratic Party. Wilson and Schmidt both represent a larger assortment of old guard Republican staffers, consultants and fundraisers who have slowly trickled out of the party over the past ten years, and are now attempting to maintain relevancy on the other side. Although Schmidt left the Lincoln Project in 2021 to pursue other ventures (including a long shot bid to prop up Dean Phillips’ campaign against Joe Biden), the PAC is still highly active, now producing ad campaigns that are debatably far more aggressively opposed to the present administration than the rhetoric of many Democratic officials. 

A final figure worth mentioning here, especially given some very recent developments, is Geoff Duncan, the former Lt. Gov of Georgia who declined to run for re-election in 2022 in favor of joining CNN as a paid contributor and a vocal anti-Trump critic. Duncan never made a name for himself in the Republican Party as a firebrand, but instead as a pragmatic outsider with a few core conservative views (abortion, for one). As a Republican, Duncan refused to endorse Trump’s 2024 campaign and vocally sided with Biden/Harris, going so far as to address the Democratic National Convention (more on this in part two). Like others, he had no real place in the party by this point, but formally exited the Republican Party just a number of weeks ago (even after his unanimous expulsion by the state party in January) in preparation for a recently announced Gubernatorial bid. At this point, the race for Governor is fairly wide-open, and it remains to be seen just how well Duncan could do given his background. 

The big difference between the Turncoats and Converts is fairly clear in that this faction does not include any major nationally-known elected officials. It is primarily pundits, commentators, strategists, consultants and other parts of the old machinery of the Republican Party who have deemed it acceptable to fully make the switch, most likely because this is a group of people with far less to lose. The potential political fallout of swapping party affiliations as a high-level elected official is simply too large of a chasm for many to attempt to cross, putting aside any ideological considerations. The motivating factors for those who did ultimately pull this trigger tend to be similar between individuals – Trump’s extreme disregard for post-war political norms, procedures and decorum, his obnoxious personality, and his many attempts to subvert the fragile state of democratic governance that has only really existed in the US for about the last sixty years. Alongside the figures listed above whom each represent a different variety of former Republican, there are numerous voters who have also in turn changed their political allegiances over the past decade.

Democrats are increasingly white, wealthy, and old

CBS and CNN combined exit poll data from 2012-24 shows changes in the Democratic vote share among different demographic groups.

The 34-point enthusiasm gap for Trump between 2016 and 2024 among Republicans cannot simply be explained through brute force long-term persuasion. Using exit poll data from CBS and CNN from the past four cycles, the shift is clear. While Trump has made most of his electoral gains in this time period among non-white, working class and under-65 voters, the opposite is true of Democrats, who since 2016 have seen their vote share increase steadily with white, wealthy and older voting blocs. These are in all likelihood traditionally Republican voters who have steadily left the party and changed their voting habits since 2016, with many of those shifts having been locked in by 2020. Of course, this does not imply by any stretch of the imagination that these voters make up a more significant portion of the electorate than the traditionally Republican voters who have simply adapted themselves into the MAGA coalition. However, there is a clear shift among these voters which has taken place, cannot be ignored, and has affected the composition of the national Democratic coalition to a non-insignificant degree.

The Ghosts

Leading figures:

• Mitt Romney
• Mike Pence
• Chris Christie
• Larry Hogan
• The Old Guard

Despite what you may notice from the likes of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham etc., there are actually many nationally-known Republican elected officials who held their ground and remained in at least some level of vocal opposition to Donald Trump. The only problem? Basically all of them are gone. As mentioned earlier, the figures who stuck to their guns in the face of Trump’s takeover of the GOP have had their influence effectively destroyed. Whether they were voted out of office, retired, or simply faded from public view, these are the Ghosts of the pre-Trump GOP. The centers of Republican thought do not revolve around any of these figures, there is no appetite for their influence among the fundraisers and power-brokers, and there is simply no room for their brand of conservatism within the party itself anymore. In this era, these Republicans are essentially nothing but dust in the wind. Echoes from a forgotten time.

