Because I listen to various major Never Trump podcasts so you don't have to, I can reliably report back to you that almost all of them -- free or paywalled -- feature in each episode what I would call the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.
After spending a fair chunk of time being outraged by the fascist who runs their former party, then switching back and forth at whiplashing speed yelling at Democrats for not shouting enough or shouting too much... or shutting the government down or not shutting the government down ... or too much baking soda, then not enough baking soda (I swear, it's like having picture hanging instructions barked at you by a metamorphopsia sufferer who's also drunk) then comes the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.
In case you are unfamiliar, the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin always centers around one of the tiny number of Republican elected official out at the perimeter of the GOP who Never Trumpers thought, when nut-cuttin' time finally came, would take at least a tiny step forward and show a little of those steely Conservative principles which Never Trumpers always thought were there.
When, after yet another "Surely this time..." moment has passed and Republicans have behaved like, y'know, Republicans, and you hear Never Trumper's saying things like...
What the hell is wrong with Susan Collins? Or
Lisa Murkowski has betrayed... Or
I had such hopes for Bill Cassidy...
...congratulations! You've arrived just in time for the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin!
And the chagrin is palpable, and yet it's repeated over and over again, every day and always with the same tone of "You mean there's no Santa Claus?!?" disbelief. Because deep down they simply refuse to believe that they could have been this spectacularly wrong about the cause to which the devoted most of their adults lives.
And these last 10 years (although some of us would peg it at the last +30 years)? If they have proven anything far beyond the need to pile up even one more piece evidence, it's this. This is bot and never has been some passing fever that will break if we all keep calm and go right on treating these fuckers with civility. There is no national epiphany at hand. No sudden burst of collective conscience where we all agree that this was evil and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Yes, the MAGA mob may disperse once they're out of power, but not to go on some contemplative nature hike where they learn important lessons about life and compassion. Instead they'll do what they did after the Bush regime collapsed: scatter like roaches, rebrand, then rely on a complicit legacy media to tell everyone that the danger has passed and we can get back to "politics as usual" while the MAGA scum regroup.
Because by now their rage and racism and paranoia are not affects: these are the traits that define them. These are the building blocks of their spiritual DNA and at this late date we can no more expect them (or the puppeteers/influencers who spin them up and given them scapegoats) to change than we could expect a wood tick to become a golden retriever. There will be no Damascene moments down the dark road they are traveling.
On the other hand, very slowly and through layers of habit and denial, Old Man Epiphany appears to be chipping and chiseling his way into the Never Trumper bubble with the bad news that, yep, it's the whole fucking party, from top to bottom.
You still hear loose talk about how Trump, "hostile takeover" of the party, or how he "hijacked" the party, which is nonsense. Yes, I'm sure the handful of party elites for whom the Never Trumpers worked felt like it was a hostile takeover when the party base chucked them out in favor of the guy who talked like they talked and hated who they hated, but all Trump ever did was speak to the base in the Limbaugh language they understood, instead of disdainfully holding that Hate Radio hate speech at arm's length and act like they were better than all that.
And as for "hijacking ", as I've written on this blog many times, it's not a hijacking when they hand you the keys and beg you to drive. Three times.
However, the Never Trumpers seem to have given up their ridiculous, Trump 1.0 fantasy of returning to a shattered Republican party as the "We told you so" caucus after Trump crashed and burned. That somehow, the staff of the defunct Weekly Standard and a few of their fellow travelers would show up like Charles II to restore the Neocon monarchy and lead the grateful, shamefaced mob back into peonage under the same people that gave them Bush and Cheney twice, and tried to force-feed them Romney and Jeb.
They seem to have finally gotten it through their heads that things have changed. Forever.
But however clearly they begin to see how wrong they were about their party and their movement and their former friends and colleagues, the distance between that and forcing their mouths to say the words "The Left was right about the Right all along" is incalculable. Or at least something to be measured in light years. Because continuing to roll their eyes at the excesses of the Left -- even when those excesses amount to nothing more than the usual media "nutpicking" -- remains the floatation device that keeps them viable.
After all, within the legacy media, admitting out loud that, in effect, you never had any idea what was really going on inside the party you worked for your entire adult life is considered merely a venial sin. Minor, but forgivable, since the overall media party line continues to be that nobody could have seen this coming.
But then to say out loud that the dirty hippies who they built their careers mocking and shitting on had it right all along? Are you insane? That, my friends, would be the most sure-fire way to A) make yourself as big a legacy media pariah as the dirty hippies are because the media does not want to hear that shit, and B) lose your profitable podcasting gigs, newspaper columns, book contracts and round-the-clock appearances on MSNOW as the media-anointed Leaders of the Resistance.
No, they've chosen the safest available path: indignant about the fascists who run their former party, then carping at Democrats for being too tall, but also not tall enough, and too vanilla, but also problematically not vanilla enough.
Selah.
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