When Donald Trump entered the political arena for the 2016 presidential cycle, there was some initial resistance inside the GOP but nothing like what we saw in 2020.
That died down a bit later on as some of the anti-Trump crowd were muted due to the disastrous presidency of Joe Biden.
Now, malcontents in the Republican Party are making a rise again, and CNN’s Scott Jennings, the rare conservative pundit on the network, had a few choice words for them.
I think we can safely say that Trump stirred the pot during his first term to the point that several internal GOP resistance groups formed.
The most notable of these was “The Lincoln Project.” This was a group of high-profile Republicans who absolutely despised Trump.
That group then formed an offshoot, called “Lincoln Women,” which featured Jerushah Duford, granddaughter of the late Billy Graham.
Jennifer Horn, cofounder of The Lincoln Project and former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, stated, "We know that women will play a critical role in defeating Donald Trump in this election.” And it worked, as Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden.
The anti-Trumpers were more or less run off the scene ahead of the 2024 election because of how badly Biden performed in office.
All the warnings Trump and Republicans had given about a Biden presidency seemed to have come true.
We saw massive overreach, at least in the eyes of conservatives, censorship, rising prices for our everyday staples, a war against Big Oil, and massive immigration problems.
Now that Trump is back in office, the anti-Trump movement seems to have forgotten about 2021 to 2025, as its former members are starting to make a resurgence, which has CNN’s Scott Jennings in a bit of an uproar.
Jennings recently discussed the anti-Trump movement in the GOP, stating, “During the 2024 campaign, I kept hearing these Republicans say things like, ‘In order to save conservatism, we have to vote for Kamala Harris.’ And as someone who had to sit out there and debate these issues every night, I could never sort of figure out why they were saying that, what they meant by that.”
He continued, “And then I started to think about the underlying arguments they were making, the other statements they were making, and I realized that they weren’t trying to save conservatism. They were trying to liberalize it.”
After running off a grocery list of names and citing how they had changed their ideology due to Trump's presidency, Jennings concluded, “And to this day, I still do not understand people who claim to be Republicans running around having voted for Democrats in each of the last three elections, having advocated for Democrats to win the Senate, having advocated for Democrats to win the House, having advocated for pro-abortion policies, having advocated for every liberal social crusade, and then look me in the eye and say, ‘You’re hurting conservatism by supporting Donald Trump.’ F all the way off.”
I agree with him to an extent. For anyone who has gone over to actually pulling the handle for Democrats solely to stop Trump, they are of no use to the party. But we do need to figure out how to lure back those who have Trump exhaustion, or just don’t like the president but still support conservative ideals.
I was a DeSantis voter in the last presidential primary, and I have die-hard Trump friends who have accused me of being a liberal solely because I wanted the Florida governor in the Oval Office. That, to me, is utterly ridiculous. I also take a lot of heat for holding Trump and other Republicans accountable when I think they have crossed the line, but that is literally my job as a political writer, at least if I want to be honest and taken seriously. We have to get out of this mode of disowning people simply because they disagree with Trump on certain issues, because if we don’t, we will be the direct cause of the downfall of the conservative movement in this country.