Mitt Romney is an obvious selection, as a former standard-bearer of the party turned factionally popular Senator from Utah before his swift retirement in 2024 at the end of a single term. His stint in the Senate was likely not as a result of a burning desire to serve the people of Utah, but more likely stemmed from a personal belief that there was still a significant place in the party for somebody like Romney, whose traditional appeal to wealthy, white and suburban voters in his failed 2012 campaign was totally uprooted, rejected and replaced over the span of just a few years. Now, there is no real room for somebody like Mitt Romney. What would his continued presence in the United States Senate have actually contributed to the Republican Party as a whole, if anything?

Mike Pence was Donald Trump’s peace offering in his insurgent 2016 bid to the evangelical wing of the party, and skeptical conservatives at large. A traditional conservative Republican of the Reagan-era in virtually every way, Pence stood in lockstep with Trump all the way up to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, where his fairly mild opposition to the President and his insistence on holding up his constitutional duty in fairly counting electoral votes was met with calls for his execution by the January 6th rioters. The last you probably heard from Mike Pence besides his contributions to the January 6th committee was potentially from his utterly baffling 2024 Presidential campaign, in which the Vice President ran a somewhat Trump-neutral bid with all the trappings of a truly bygone political age for Republicans that made him look just about as out of place with the current core of the party as somebody waking up from a twenty-year coma. 

Believe it or not, Chris Christie also ran a Presidential campaign in 2024, in what was essentially a longshot bid and cry for attention to his specific brand of opposition to Trump and the MAGA movement. The former New Jersey Governor was at one time considered the face of the future for the GOP, in an era where the idea of a Donald Trump candidacy was treated as a recurring joke by the press. After the fated “Bridgegate” scandal and a Presidential bid that generated little more than some memorable sound bites, Christie was actually one of the very first national Republicans to endorse Trump following his victory in the New Hampshire primary all the way back in February 2016. After his victory in November, Christie led his transition team. Although that early closeness to Trump is certainly not reflected by their relationship today, in which Christie is now one of the President’s favorite recurring jokes. Today, Christie is little more than a sidenote talking head on cable news. This is what has become of the former “future of the party”:

Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s inclusion here is representative of a larger group of regionally-influential Republican politicians who have all but died out since 2016. Think of figures like Charlie Baker, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Pat Toomey, or Ken Buck. All Republicans who had adapted the national party platform to fit the constituencies they served in one way or another. The various regional flavors of Republican Party thought which were once prevalent have largely become victims of the MAGA movement, the widespread nationalization of all politics, and an insistence on truly top-down leadership from Trump which places a high value on personal and political loyalty above almost all else. This is also why Maryland did not elect another Republican Governor following Hogan’s departure, and it is why Hogan’s bid for the US Senate failed by a double-digit margin. Beyond a few outliers, the ideological diversity of the old Republican Party has been swiftly replaced with something far more homogenous and incapable of reaching voters who require regional appeals for messaging to truly be effective. 

Finally, there is “the Old Guard”. There are simply too many names to mention individually here, but think of the Cheneys, the Bushes, the late John McCain and his daughter Meghan, Rob Portman, as well as many of the recent retirees. These are perhaps the Republicans who have seen their influence fade the most since 2016, and whose imprint on the party itself is now truly lost to time. Many of Trump’s first-term cabinet officials were among the Old Guard – John Bolton, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, perhaps Nikki Haley (although her influence lasted a bit longer as mentioned above), who Trump was initially willing to work with in order to accomplish his agenda before it became clear that there was no way for these two sides to cohabitate. At a higher level, the political rhetoric of George W. Bush was considered somewhat brash, low-brow and off the cuff in 2000. By today’s standards, George W. Bush might as well be Barry Goldwater. A forgotten relic of conservatism who is only remembered by scholars and historians.

Dick Cheney voted for Kamala Harris last year, and said of Trump in a visibly halting video that he was “the greatest ever threat to our Republic”. Who was actually listening by this point? Is anybody still listening? I am purposefully omitting the other notable member of the Cheney family from this article, as she will feature quite heavily in part two. Even as many in this category of Republican have moved on to author books which all fundamentally say the same things, make the rounds on cable news, or try and keep themselves relevant by going on the speaking circuit, it is abundantly apparent that their approach to politics, their flavor of conservatism, their brands, their messaging and their core ideals have been more or less obliterated within a span of just nine years.

