The Trials of a Never Trump Republican
March 23, 2020
“For me, the world changed in 2016,” Sarah Longwell says.
illustration by Christian Northeast
For four years, Sarah Longwell has been hoping for Donald Trump’s downfall. But nothing has triggered it. Not the Mueller investigation into his dealings with Russia. Not his coverup of hush-money payments to a porn star, or the profiting from his office to benefit his personal businesses. Not even a Ukraine extortion scheme that resulted in just the third impeachment and trial of a President in history. He has proved immune to every scandal. Will the coronavirus pandemic be any different?
I spoke to Longwell on March 13th, barely an hour after Trump declared a “national emergency” to combat a once-in-a-century outbreak that he had spent the previous few weeks claiming to have completely under control. Pundits were already calling Trump’s botched initial handling of the crisis“the end of his Presidency.” Longwell, a forty-year-old conservative Republican who has spent the Trump years in an increasingly isolated fight within her party to end his Presidency, was not yet convinced. “How many times have we seen that headline before?” she asked.
Longwell is a Never Trumper, one of the stubborn tribe of Republicans who have refused to accept the President as their leader. In 2016, virtually the entire Republican Party opposed Trump in the primaries, but since his Inauguration only a shrinking group has persisted in publicly taking him on.
To Donald Trump, the members of this small but highly visible resistance are his real enemy, even more than the opposition party. He often tweets his contempt; one day last fall, he described them as politically weakened and “on respirators,” but nonetheless “worse and more dangerous for our country” than the Democrats. Trump concluded with a furious flourish: “Watch out for them, they are human scum!”
Longwell embodies Trump’s darkest anxieties. Relentless in her loathing of the forty-fifth President, she has turned her Never Trump-ism from a passion project into a full-time profession. Starting last September, as Trump faced impeachment by the House of Representatives and a trial in the Senate, Longwell raised and spent millions of dollars on ads advocating his removal from office. After his acquittal, she launched a new effort, raising several million dollars in a matter of weeks to turn out “disaffected Republicans” in the Democratic primaries, a first step toward building a “coalition of the center” to defeat the President in November.
Longwell sees Trump’s failure to respond early and decisively to the coronavirus as a case study in “the crisis of leadership” that she has warned fellow-Republicans about. She believes the new political reality of the pandemic moment is deeply problematic for Trump and for the Party leaders who have so fervently embraced him. As Trump was denying that the virus would afflict the country, millions of suburban voters—including many Republican women like Longwell—were helping former Vice-President Joe Biden take a commanding lead in the Democratic primaries over Bernie Sanders. She hopes now that Biden can be the instrument of Trump’s defeat, enabling a “restoration” of the America she still believes in. Longwell told me that, for the Republican establishment, which has for all intents and purposes fully sold out to Trump, “this is their worst-case scenario.”
A lifelong conservative, Longwell grew up in a Republican family and town in central Pennsylvania and began following politics in high school, during the impeachment, in 1998, of Bill Clinton. In her eyes, Clinton was a “dirtbag” for having an affair with a former intern who was not much older than she was. After graduating from Kenyon College, in Ohio, in 2002, she went to work for a conservative group, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in Delaware. She soon found herself promoting a book for “intellectuals who find Darwinism unconvincing” and went on tour with Senator Rick Santorum to help sell his book “It Takes a Family,” whose retrograde views led a reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer to describe it as the product of “one of the finest minds of the thirteenth century.” At the time, Longwell was coming out to her friends and family as a lesbian. She decided that she could no longer work at such an organization with someone she considered “the most visibly anti-gay politician in the country,” and she quit.
Still deeply conservative, she moved to Washington in 2005, and was hired by Richard Berman as a junior staffer at his communications firm. Berman, a legendary Republican lobbyist turned P.R. man, specialized in helping food and beverage companies by setting up industry front groups to fight regulatory efforts. Longwell loved the work, and in the course of fifteen years she rose to become senior vice-president and was in line to run the company. Together, they opposed everything from raising the minimum wage to stricter drunk-driving laws. “Sarah always had a knife in her teeth,” Berman told me.
