At a ballroom in Maryland on Saturday, as Donald Trump spoke to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, pardoned Capitol rioters shouted in adoration for the president, thanking him for setting them free from jail.
At the exact same moment, in a ballroom about 10 miles away in Washington, D.C. — blocks away from the White House — former police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, suggested there was no way to reunite the MAGA wing of the GOP with the Republicans who remain deeply disturbed by the Capitol riot.
“I went through my kumbaya phase, ‘we’ve got to work with these people,’” former Capitol cop Michael Fanone told the crowd. “Fuck that. We need to get everyone from MAGA out, never hold office again.”
The Principles First summit has established itself as Washington’s preeminent Never Trump gathering. This year, speakers ran the political gamut — from Reagan Republicans, like former Trump national security adviser John Bolton and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson who found their Trump opposition more recently, to Democrats like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis who has tempered his liberalism to appeal to these former Republicans, to former GOP activists like George Conway who always hated Trump and feel like the Republican Party left them, not the other way around.
But it’s a different, difficult time to be a Never Trump Republican. Just a little over a year ago, Republicans ready to turn the page had Nikki Haley, who looked for a brief moment like she could beat Trump in the GOP presidential primary.
And then she didn’t, with Haley — adding rhetorical insult to electoral injury — quickly endorsing Trump.
True believers in the Never Trump movement then advocated for Joe Biden, who later had to drop out over concerns about his age. And then they pushed for Kamala Harris, who decisively lost to Trump in November.
Their message about protecting democracy fell on deaf ears in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. And the theory that Trump was a 2016 fluke, that his dark brand of politics was a one-time mistake for America, turned out to be resoundingly false.
“Trump sucks. He’s a Nazi. He’s a fascist,” said entrepreneur Mark Cuban in his keynote address, summoning common anti-Trump arguments. “How’d that work in the campaign? It didn’t.”
Never Trumpers have 47 months to endure this president. And at the top of mind is how to move forward, how to create a strategy around getting anyone but a Trump acolyte in the White House in 2028.
But if there was one takeaway from the fifth-annual Principles First summit, it’s that there’s little agreement on how to actually do that.
“There are a ton of divisions. We’re still trying to get a sense of the right way forward,” Reed Howard, a democracy practitioner fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, told NOTUS while at the Summit.
“It’s not the fault of the people in this room solely, but we’re still trying to find those messengers who can bring it forward,” Howard said. “And I think we will be in the wilderness until we can find a leader who’s willing to run for public office and talk to folks in a way that resonates with them outside of places like D.C.”
To Howard — and to about half of the summit’s speakers — there is no future for this group of Republicans within the Republican Party. The way for the group to make its mark is to attach itself to Democrats.
“We could probably serve a positive purpose in here by nudging them in the right direction,” political commentator Tim Miller said during a session with fellow Bulwark leader Sarah Longwell.
“Right now, there’s a lot of wound licking, we’re worried about various things, there’s a lot of things to be worried about. There is rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, there’s people’s concerns about their safety, and that is going to discourage people from running,” Miller said.
“We should be doing everything possible — to people in our lives and our communities, particularly if you live in places that are kind of reddish and light red — to encourage them to run,” he said.
Others said the movement needs to steer away from Democrats.
“This last election is a warning sign for the strategy for the pro-democracy movement to have largely hitched its wagon to one political party,” said Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America.
Troiano said the Democrats suffered both a branding problem and a political problem. He said Harris was out of step with mainstream voters, citing her previous positions on fracking and Medicare for All that Republicans used against her.
Whether there’s a D, R or I attached to their name, the speakers all agreed Trump was a threat. There was just no agreement on how much of a threat — or what to do about it.
Even the question of whether or not we’re living through a constitutional crisis became a disagreement in the room.
“We’re not in a constitutional crisis,” Hutchinson declared mid-morning.
“Every day I’ve said we’re in a constitutional crisis,” former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh said an hour later.
“We use this constitutional crisis statement much too liberally,” said former New Jersey governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie.
“What we’re doing is cheapening it,” Christie said, “because when we really do have a constitutional crisis, half the country’s gonna go ‘eh.’ It’s like when the Democrats wouldn’t stop calling him a fascist.”
The most fundamental fracture to be resolved is the future of the Never Trump movement.
Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair who led the party to one of its most sweeping victories in the 2010 midterms, isn’t so optimistic it’s within the GOP.
“Trump is not a phase; I think that is head-up-ass kind of thinking,” Steele told NOTUS.
“A phase is a hangover after a long weekend party. You’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to go to work Monday,’ and you get your shit together, and you go to work, you get back to business. We’re now 10 years into this, this is a pretty long-ass hangover,” Steele said.
“This isn’t a phase; this is acceptance,” he said.
Still, some are holding out hope that Trump is a phase, that the political cycle will fade and they will again have a political home within the party that exiled them.
“I don’t think the party has gone away at all. I think underneath, people still believe the same things,” Bolton told NOTUS ahead of his speech at the summit.
“It’s not even a question of finding coalitions. It’s getting people to understand in larger numbers that we’ve got him for 47 more months now, but we’ve got to think about what comes after him,” Bolton said. “That’s the most important thing.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.