16 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
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 Re
publican lobbyists, consultants, political
operatives, congressional staffers, right
wing media commentators, and govern
ment job seekers quickly identified where
their interests lay.
Jerry Taylor, who helped found the
Meeting of the Concerned and the Ni
skanen Center, the think
tank that hosts it, told me
about the first time Long
well 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 Wash
ington’s TV greenrooms,
who bonded over their disil
lusionment 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 selfstyled 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 fa
mous. You’re Bill Kristol.’”
Kristol has been a leader of the hawk
ish neoconservative wing of the Party
since arriving in Washington, as a mem
ber of the Reagan Administration. In
2016, he made a wellpublicized attempt
to recruit a lastditch independent can
didate 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 brain
storming regularly at the Madison Hotel.
“Then Mueller happened,” Longwell
said, and the idea for their group, Re
publicans 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 inves
tigation; 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 attack
ing Mueller, Longwell set up
Defending Democracy To
gether, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit
that could accept donations
without having to disclose donors. De
fending Democracy Together became
the umbrella organization for Republi
cans for the Rule of Law and other like
minded projects that sought to combat
Trump’s policies. Longwell and Kris
tol worked his contacts and raised sub
stantial 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 defend
ing the investigation, many of them fea
turing 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, Re
publicans for the Rule of Law had run
more than a hundred ads, aimed at a
narrow but important segment of “per
suadable Republicans” in key states, seek
ing 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 Presi
dent, Longwell also ran the ads in Wash
ington 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 WhiteHouse 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 maritalpolitical drama
worthy of a realityTV 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 paper
work to start Checks and Balances, an
antiTrump group for conservative
minded lawyers, to counter the influen
tial Federalist Society. It débuted with a
splash, given the Conways’ public split
over Trump. Longwell was fast becom
ing 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 con
verted to Trumpism—deleting old Twit
ter posts critical of the President, mak
ing discreet job inquiries. By the second
year of the Administration, she saw two
kinds of Republicans in Washington:
“the people who became Always Trump
ers” and the group she called “the Anti
AntiTrumpers, 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” antiTrump
in 2016 now bashed her and other Never
Trumpers on Twitter.
Kristol’s Weekly Standard remained
strongly antiTrump, 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, Ru
pert Murdoch, approached Anschutz
about buying it. But Anschutz refused
to sell, and abruptly forced the Standard