Early in her time at the firm, Longwell persuaded Berman to agree to be interviewed by “60 Minutes.” The story portrayed Berman as the “Dr. Evil” of the Washington influence game, willing, on behalf of a range of undisclosed corporate clients, to attack workers, healthy-eating proponents, and even activists for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Berman still has a link to the “60 Minutes” episode on the firm’s Web site, accompanied by a quote calling him “the industry’s weapon of mass destruction.” He keeps a “Dr. Evil” nameplate on his desk. “If they call you Mr. Nice Guy, would that be better?” Berman told me. “I don’t think so.”
Berman taught Longwell to discredit the opposition before it discredits you; to be edgy, memorable, and funny; and to always play offense, because, as Longwell put it in a 2014 presentation, “defense over time loses.” He devised an acronym for the firm’s approach to “managing” public opinion: FLAGS, for fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of those, he told me, fear and anger are the most effective: “Nobody likes negative ads, but everybody remembers them. I absolutely believe it.”
Longwell readily acknowledged that Berman was “almost like a bogeyman” to opponents. But she admired him. “Rick is the kind of person who is, like, ‘I will stand up, I will say what I think, and I will defend my positions.’ I believe that, too,” she said. “I believe that, if you are opposed to this President, there are so many people in this town, so many people in Congress, they want to say, ‘I think he’s terrible,’ whatever. They won’t say it out loud. I think that Rick helped me understand how to have the courage not just to say what I believe but, when people come at you for that, to say, ‘Well, this is who I am, this is what I believe.’ ”
The experience of being a lesbian in conservative circles also taught Longwell the virtues of plain speaking. An advocate for marriage equalitydespite the Republican Party’s stance against it, she married her girlfriend in 2013. “I got comfortable with everyone being mad at you,” she said. “To be a gay Republican was to recognize that Republicans were going to dislike you because you were gay, and Democrats were going to dislike you for being Republican, and you had to walk your path because you felt like it was the right thing to do.”
In 2016, Longwell opposed Trump in the Republican primaries but recognized the potency of his fear-and-anger platform. How could she not? It was as if he were working from Berman’s playbook. During the campaign, Longwell happened to be the incoming board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans; she was the first woman to hold the post since the group was founded, in the late seventies, to advocate for gay and lesbian Republicans. The board felt intense pressure to endorse Trump, despite his selection of Mike Pence, an openly homophobic evangelical Christian, as his running mate. Longwell told me that she “basically lay on the tracks” to stop the group from backing Trump. Mostly, though, she watched the election unfold with dismay.
“For me, the world changed in 2016,” Longwell said. That summer, her first son was born. “My wife’s water broke the night of Melania’s speech at the Convention,” and a few nights later, after their son’s birth, she watched on television at the hospital as Trump accepted the Republican nomination. “I remember just how bad he made me feel,” she said. “That’s what I remember. I remember holding a new baby and feeling like this can’t be what’s happening.” On Election Night, she was at a party in Washington, texting with another anti-Trump operative, Tim Miller, the former spokesperson for Jeb Bush’s short-lived Presidential campaign. “He’s going to win,” Miller wrote to her. As the news sank in, she went outside and bummed a cigarette, although she no longer smoked.
Many people who opposed Trump in 2016 have their version of this story: the Election Night disbelief and shock, the litany of outrages that followed. But, unlike many others in Republican Washington, Longwell did not make her accommodations, political and moral, with the new President. When, on his second weekend in office, Trump issued an executive order banning entry into the U.S. for citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations, Longwell decided that Trump really was a danger to the country. “I started thinking about: What can I do?” she recalled. “How can I get involved?”
