A Never-Trump Anthology (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

A wax figurine of President Donald Trump stands at Madame Tussauds in New York.

Generally speaking, I have no use for Bill Kristol. His opinions are predictable, and his predictions are wrong so often — and so spectacularly — that pointing them out is sort of a cottage industry. (Google “Bill Kristol wrong predictions” to see what I mean.) Would someone who wasn’t born into movement conservatism royalty — his father was Irving Kristol — have been able to survive so many wrong calls?

Worst, he helped elevate Sarah Palin from Alaskan obscurity to Republican vice presidential nominee. Unlike John McCain, he doesn’t have decades of public service to counterbalance that error of judgment, which seems to have permanently altered the Republican idea of the experience, temperament and intellectual rigor necessary for the presidency.

But last week, Kristol tweeted something that surprised and delighted me:

Never-Trump Republicans are like reformed smokers, aren’t they?

It’s been fascinating to watch Republicans, or former Republicans, disentangle themselves from party-first politics. I’m not talking just about Bill Kristol. I’m talking about a list of bona fide conservatives who could not bring themselves to appease or endorse Trump.

Bruce Bartlett, an adviser to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, became a “recovering Republican” when he was ostracized in 2005 for suggesting that George W. Bush was not a true conservative. A social liberal, Bartlett is a prolific (and often profane) Twitter commentator (@BruceBartlett). Since he is the author of “Reaganomics: Supply-side Economics in Action” (1982), I find his analysis of the current tax proposals authoritative.

In commentary for The Washington Post, he dared to question the Republican article of faith that there is never a bad time for a tax cut. “If anything,” he wrote, “by enacting a stimulus now, in the form of a tax cut, when the economy is near full employment, the government risks raising inflation, which would mean the stimulus generates higher prices rather than reduced unemployment — when employers can’t find additional workers to meet increased demand, they have little choice but to bid up wages, which get incorporated into prices.”

I also follow the work of David Frum, George W. Bush’s Canada-born speechwriter who warned in 2010 that “Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever.” (Unlike Kristol’s predictions, Frum’s is holding up.) Last week, writing for The Atlantic, Frum called for corporate tax reform, not a tax cut, in place of the GOP proposals he described as “a scandalous expression of upper-class and Sunbelt chauvinism that will melt away within weeks of the next Democratic electoral success.”

Jennifer Rubin, the most conservative columnist in The Post, used to drive Democrats crazy. Last week these words about our Republican commander-in-chief appeared in her column, which is called “Right Turn”: “In sum, the problem is not Trump’s advisers calling him names. The problem is that he’s unfit, his top advisers know it and collectively they are pretending that everything is fine. … It’s long past the time to end this charade. If the president is too intellectually limited to perform the job, he needs to go.”

George Will’s columns in Newsweek back in the ’80s gradually persuaded me that I was not a Democrat just because my parents were. Last year he joined me as an independent — or “unaffiliated,” per his Maryland voter registration.

Writing in The Post, he recently took a swipe at Vice President Mike Pence, who “eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle” and is now “a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.” Then he let loose on President Trump, the “enfant terrible” who is “innocent of this (or any other) systemic thinking” and whose “energy, unleavened by intellect and untethered to principle, serves only his sovereign instinct to pander to those who adore him as much as he does.”

I’m also reading the singularly depressing “How the Right Lost Its Mind” by Charles Sykes, a former conservative radio talker from Wisconsin. He’s entertaining on Twitter (@sykescharlie), as is a Chicago-dwelling Texan named Chris Ladd (@ChrisALadd), proprietor of a blog called PoliticalOrphans.com since he left the GOP last year.

And if Trump-free conservatism is your cup of tea, you might also check out MaxBoot.com, where historian and foreign policy analyst Max Boot writes commentary with stinging headlines like “Republicans Have Stockholm Syndrome and It’s Getting Worse” and “Roy Moore Response Shows GOP Deserves to Die.”

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.