Hundreds of Republican candidates and lawmakers withdrew their endorsements. A stable of National Review writers, including Jonah Goldberg and Dan McLaughlin, committed to McMullin.46 Others promised to write in a candidate or vote for Hillary Clinton.
But the tide of outrage from the Republican establishment played right into Trump’s hands: Just as with the “Against Trump” missive, voters viewed the rebuke as another way for party elders to thwart their choice. It would not stand.
In fact, some Republicans were forced to promptly reverse themselves after facing backlash from their constituents for abandoning Trump. Less than three days after tweeting her demand that Trump exit the race, Fischer backtracked and restated her support for the Republican ticket.47 “The quick reversals back to Mr. Trump’s camp vividly illustrated Republicans’ predicament as they grapple with a nominee whom some of their core supporters adore, a Democratic candidate their base loathes—and a host of voters who believe that Mr. Trump is self-evidently unsuited for high office,” wrote Jonathan Martin in the New York Times on October 11, 2016.48
It would be a harbinger of which side Republican voters would take when faced with a choice between Trump and old-line party leadership. The Access Hollywood matter also served up another opportunity for Trump to remind Americans, especially younger voters, exactly who the Clintons were.
In a gutsy piece of stagecraft, Trump hosted a pre-debate press conference on October 10 with four women, including Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault and rape. (Broaddrick also claimed that Hillary Clinton had threatened her.) The stunt was a display of Hillary Clinton’s immense political baggage and her own husband’s predatory sexual behavior; it also served as a stark visual that, had Trump been running against anyone besides Hillary Clinton, his prospects might not have been so bright.
To twist the optics knife even deeper, Trump attempted to seat the victims in his box for the debate, which would have placed the women near the former president; the debate commission prevented the move.49
And it was during that debate in St. Louis that Trump, unbowed by the scandal besieging his campaign, murmured his most memorable comment of the general election. When Clinton remarked that she was relieved Trump was “not in charge of the law in our country,” Trump, not missing a beat, responded, “because you’d be in jail.”50
That moment stood in sharp contrast to the debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama four years earlier when Romney fumbled his face-to-face encounter with Obama over the president’s lies about the Benghazi terror attacks. Confronted by debate moderator Candy Crowley, who sided with Obama’s misleading version of events by insisting he did call the deadly assault an act of terror (he had not), Romney stammered to condemn the Obama administration for its egregious excuse that a YouTube video sparked the spontaneous attack.51 Romney’s stumble on the debate stage a month before Election Day deflated Republican voters and contributed to his losing a very winnable race in 2012.
Trump, on the other hand, managed to survive a blow that would have tanked the campaign of any other candidate—a feat not unnoticed by Republican voters weary of Romney-esqe timidity. By the beginning of November, Trump had as much support among likely Republican voters as Clinton had among Democrats.52 Further, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll taken just days before Election Day, 97 percent of Trump voters had an unfavorable view of Clinton, the exact percentage of Clinton voters who felt the same about Trump. “This depth of animosity is unprecedented in available data from previous elections,” the pollsters observed.53
No kidding.
But hundreds of Republican and conservative leaders remained opposed to Trump.54 Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced he would vote for McMullin, an act of pure silliness. French threatened to shame believers to do the same. “I’ll be calling on Christians to support a candidate who possesses real integrity,” French said of McMullin.55
Dozens of one-time party heroes, including former secretary of state Colin Powell and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, pledged to vote for Clinton. Some news outlets reported that former president George H.W. Bush and his wife also would pull the lever for Hillary Clinton.56 (The Bushes and Clintons had developed a chummy relationship, something that Republicans, especially conservatives, viewed as a betrayal.)
ELECTION DAY: STORM THE COCKPIT OR DIE
Meanwhile, conservatives were reconciling their personal aversion to Trump’s style with their genuine fears about the consequences of a Clinton presidency. An anonymous essay published in September 2016 described, using a stark analogy, the choice before conservatives on Election Day. “The Flight 93 Election,” referring to the doomed airliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, after passengers wrested control of the jet from Islamic terrorists, made the conservative case for Donald Trump.57
The 4,300-word piece detailed the multiple failures of the conservative hierarchy; the “whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc. reeks of failure,” the unnamed author wrote. “Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation.” The essay described the prospective doom posed by a Hillary Clinton presidency and the reasons why conservatives would be justified in voting for a presidential candidate, who, by nearly every measure, contradicted the airbrushed avatar of a true conservative leader.
Writing as Publius Decius Mus in the Claremont Review of Books—it initially was published at the Journal for American Greatness website, now American Greatness, for which I write—the author directly challenged arguments made by marquee conservative influencers against the election of Donald Trump while advocating a vote for Clinton or a third-party candidate:
“Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.”
The writer presciently warned that the Clinton machine would “be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England.” Little did he, or anyone outside of the Obama White House or Clinton team, know that a Stasi-like cabal of political operatives were already using powerful government tools to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign, a scheme that would escalate after he won.
Then this parting shot: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”
The essay outraged the conservative intelligentsia, mostly because it was clear the writer was of their ilk. Kristol outed the identity of the writer—Michael Anton, a former Bush speechwriter—and NeverTrumpers subsequently piled on. (More on this in chapter 6.) In his criticism of the piece, Jonah Goldberg, unwittingly making Anton’s point, admitted, “I am the first to concede that if Hillary Clinton wins it will likely be terrible for the country,” but the Republic will not in fact literally die like the passengers on Flight 93.58
Point missed.
So while pragmatic conservative thinkers like Anton recognized the cataclysmic future under the reign of Hillary, NeverTrump, shamefully, continued their opposition to the Republican nominee while bracing for another Clinton presidency.
A few days before the election,