In the fall of 2017, Longwell was invited to a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, a semi-secret group of disaffected Republicans that had started gathering every other Tuesday in a basement conference room near Capitol Hill. The Never Trumpers were hardly a real movement, less an organized cabal than a cable-news-savvy alliance. Among them were longtime Party operatives, such as Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, who became regulars on liberal-leaning TV shows, and public intellectuals, such as Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and Max Boot, of the Council on Foreign Relations, who stopped writing for the Wall Street Journal’s increasingly pro-Trump editorial page and went to the Washington Post. With the exception of Senator John McCain, most Republican elected officials already either supported Trump or kept their mouths shut about him. Inside the Administration, some had qualms about the President, but they soon were fired or marginalized, or quit. The official Party apparatus had been taken over by the President, and Republican lobbyists, consultants, political operatives, congressional staffers, right-wing media commentators, and government job seekers quickly identified where their interests lay.
Jerry Taylor, who helped found the Meeting of the Concerned and the Niskanen Center, the think tank that hosts it, told me about the first time Longwell showed up. “Sarah didn’t know anyone in the group,” he said. “She had never really travelled in those circles before.” Many of the attendees were well-known denizens of Washington’s TV greenrooms, who bonded over their disillusionment with the Party and saw “the election of Donald Trump as just the thin blue line between us and the abyss,” as Taylor put it. Longwell wanted more than this talky self-styled resistance. She told me, “Everybody was sitting around having a conversation that I had heard lots of versions of at that point, which is: What happened to the Republican Party?” When Bill Kristol, a Republican pundit and the founder of The Weekly Standard, spoke up, Longwell recalled, she interrupted him: “ ‘Why don’t we do something about it?’ And he was kind of, like, ‘Well, what would we do?’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t know, but you’re famous. You’re Bill Kristol.’ ”
Kristol has been a leader of the hawkish neoconservative wing of the Party since arriving in Washington, as a member of the Reagan Administration. In 2016, he made a well-publicized attempt to recruit a last-ditch independent candidate to run against Trump. Having failed to find anyone of stature, Kristol settled on an obscure former C.I.A. officer and congressional staffer named Evan McMullin, whose candidacy never rose above the level of obscurity. After their initial meeting, Kristol and Longwell went out for coffee, and she urged him to take action again. They started brainstorming regularly at the Madison Hotel.
“Then Mueller happened,” Longwell said, and the idea for their group, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was born. Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, in the spring of 2017, had set off the first major crisis of his Presidency, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. Longwell and Kristol decided that their group would try to insure that Trump did not fire Mueller or block the investigation; to do this they would pressure Republican officials in the capital. “I did think someone needed to fight the fight within the Republican Party, that you can’t just give up even though it’s a long shot against a Republican President,” Kristol told me. “Sarah agreed.”
In February, 2018, as Trump was publicly attacking Mueller, Longwell set up Defending Democracy Together, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that could accept donations without having to disclose donors. Defending Democracy Together became the umbrella organization for Republicans for the Rule of Law and other like-minded projects that sought to combat Trump’s policies. Longwell and Kristol worked his contacts and raised substantial sums of money, including from liberal donors such as Pierre Omidyar, the tech billionaire who funds the left-wing Web site the Intercept.
Starting that March, whenever Trump threatened Mueller or opened a new front in his fight against the Russia “hoax,” the group ran TV ads defending the investigation, many of them featuring quickly produced clips of news footage or Trump’s latest tweet, with urgent pleas to members of Congress to stop the President. All told, before the Mueller investigation was over, Republicans for the Rule of Law had run more than a hundred ads, aimed at a narrow but important segment of “persuadable Republicans” in key states, seeking to convince Party leaders that even Trump’s base would not go along with his firing of the special counsel. In the hope of getting directly to the President, Longwell also ran the ads in Washington on Fox News, which Trump watches addictively.
