Will 'Never Trump' Be the Only Survivors After He's Gone?...

When the Republican Party’s current coalition falls apart, those who stood up to bigotry will be the only ones with the credibility to rebuild.

Excerpt from The Atlantic. Conservatives and republicans need to read, reread, and fully understand the following as well as the ramifications of their failure to stand for right rather than the misguiuded right wing of their party .

Of course, Trump has presided over many policy failures. Any president could pass a tax bill or confirm federal judges given a Senate and House that is controlled by their party. And Trump’s tax bill failed to simplify the system while his federal court appointments include embarrassingly unqualified choices. But even without those caveats to the two policy achievements that conservatives cite most often, there are sound reasons to justify opposition from Never Trumpers.

Some relate to incompetence, others to lack of transparency.

And the most important and damning traits that distinguish Trump from his predecessors are his willingness to stoke animus against minority groups for political gain; the energy he has given to white supremacists; the indiscipline of his public statements; the frequency with which he blatantly lies to the public; and the unsavory characters that he brought with him into the federal government—including Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka, for starters.

Only Never Trumpers can credibly claim to stand against the moral abominations that suffused Trump’s political rise and the first year of his presidency. They alone are conserving a faction on the right that stands against deplorability in the face of a president who remains a cruel, mendacious egomaniac. They alone can credibly claim to oppose racial demagoguery.

Insofar as most Republicans celebrate Trump as a success story, rather than repudiating him as an affront to basic standards of decency, they transgress against the Founding belief in the importance of character in leaders while disgracing themselves and doing shortsighted violence to the GOP’s long term prospects. To the question, “Did you oppose the man who repeatedly stoked hatred of us?” they will have to tell Hispanics, Muslims, and African Americans, “No.”

In fact, Pro-Trumpers are sullying the fiscally laissez faire party for a generation, a tragedy for those who believe in free-market economics and small government. Neither George W. Bush nor John McCain nor Mitt Romney deserved criticism they got from some quarters for alleged racial animus. But I don’t blame voters who are rooting for Republicans to be routed in Election 2018: The GOP no longer passes the threshold test of opposing open bigotry.

Just last month, my colleague David Graham offered a mere snapshot of Trump’s most recent deplorable behavior. “He retweeted inflammatory and misleading anti-Islam videos from a bigoted far-right British politician,” he wrote. “He baselessly implied that NBC host Joe Scarborough, a onetime informal adviser, might have been involved in the death of an intern years ago in Florida. And several outlets reported that the president privately continues to claim preposterous things, including that it wasn’t him on the Access Hollywood tape and that Barack Obama really wasn’t born in the United States.”

All alone, spreading propaganda directed at a religious minority group would’ve been a shocking act for any past president. For Trump, more tweets like it could come any moment and no one in the United States would be surprised. Insofar as a voter backlash can repudiate the bigot in the White House and his choice to stoke racial and ethnic divisions for power, the country will benefit.

For now, the man responsible for so much bigotry is the same one that the RNC is declaring a historic success, and the same one Roger Simon wants to form a “united front” behind. If a Democratic president ever behaved half as irresponsibly as Trump the entire right would explode in righteous indignation. Yet Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and many more besides stand with Trump no matter how nakedly he engages in character assassination or how often he openly stokes ethnic tensions.

America is decidedly NOT what Trump and his surrogates are attempting to turn our nation into.