Trump Derangement Syndrome. The term started in 2016 as a largely humorous, tongue-in-cheek characterization of Republicans who found Donald Trump unbearable and described their loose alliance as the Never-Trump movement. But then it became something more serious. Longtime conservatives in the throes of deep-seated hatred for the once and future president completely discarded their long-held beliefs and eagerly served as useful idiots for those on the left whom they had always fiercely opposed. The level of revulsion toward Trump became so severe that some psychologists diagnosed TDS as a mental disorder.
The most visible face of the Never-Trump movement was The Lincoln Project, which usurped the legacy of America’s 16th president to seek credibility, spending millions of dollars on well-produced ads essentially depicting Trump as a fascist intent on terminating the American republic in favor of his own perpetual dictatorship. This group was founded not by leftists but by Republicans furious about the rise of Trump.
Naming Names in the Never-Trump Movement
Let’s put names to the faces of Republicans who formed what many on the right believe was a traitorous alliance with the left – and who now face extinction. Exhibit A would be Bill Kristol, one-time prominent thought leader on the right and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, which folded not long after the 2016 election. Kristol went on to form The Bulwark, a magnet for Trump-deranged Republicans and conservatives such as Mona Charen, Sarah Longwell, Tim Miller, and Charlie Sykes. The website “transformed the jumbled anti-Trump forces into an eight-figure political ad machine for boosting Democrats, funded overwhelmingly by mega-donors on the Left,” according to an exhaustive investigation of the movement on TomKlingenstein.com.
Critical to the movement were Bush/McCain/Romney-era political strategists Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, who regularly spewed bile about Trump on various left-wing platforms that were eager to depict them as representative of widespread Republican sentiment regarding Trump. Wilson and Schmidt, together with George Conway (former husband of Kellyanne Conway) and Max Boot, an ultra-neoconservative from the Council on Foreign Relations, spawned a series of anti-Trump organizations in 2018, including Defending Democracy Together and Republicans for the Rule of Law to coordinate their efforts to discard Trump in favor of leftist alternatives. Evidence of the group’s wishful thinking was the prediction by Wilson days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris would win a landslide victory over Trump.
Another group, the Republican Accountability PAC, was a major funder of Liz Cheney’s 2022 primary campaign for re-election to her House Seat in Wyoming. After leading the House investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, Cheney was trounced by a margin of 66%-29%, the largest primary defeat in memory, perhaps in all of American history.
Yet another Never-Trump organization, America Future Republic, funded E. Jean Carroll’s 2023 lawsuit alleging Trump had raped the former New York magazine writer, though Carroll falsely claimed that she was paying her own legal fees. When George Stephanopoulos of ABC News repeatedly and falsely claimed that Trump had been found guilty of rape, they were forced to cough up $15 million in a recent settlement.
The movement coordinated by disaffected neoconservatives “quickly discovered the pool of anti-Trump conservative donors is trifling and has only shrunk since 2016. Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, for instance, spent heavily to stop Trump’s nomination in 2016 — even engaging the now-notorious firm Fusion GPS — but later changed his mind, contributing $5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2024,” per TomKlingenstein.com
Nevertheless, after Trump’s first victory, Never-Trumpers on the right persisted, at least holding out the hope that they could help Joe Biden defeat Trump in 2020. The fact that Biden had pledged to be, and would indeed go on to become, the most progressive, anti-conservative president in American history seemed not to matter to these relics of the George W. Bush era clinging to neoconservatism that GOP voters thoroughly rejected. Many were infuriated by the fact that, after the abject failures of their prized GOP nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, this bombastic reality TV star and real estate mogul from far outside their cherished Swamp, this cretin, had the audacity to vanquish more than a dozen of their favorite establishment Republicans and capture the presidency. How dare he claim to represent the Grand Old Party!
Et Tu, Cheneys?
When Liz Cheney and her father Dick Cheney, once the scourge of Democrats, despised almost as much as Trump when he served as vice president under George W. Bush, went beyond just ignoring or attacking Trump and actively endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, the Never-Trump movement had reached its pinnacle. Liz Cheney accompanied Harris on the campaign trail, the vice president’s advisers believing that would attract millions of disaffected Republicans unwilling to vote for Trump. In the end, all Liz Cheney got for throwing her career overboard was seeing her new best friends on the left almost universally call the Harris-Cheney alliance an abject failure, something between a big mistake and an outright disaster for the vice president.
There have been many movements over the course of American history, such as abolitionists attempting to end slavery, suffragettes seeking to grant women the right to vote, and the civil rights movement fighting for equality among the races. But the Never-Trumpers are the only movement formed for the singular purpose of degrading and disgracing a single person in their own orbit. After two presidential victories and a near-miss by Trump, those who led and participated in the movement now find themselves disgraced on the right and discarded on the left, homeless rebels without a cause who find themselves a footnote in 21st-century political history.
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