In 2018, at a session of the Meeting of the Concerned, Longwell met George Conway, the husband of Trump’s White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway. A prominent conservative attorney, he had accepted, then declined, a senior position in Trump’s Justice Department. Earlier that year, Conway had started tweeting his dismay about Trump, thus setting off a marital-political drama worthy of a reality-TV Presidency. Like Longwell, Conway was invited into the capital’s Never Trump circle, but he, too, decided that the meetings were often frustrating exercises in “therapy.” He craved action. (“Look, there’s a lot of benefit just to catharsis,” Jerry Taylor joked to me, “especially given that the alternative is to become an alcoholic, which is easy to do in this town now.”)
In November, 2018, as Trump attacked Justice Department norms and practices, Longwell helped Conway file the paperwork to start Checks and Balances, an anti-Trump group for conservative-minded lawyers, to counter the influential Federalist Society. It débuted with a splash, given the Conways’ public split over Trump. Longwell was fast becoming the organizational heft behind the Never Trump movement. “Basically, if you want to set up a group,” Conway told me, “she’s the person who makes it.”
Although Conway was constantly in the news with his tweets whacking his wife’s boss, more and more of Longwell’s Republican connections were being converted to Trumpism—deleting old Twitter posts critical of the President, making discreet job inquiries. By the second year of the Administration, she saw two kinds of Republicans in Washington: “the people who became Always Trumpers” and the group she called “the Anti-Anti-Trumpers, the people who were, like, ‘Well, I’m not for Trump, but you guys are ridiculous, you guys have Trump Derangement Syndrome.’ ” Republicans she had been friendly with for years and who had been “vociferously” anti-Trump in 2016 now bashed her and other Never Trumpers on Twitter.
Kristol’s Weekly Standard remained strongly anti-Trump, and by late 2018 he was struggling to keep it alive. When the magazine’s owner, the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, threatened to shut it down, James Murdoch, the estranged son of its initial backer, Rupert Murdoch, approached Anschutz about buying it. But Anschutz refused to sell, and abruptly forced the Standard to cease operations, transferring its assets to another property he owned, the Washington Examiner. Kristol assembled a small new team to run a Never Trumper Web site, called the Bulwark, which launched a month later. Longwell, with no previous experience in the media business, became its publisher.
James Murdoch was not able to save the Standard, but Kristol introduced Longwell to Murdoch’s wife, Kathryn, and she became a major, six-figure donor to Republicans for the Rule of Law. Kathryn Murdoch told me, “Sarah gives me hope that there is going to be a post-Trump Republican Party that is principled and focussed on getting things done.” Murdoch, who described herself as an independent, added, “Unfortunately, one of the most frustrating things right now is there’s a big difference between the way Republican leaders speak behind closed doors and the way they speak in public.”
Longwell and Kristol spent much of 2018 and the first half of 2019 trying to recruit a Republican to run against Trump in the upcoming primaries. At first, Longwell hoped for a big-name candidate: “I was, like, ‘Maybe Mitt Romney’ll do it, maybe Condoleezza Rice will do it.’ And I subsequently realized that there really was a very narrow universe of people who were going to legitimately consider it. At the end of the day, none of them saw a path.” John Kasich, the former Ohio governor, who ran against Trump in 2016, was interested, but even longtime financial supporters wouldn’t back him. Longwell’s “personal favorite” was Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, whose father had been the first Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment. But, last spring, Hogan said that he wouldn’t mount a “suicide mission” against the President. “Nobody wanted to cross this guy,” Longwell recalled. “This American Life” compared her effort to that of the workers who tried to stop the meltdown at Chernobyl. And yet, Longwell noted, “it was easier to get three guys to go into Chernobyl than it was to get somebody to run against Trump.”
By the summer of 2019, not even the Log Cabin Republicans wanted to oppose Trump anymore. Longwell found that her activism against the President was at odds with the majority of the board, and in August she resigned as chair. As soon as she did, the board voted to preëmptively endorse Trump for 2020. A half-dozen other board members ultimately quit in the rift over Trump, as did the group’s first female executive director. Jennifer Horn, the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who had been recruited to the board by Longwell, told me, “We just could not remain.”
