THE POLmCAL SCENEHOPE DIES LAST
The trials ef a Never Trump &puhiican.
BY SUSAN B. Gl.A.SJER.F
or four yeus, 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
ofhush-money payments to a porn•
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
imnum.e to every scandal. Will the corona-
virus pandemic be any different?
I spoke to Longwdl on March i3th,
barely an hour after Trump declared a
"national emergency" to c.ombat a onc.e-
in--a-ccntury outbreak that he had spent
the previous few weeks claiming to have
c.ompletdy under c.ontroL Pundits were
already calling Trump's botched initial
handling of the crisls "the end ofhis Pn:s-
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 Pn:si-
dency, was notyt:t convinced. "Haw 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 201.6, virtually
the entire Republican Party opposed
Trump in the primaries, but since his"For me, the world changed in 2016," Sarah Longwell says.THE NEY~ MAl\CH 30, 2020Inauguration 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~ he described
them as politically weakened and "on
respirators,"but nonethdess "worse and
more dangerous for our country" than
the Democrats. Trump concluded with
a furious flourish: "Watch out for thCIIl.,
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. Stmt-
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 bis removal from office.
After his acquittal, she launched a new
effort, raising sevenl million dollars in
a matter of weeks 1D tum out "disaffi:cb:d
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
leadershipn that she has warned fellaw-
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. AB Trump was denying
that the virus would afBict the country,
millions of suburban vot:er&-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 off rump'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
lifdong conservati:re, Longwdl
grew up in a Republican family
and town in central Pennsylvania and
began following politics in high schooL
during the impeachment, in 1998, ofBillILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST