14 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
“For me, the world changed in 2016,” Sarah Longwell says.
THE POLITICALSCENE
HOPE DIES LAST
The trials of a Never Trump Republican.
BYSUSAN B. GLASSER
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST
F
or 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 corona-
virus 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 Pres-
idency.” Longwell, a forty-year-old con-
servative Republican who has spent the
Trump years in an increasingly isolated
fight within her party to end his Presi-
dency, 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 Presi-
dent 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. Start-
ing last September, as Trump faced im-
peachment by the House of Represen-
tatives 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 prima-
ries, a first step toward building a “co-
alition of the center” to defeat the Pres-
ident in November.
Longwell sees Trump’s failure to re-
spond early and decisively to the corona-
virus 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 Long-
well—were helping former Vice-Presi-
dent Joe Biden take a commanding lead
in the Democratic primaries over Ber-
nie 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