By this point, Longwell had become all too familiar with what she often called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”: the assumption that her fellow-Republicans would give in to Trump, whatever his latest outrage, and yet escape censure, since their capitulation was now merely the expected outcome. The impeachment drama, ignited by the disclosure, in September, of Trump’s fateful call to the Ukrainian President, seemed as if it would provide yet more proof of this frustrating new Washington reality.
Despite the revelations about Trump’s scheme to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine as he demanded politically beneficial investigations into Biden, Longwell knew that impeachment was almost certain to end with an acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate. There were not twenty Republican votes to convict, and likely never would be. Still, on September 30th, less than a week after the House inquiry began, she wrote an opinion piece for NBC comparing the moment to Watergate, titled “Republicans Who Back Impeachment Can Save the Country—and the GOP.” That day, she got an e-mail from Rick Berman, her boss, asking where she stood on impeachment. She replied that it was time for them to talk.
They met in his sunny corner office, and Berman made it clear that Longwell would have to choose between supporting Trump’s impeachment and staying on at his company. Berman had allowed her to devote increasing time to anti-Trump causes during the previous few years, to the point of even raising money and working to recruit a primary candidate against him. But Berman could not abide her using his firm to run a campaign to remove a President of their party. “My red line was impeachment,” he told me. They agreed that by the end of the year she would leave Berman’s company and start her own political consulting firm, Longwell Partners.
Longwell said that her views had “changed a lot” since she first began working with Berman, but she still shared his hard-edged approach to political combat. “Rick really taught me everything,” she told me. “If you don’t engage people and try to persuade them, the other side will.”
As the impeachment proceedings began, Republicans for the Rule of Law rolled out video ads that detailed with biting humor the latest developments in the Ukraine saga. One of Longwell’s staff members, Barry Rubin, started a Twitter account, focussing on the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, called Lindsey Graham’s Fake Conscience. Every day, he tweeted out old footage of Graham, now arguably Trump’s most reliable Senate cheerleader, from his previous incarnations as a Trump basher (in 2016) and as a House impeachment manager against Bill Clinton (in 1999). In one clip that went viral, Graham talked with great emotion about how much he admired Joe Biden, the “nicest person” in politics. Rubin posted it on November 21st, the day Graham’s committee began investigating Biden’s dealings with Ukraine, just as Trump had demanded. The tweet said, “WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW!! IT WILL MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A MONSTER.” It has been viewed more than one and a half million times.
Still, it proved impossible to persuade Republicans to vote for impeachment. Longwell started out with a list of a few dozen House members who she thought might be persuaded to break with Trump. After one week of hearings, the list rapidly shrank. First to go was Elise Stefanik, a Harvard-educated junior member of the House Intelligence Committee, who sarcastically questioned witnesses and ranted about the Democratic-controlled process. “They just Trumpify themselves immediately,” Longwell said. Stefanik was soon doing prime-time interviews on Fox News with Sean Hannity and tweeting nasty nicknames at her 2020 opponent, a Democrat she disparaged as “Taxing Tedra.” Longwell likened the sudden shifts of Stefanik and others to “the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
For as long as she had been fighting Trump, Longwell had been travelling home to central Pennsylvania, hoping to understand his appeal to Republicans. After the public impeachment hearings wrapped up, just before Thanksgiving, we drove two and a half hours from Washington to a storefront in New Cumberland, to find out if the base was fazed by the Ukraine scandal. Longwell grew up nearby, just outside Dillsburg, a small town of fewer than three thousand people. Her parents are lawyers (her father is retired) and still live there. Dillsburg is conservative and Republican, the kind of place where the local elementary school closes for the first day of deer-hunting season. It went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Since the start of the Trump Presidency, Longwell has conducted regular focus groups of his voters from the area, trying to figure out what might move them to vote against him in 2020. The groups almost always comprise middle-class Republican women from the suburbs and exurbs—the most Trump-skeptical remaining part of the G.O.P., and the voters who may well decide the President’s fate in November. One Republican who has been in many meetings with Longwell was struck by the personal nature of her project. Longwell has often joked that she was secretly doing this to convince her “parents that they shouldn’t be supporting Trump,” the Republican told me. (Longwell was reluctant to discuss her parents, except to say that she didn’t ask her father if he had voted for Trump in 2016, “because I didn’t want to know.”)