Who's left?

Leading figures:

• Lisa Murkowski
• Susan Collins
• Brian Kemp
• Phil Scott
• Mitch McConnell (seriously)

The Never Trump wing of the Republican Party is well and truly dead - but even a corpse takes time to decompose. What is left behind are a number of straggling and largely disconnected elected officials who have largely employed a strategy of largely ignoring, and when it suits them, working with Trump to accomplish their most immediate political objectives.

The closest parallel one can find to a successful Never Trump Republican in 2025 is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Much could be said about her specific approach to politics at this moment and how she has been able to hang on to her position in the Senate – like many of the other stragglers across the country, Murkowski has benefitted by being from a traditionally red state that has given the MAGA brand a somewhat lukewarm response. Mitt Romney and the state of Utah also go hand in hand for this example. Alaskan voters are uncharacteristic of the typical Republican base in 2025, and they have routinely rewarded Murkowski’s pragmatism and intensive focus on local issues as a result. In July, “agonizing” was the word she used to describe her decision to vote for and ultimately decide the fate of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), only after securing key earmarks in the bill to benefit Alaska, and only Alaska. In April, she appeared before a meeting of nonprofit and tribal leaders and openly admitted that “we are all afraid” and “retribution in real” in response to a question regarding federal funding cuts. She has said that the threat of retaliation has occasionally made her feel afraid to use her voice, and that she recognizes how poorly she fits into the Republican Party ecosystem at this point in her long career. A party switch (Republican to Independent) is not entirely out of the question, and Murkowski has become a fairly adept navigator of the current moment as she subtly holds the issue over the heads of her colleagues, many fully aware of the amount of power she presently holds over the Senate chamber. I would not be surprised if this really comes into play in the scenario of a solid midterm year for Democrats in 2026. 

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski may seem like mirror images of each other in the Trump-era, as the two remaining real “thorns” in Trump’s side from the Senate Republican caucus - this could not be further from the truth, however. Like Murkowski, Collins also represents a state with an electorate that fits far less cleanly into the national picture than others. Also like Murkowski, she has held onto her position in the Senate for decades, and through a shift in the Republican Party that has left her politically ostracized from much of the caucus. We are all by now familiar with the “Collins Scale of Concern”, which stems from her often bewildering responses to the actions of the Trump administration, which could damage her political futures the most. These responses are part of what fundamentally separates her from Murkowski, as over time the Maine Senator has found herself less and less able to skillfully wield her power without upsetting her constituents. As the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins cast her vote to advance the OBBB to a floor vote – a procedural action which essentially paved the way for the bill’s actual passage, which she then voted against. “Maneuvers” like this have become increasingly common from Collins, and her constituents have begun (at least from what we can gather from polling data) to turn against her as a result. Morning Consult’s approval tracking poll of US Senators clocked her at 38% in July, an all-time low throughout both of Trump’s terms. Now, the knives are out. She is staring down the barrel of a brutal midterm campaign against a field of well-qualified opponents, and in a state (let’s not forget) that did vote for Kamala Harris by 7%, even with its particularly wonky local politics. If anybody is likely to be a casualty of this midterm, it is Susan Collins, and it is frankly well past-time given how far removed she appears from the political era she came up in. 

Brian Kemp is one of the more peculiar survivors of MAGA consolidation. As Governor of Georgia, Kemp (and more importantly, Brad Raffensperger)’s refusal to go along with Trump’s long shot attempts to overturn the 2020 election made him public enemy number one in the eyes of the President. Trump recruited primary challengers, trashed him at rallies, and vowed political revenge. Yet, Kemp not only survived his 2022 re-election bid, he thrived—winning comfortably in Georgia as a recently minted critical battleground state. His approach to dealing with the Republican Party of the present moment has been simple: govern Georgia as a conservative in practice, while largely ignoring Trump entirely since 2020. This balancing act has insulated him from both Democratic opponents and MAGA challengers, but it has also left him in an odd sort of limbo nationally, like others in this category. He is not a Trump loyalist, nor a Never Trumper, nor a Democratic defector like Geoff Duncan. Instead, he exists in the now-microscopic lane of old guard Republicanism which, given the circumstances, is not supposed to exist in 2025. Kemp has made occasional noise about a national role, but in today’s GOP, his brand outside of Georgia has no real broad-based constituency.

