him. Inside the Administration, some
had qualms about the President, but they
soon were fired or marginali7.ed, 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 commentaton, and govcm-
mart job sa:kcrs quicklyidc:ntifu:d where
their interests lay.
Jerry Taylor, who helped found the
Meeting of the Coru:erru:d 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 ovttthcir disil-
lusionment with the Party and saw "the
election of Donald Trump as just the
thin blue line betwa:n us and the abyss,"
as Taylor put it. Longwell wanted more
than this talky self-styled n:sistance. 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 Kristo!, a Republican
pundit and the founder of The ~ek.{y
Stmuiard, 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 W2S, like, 'I don't know, but you're .fa-
mous. You're Bill Kristel'"
Kristo] 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 well-publicized attempt
to recruit a last-ditch independent can-
didate to run against Trump. Having
failed to find anyone of stature, Kristol
settled on an obscure former CJA officer
and congressional staffer named Evan
McMullin, whose candidacy never rose
above the levd of obscurity. After their
initial meeting, Kristel and Longwell
went out fur coffue, 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-
16 THE NEY ~MARCH 30, 2020publicans furthe Rule of Law, was born.
Trump's firing of the F.B.I. director
James Corney, 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 Kristo! 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 ru:eded to fight the
fight within the Republican
Party, that)Ull can't just give
up even though it's a long
shot against a Republican
President, "Kristol told me.
"Sarah agteed."
In February,2018, as
Trump was publicly attack-
ing Muellei;~ setup
Defending Democracy To-
gether, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit
that could aa:ept donations
without having to disclose donon. De-
fending Democracy Together became
the umbrella organization fur Republi-
cans for the Rule of Law and other likc-
minded projects that sought to combat
Trump's policies. Longwell and Kris-
to! worked his contacts and raised sub-
stantial sums of money, including from
liberal donon such as P'ierre Omi.dyar,
the tech billionaire who funds the left--
wing Web site the Intercept.
StllrtingtfurtMarch, ~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 twt:et, 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-
suadahle Republicans" in key states, see.k-
ing to convince Party leaden that even
Trump's base would not go along with
his firing of the special counsel In the
hope of getting directly to the Prcsi-
dent,Longwdl also ran the ads in Wash-
ington on Fox News, which Trump
watt.hes addict:i.vdy.
In 201.8, at a session of the Meeting
of the Concerned, Longwell met George
Conway, the husband of Trump's WhiteHouse counsellor Kcllyanne 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 cin:le, 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.j
In November,1.018, as Trump attacked
Justice Department norms and practices,
Longwdl helped Conway.file the paper-
work to start Checks and Balances, an
anti-Trump group for conservative-
minded lawyers, to counter the influen-
tial Federalist Society. It debuted. 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 ofl..ongwell's
Republican connectionswcre being con-
verted to Trumpism--dcle1i old Twit-
ter posts critical of the President, mak-
ing discreet job inquiries. By the second
year of the Administr.ation, she saw two
kinds of Republicans in Washington:
"the people who becameAlwaysTrump-
ers" and the group she called "the Anti-
Anti-Trumpers, the people who were,
like, Well, I'm not for Trump, but you
guys an:: ridiculous, you guys have Trump
Derangement Syndrome.'" Republicans
she had been friendlywith for years and
who had been '\rociferously" anti-Trump
in 2016 now bashed her and other Never
Trampers on Twitter.
Kristol's Week.{y Standard remained
strongly anti-Trump, and by late 201.
he was struggling to keep it alive. When
the magazine's owner, the conservative
billionaire Philip Anschutz, threatened
to shut it dawn, James Murdoch, the
estranged son ofits initial backer, Ru-
pert Murdoch, approached Anschutz
about buying it. But Anschutz refused
to sell, and abruptly forced the Standard