At first, the two focus groups that Longwell had convened for our visit seemed to suggest that the President was in more political trouble than we had realized. The groups—all women, all Trump voters with varying degrees of regret about him—started out identically: when the moderator asked how many thought the country was going in the right direction, not a single hand went up. The reason was their concern about the President. In the second group, a retired nurse said, “He has ability, but he’s also a narcissistic sociopath. And I voted for him! We all did.” (When she said this, Longwell exclaimed from where we were observing, behind a two-way mirror, “We have a George!”—as in George Conway, who had recently argued in The Atlantic that Trump has narcissistic personality disorder.) Others spoke of the “degradation of the office of President,” said that Trump was “just so full of hate,” and bemoaned his “flamboyant obnoxiousness.” Everyone said Trump’s Twitter feed was a problem.
Two staffers from Longwell’s team who watched with us were encouraged, but she warned them to wait for “the turn.” It soon became clear what she meant: The women didn’t like Trump, but they didn’t like anyone else, either. They didn’t trust the media, and they thought other politicians were just as bad as the President. Although they could not explain the details of the Ukraine scandal—except for one woman who had become an obsessive MSNBC watcher—they thought impeachment was costly and pointless.
Still, Longwell was not entirely discouraged. Trump had won Pennsylvania by only about forty thousand votes in 2016; he would need these women to vote for him again, and it was hard to imagine that all of them would do so. Before we left, the moderator asked the second group whether they would consider voting for a Democrat in 2020. Five of the nine said yes. “I’d vote for a dog over Trump,” one said. Then the moderator asked who they thought would win if Biden was the Democratic nominee. They all said Biden.
Three weeks later, when the Democratic majority in the House impeached Trump, all of Longwell’s initial targets—among them Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois; Will Hurd, of Texas; and Francis Rooney, of Florida—voted no, along with every member of the Republican caucus.
Longwell nevertheless kept her contrarian optimism, hoping that some new revelation could shift the political momentum in the upcoming Senate trial. “To me, the only thing that seemed like it could would be witnesses, hearing from people directly,” she said. In the focus groups in Pennsylvania, the women had been shown a series of impeachment-related ads, and panned all of them, except for one pressing Trump to agree to witnesses. (“What is Trump hiding?” it asked, showing pictures of his advisers with duct tape over their mouths.)
Longwell planned to pressure Senate Republicans to summon witnesses whom Trump had blocked from testifying in the House. She was aware that others might consider her “naïve and quixotic,” or at least “annoyingly earnest,” but she was not ready to give up. “I’m like Charlie Brown with the football, right?—me thinking that these guys are going to stand up.”
As the House was conducting its impeachment vote, which Kellyanne Conway dismissed as the result of Democrats’ “get-Donald-Trump obsession,” her husband and other Never Trumpers announced the creation of the Lincoln Project, a group aimed at punishing Trump’s “Republican enablers” in the Senate in the 2020 election. “There has to be some political price for putting party over country,” George Conway told me. Earlier in the fall, he had talked with Anthony Scaramucci—who had flamed out as Trump’s White House communications director after only eleven days and eventually became a biting critic of the President—about “ways to get under Trump’s skin.” Conway wanted to run TV ads targeted at the President that would feature an actor playing Trump’s disapproving father—an idea from the political strategist Rick Wilson. Scaramucci wanted them to start a political-action committee. Instead, they created the Lincoln Project with an array of consultants who had worked on Republican Presidential campaigns, including Wilson and Steve Schmidt, as well as Jennifer Horn, who had served on the Log Cabin board with Longwell.