If Brian Kemp is peculiar, Phil Scott is a total anomaly. The Vermont Governor now stands virtually alone (so long, Chris Sununu) as one of the last true New England state Republicans, consistently winning re-election in one of the bluest states in the country by positioning himself as a pragmatic, drama-free executive. Scott openly opposed Trump in both 2016 and 2020, voted for Joe Biden, and publicly said he could not in good conscience support Trump’s return to office in 2024. In any other place, this would have amounted to political suicide within his party. But, even more so than Alaska, Maine or Utah, Vermont is just weird. Scott has built his own coalition within Vermont that is utterly isolated from the national discourse, essentially functioning as an Independent who just happens to wear the GOP label. He is largely ignored by national Republicans as a result of Vermont’s partisan lean, and he is not particularly influential. It is unlikely that anybody in Trump’s orbit has seriously thought about Phil Scott in years. I’m not even sure they know he exists. His quiet survival says much more about Vermont and its particularly incongruent political culture than any remaining stronghold of Never Trump Republicanism. Like Lisa Murkowski, he governs on borrowed time from a set of political traditions that no longer exist at scale anywhere else in America.

Finally, let’s talk about Mitch McConnell. Yes, that Mitch McConnell. You remember Mitch McConnell, right? The Senate Majority Leader from 2015-2021, who delivered multiple Supreme Court Justices for Donald Trump and who was the Senate architect of his sweeping 2017 tax cuts. Mitch McConnell helped to facilitate the creation of the monster, and now very clearly regrets what it has become. Even after voting to acquit Donald Trump during his second impeachment in 2021, McConnell could not help but clarify what he really felt, that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the events of January 6th. The Price of Power, an October 2024 biography of the Kentucky Senator that McConnell personally approved, went deeper into his thoughts on the President following his 2020 election loss. To McConnell, after all of this, Trump was “​​a despicable human being” and a “sleazeball”, who had abused and manipulated power at every turn to accomplish a purely self-serving agenda. Despite these deep-seeded feelings, McConnell still tepidly endorsed Trump in 2024, before ultimately stepping down from his role as Senate Leader. Earlier this year, McConnell voted against a number of Trump’s cabinet nominees, in a manner that proved to be ultimately futile. In return for his years of service and orchestration of the few notable successes of Trump’s first term, the President said he was “not equipped mentally” to serve anymore. Now, McConnell, once a titan of the Senate, is simply waiting out the end of his seventh and final term. His political project having been completely fulfilled in the most warped fashion imaginable, by a man he personally detests and who views him as nothing but pathetic. In 2025, Mitch McConnell is irrelevant within the US Senate, and few but the most ardent political observers will really remark upon his absence from the body beginning in 2027. 

In this sense, Mitch McConnell, despite not being a true “Never Trumper” is THE defining character of the Never Trump Republican Movement. A figure whose influence over our politics stretched for decades, and helped define the national political conversation for more than a generation. All of his work, and all of his efforts to promote a truly ideologically conservative agenda for the country, proved to ultimately be nothing more than subservient to what came after. What McConnell did, or did not do in response to his party being subsumed by MAGA does not fundamentally matter. The Never Trump Republicans of old have now either been folded in, folded out into positions of total irrelevancy, or erased from the narrative altogether. McConnell has experienced each side of this since 2016. He has aided Trump, he has derided him, he has tried to ignore him and forge his own path. None of it mattered – Trump got what he wanted, and now McConnell, alongside his peers, will be disposed of to the political wastes. 

The Never Trump Republicans are dead. In part two of this feature, we’ll explore why this either did not occur to, or was entirely misinterpreted by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party writ-large in a post-2020 environment.