Clinton. In her eyes, Clinton was a "dirt-
bag" for having an affair with a former
intern who was not much older than
she was. After graduating from Kenyon
College, in Ohio, in 2002, she went to
work for a conservative group, the In-
tercollegiate Studies Institute, in Dela-
ware. She soon found herself promot-
ing a book for "intellectuals who find
Darwinism unconvincing" and went on
tour with Senator Rick Santorum to
hdp sdl his book "'It Takes a Family,"
whose retrograde views led a reviewer
for the Philade.lphialnquirerto describe
it as the product of"one of the finest
minds of the thirteenth century." At the
time, Longwell was coming out to her
friends and family as a lesbian. She de-
cided that she could no longer work at
such an o.rganization with someone she
considered "the most visibly anti-gay
politician in the country," and she quit.
Still deeply conservative, she moved
to Washington in 2005, and was hired
by Richard Berman as a junior staffer
at his communications furn. Berm~ a
legendary Republican lobbyist turned
P.R. man, specialized in helping food
and beverage companies by setting up
industry front groups to .fight regula-
tory efforts. Longwdl loved the work,
and in the course of .fifteen years she
rose to become senior vice-president
and was in line to run the company. To-
gether, they opposed everything from
raising the minimum wage to stricter
drunk-driving laws. "Sarah always had
a knife in her teeth." Berman told me.
Early in her time at the firm, Long-
well persuaded Berman to agree to be
interviewed by "60 Minutes. "The story
portrayed Berman as the "Dr. Evil" of
the Washington influence game, will-
ing, on behalf of a range of urulisclosed
corporate clients, to attack workers,
healthy-eating proponents, and even
activists for Mothers Against Drunk
Driving. Berman still has a link to the
"6o Minutes" episode on the firm's Web
site, accompanied by a quote calling him
"the industry's weapon of mass destruc-
tion." He keeps a "Dr. Evir nameplate
on his desk. "If they call you Mr. Nice
Guy. would that be better?"Bennan told
me. "I don't think so."
Berman ta.ught Longwell to discredit
the opposition before it discredits you;
to be edgy. memorable, and funny; and
to always play offense, because; as Long-
well put it in a 2014 presentation, "de-
fense over time loses." He devised an
aaonym for the .firm's approach to "man-
aging" public opinion: FLAGS, for fear,
love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of
those, he told me, fear and anger are the
most effective: "Nobody likes neg-ative
ads, but everybody remembers them. I
absolutely believe it."
Longwell readily acknowledged that
Berman was "almost like a bogeyman"
ID opponents. But she admired hlln. "Rick
is the kind of person who is, like, 'I will
stand up, I will say what I think, and I
will defend my positions.' I believe that,
too,,. she said. "I bclievc that, if you are
opposed to this President, there arc so
many people in this town, so many peo-
ple in Congress, theywant to say, 'I think
he's terrible,' whatever. They won't say it
out loud. I think that Rick helped me
understand how to have the courage not
just to saywhat I bdieve but, when peo-
ple come at you for that, to say, 'Wdl,
this is who I am, this is what I believe.'"
The experience ofbeing a lesbian in
conservative circles also taught Long-
wdl the virtues of plain speaking. An
advocate for marriage equality despite
the Republican Party's stance against
it, she married her girlfriend in 201J. "'I
got comfortable with everyone being
mad at you," she said. "To be a gay Re-
publican was to reoogniu that Repub-
licans were going to dislike you because
you were gay, and Democrats were going
to dislike you for being Republican, and
you had to walk your path because you
felt like it was the right thing to do."
In 2016, Longwell opposed Trump in
the Republican primaries but recognized
the potency of his fear-and-anger plat-
form. How could she not? It was as if he
were working from Berman's playbook.
During the campaign, Longwell hap-
pened to be the incoming board clWr of
the Log Cabin Republicans; she was the
first woman to hold the post since the
group was founded, in the late seventies,
to advocate for gay and lesbian Repub-
licans. The board felt intensc pressure to
endorse Trump, despite his selection of
Mike Pence, an openly homophobic wan-
gelical Christian, as his running mate.
Longwdl told me that she "basically lay
on the tracks" to stop the group from
backing Trump. Mostly, though, she
watched the election unfold with dismay.
"For me, the world changed in 20lh,"Longwell said. That summer, her :first
son was born. "My wife's water broke
the night ofMclania's speech at the Con-
vention," and a few nights later, after
their son's birth, she watched on televi-
sion at the hospital as Trump accepted
the Republican nomination. "I remem-
ber just how bad he made me feel, n she
said. "That's what I remembei: I remem-
ber holding a new baby and feeling like
this can't be what's happening."On Elec-
tion Night, she was at a party in Wash-
ington, textingwith another anti-Trump
operative, Tim Miller, the former spokes-
person fur Jeb Bush's short-lived Presi-
dential. campaign. "He's going to win,"
Miller wrote to her. As the news sank
in, she went outside and bummed a cig-
arette, although she no longer smoked..
Many people who opposed Trump in
2016 have their version of this story: the
Election Night disbdief and shock, the
litany of outrages that followed. But, un-
like many others in Republican Wash-
ington, Longwell did not make her ac-
commodations, political. and moral, with
the new President. When, on his second
weekend in office, Trump issued an ex-
ecutive order banning entry into the U.S.
for citizens of seven majority-Muslim
nations, Longwell decided that Trump
really was a danger to the country. "I
started thinking about What can I do?"
she recalled. "How can I get involved?"I
n the fall of 2007, Longwell was in-
vited to a session of the Meeting of
the Concerned, a semi-secret group of
disaffected Republicans that had started
gathering every other Tuesday in a base-
ment conference room near Capitol Hill
The NeverTrurnpers were hardly a real
movement, less an organized cabal than
a cable-news-savvy alliance. Among
them were longtime Party operatives,
such as Steve Schmidt and Rick Wil-
son, who became regulan; on libcral-lean-
ing TV shows, and public intellectuals,
such as Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Ad-
m.irllstration official who now reaches at
Johns Hopkins University, and Max
Boot, of the Council on Foreign Rela-
tions, who stopped writing for the Wall
Street journal} increasingly pro-Trump
editorial. page and went to the Wash-
ington Post. With the exception of Sen-
ator John McCain, most Republican
elected officials already either supported
Trump or kept their mouths shut about