The new group ran scorching impeachment-related ads against Republican senators seeking reëlection in key swing states. It also touted, on its Web site, a comment by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, which underscored Trump’s vulnerability. “We need the Republican establishment on board,” Bannon told the Associated Press in January, noting Trump’s narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the states that sealed his Electoral College win. “If these guys can peel off three or four per cent, that’s going to be serious.”
This was also Longwell’s theory about 2020, and the reason for her focus groups. She didn’t need to convert every Republican in the room, just a few of them. Longwell planned to assemble a database of disaffected Republicans and give them “permission structures” to vote for a Democrat. She already knew who they were: the audience of her Never Trump groups; the readers of the Bulwark, which receives about two million unique visitors a month and has had eleven million downloads of its podcast in the past year; and the more than three hundred thousand people who had signed petitions circulated by Republicans for the Rule of Law.
But as she watched the Democratic Presidential race unfold, with its faltering front-runner and disjointed debates, Longwell became increasingly discouraged. For Republicans like her, the 2020 Democrats ranged from uninspiring (Biden) to terrifying (Sanders). Republican elected officials, meanwhile, seemed to be even more vocally pro-Trump than before impeachment. When Longwell and I returned to Pennsylvania in January for more focus groups, the women were still leery of Trump and the direction of the country, but this time the conversation was dominated by the most pro-Trump woman in the room. Sounding like a Fox News host on a roll, she said, “I think they hate him so bad because he threatens their liberal agenda. They want to get rid of him any way they can.”
At this point, Longwell abruptly stepped out from behind the mirror and interrupted the focus group. “I’m from Dillsburg,” Longwell told them. “I’ve been a Republican my entire life.” Then she launched into a speech. “I’ve become persuaded that President Trump is very bad for the Republican Party, including the fact that he should be impeached,” she said. She talked about the dangers of an out-of-control executive, the future of the Republican Party, and the hypocrisy of senators who claimed to believe in the rule of law for everyone except Trump.
Longwell seemed to want to convince someone, anyone, even a dozen suburban moms munching chips in a focus group on a Wednesday night. “I really believe character counts in a President,” she said, “and I can tell you do as well.” But, while most of the women did not love Trump, they did not really care about him, either, and Longwell did. The last word went to the President’s most ardent backer. “I think Trump is the one who could bring us together if Democrats would stop fighting him so hard,” she told Longwell. “He has to have been one of the most influential politicians of all time.”
A few weeks later, on Friday, January 31st, Longwell and I met in her bright new office, overlooking McPherson Square, in Washington. The night before, Senator Lamar Alexander had put an end to the infuriating charade of a Senate trial, announcing that he would oppose the Democrats’ effort to force the Senate to hear testimony from new witnesses. It was only a matter of days until the President’s preordained acquittal.
Despite Longwell’s months of work, the President was emerging from impeachment emboldened and unchecked. Republicans for the Rule of Law had run about two million dollars’ worth of impeachment-related ads in thirty-nine states and congressional districts, sixteen ads nationally, and twenty-eight digital billboards targeting Republican members of Congress in nineteen states. But they had been up against what Longwell’s team estimated was almost certainly more than forty million dollars in ad spending by pro-Trump forces. Her mantra in politics was all about managing public opinion, yet public opinion about Trump remained essentially unchanged. “On an objective scale,” she said that morning, of her impeachment campaign, “it was a failure.”
She was also frustrated with the Democrats. “It has really started to feel like they decided to impeach but they never really invested in impeaching,” she said. In key swing states, the ads from Republicans for the Rule of Law had been the only ones countering the Trump barrage. She pointed out that public support for impeachment shot up over fifty per cent after the Ukraine allegations emerged, but never moved after that. “Public opinion is like cement—it’s soft at first and you can move it, and then it hardens,” she said. By December, it had hardened. “The Democrats played no offense and the Republicans played a ton of offense, ultimately putting the Democrats on defense,” Longwell said. For a disciple of Berman, that was unforgivable. When you are on defense, you lose.
She had mistakenly believed, she admitted, “that there were elected Republicans who want to do the right thing, to act as a course correction. That has not happened.” Her allies agreed. “The capitulation has been amazing,” Kristol told me. Conway said, when we met after the Senate trial, “The institutions of the Republican Party are completely at his beck and call. There’s no erring whatsoever. No dissent is tolerated and it is absolute and complete.”
I asked Longwell if she thought that at least Mitt Romney, the one Republican senator who had consistently sounded a publicly skeptical note about the President since John McCain’s death, in 2018, might vote to convict Trump. “I do have a thought that he will,” she said. “I think he may.” I joked with her that she was a living example of the Russian saying “Hope dies last.”
Five days later, on February 5th, Romney announced that he would vote to convict Trump on one of the two counts, abuse of power. It was a long way from the dozen or so Senate Republicans who were once Longwell’s targets. Still, Trump did not get a unanimous Republican acquittal, which at that point counted as a victory for his opponents. “Mitt comes through!” Longwell e-mailed me. “Hope is not entirely in vain.”
But new disappointments loomed. “Everything’s bad,” Longwell told me the morning the Senate trial came to an end. Bernie Sanders was leading in the polls heading into the New Hampshire primary, just days away. Even for a diehard Never Trumper, the Vermont socialist, who promised “a revolution” with trillions of dollars in new government spending, was a reach. Longwell was still, at least nominally, a Republican. “If you end up with a Bernie-Trump showdown, we’re in such a fundamentally different place as a country, and I’ll tell you that place is really far from where I am,” she said.
Last April, Longwell wrote a piece for the Bulwark, warning Democrats, “DO NOT IGNORE BERNIE SANDERS. HE IS GOING TO WIN THE NOMINATION. AND HE IS NOT GOING TO BEAT DONALD TRUMP.” When I asked that morning if she would vote for Sanders against Trump, she hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she replied. She considered Sanders essentially a Trump of the left. “All of the things I hate about Trump I hate about Bernie, too,” she said.
She had dedicated her career to fighting Trump’s takeover of her party, but her plan rested on the premise that Democrats would offer a centrist alternative. She was willing to vote for Biden, but not Sanders. Longwell worried that she had built “a data machine to figure out how to swing voters, with no one to swing them to.” After four years of setbacks, this looked increasingly like one final unwelcome turn. “It’s like being shot or poisoned,” she said.
But Longwell was not conceding defeat. A few days after the Senate trial ended, she launched an ambitious new get-out-the-primary-vote effort, which she called Center Action Now. Working with Tim Miller, the Never Trump activist from the failed Bush 2016 campaign, Longwell raised more than three million dollars and contacted her lists of Trump-dubious Republicans in states that allowed them to participate in Democratic primaries, among them Michigan, Texas, and Virginia. All told, Center Action Now logged eight hundred thousand phone calls and text messages as Longwell turned her new office into an impromptu call center and she and her staff activated the Never Trump network they had spent the past few years building.
In late February, Biden won a huge victory in the South Carolina primary, followed by a remarkable forty-eight hours in which he consolidated the Party’s fragmented center behind him. Turnout surged in the Republican-leaning suburbs, and Biden, so recently written off as politically dead, won ten of fourteen states on Super Tuesday. Longwell and the Never Trumpers cheered Biden’s resurrection—and their own.
Soon, the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s disastrously slow and dishonest initial response to it seemed to threaten his Presidency more than impeachment ever had. The inside game in Washington was still over and lost. The Republicans on Capitol Hill had made their choice to stick with Trump. But the election is another matter. Longwell does not need the entire Party to abandon the President, just her slice of it. At her most optimistic, she dreams of a “blowout defeat” to end Trumpism once and for all. But she would settle for persuading enough suburban Republican moms in places like Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, to vote against him this time. It might just be enough. In some Republican-leaning districts, turnout in the Democratic primaries was up a hundred per cent over 2016. “Hope renewed,” Longwell wrote, when I e-mailed her after Biden’s comeback on Super Tuesday. “We’re back in the game.”
