Mytheos Holt performs a post-mortem on the quixotic Evan McMullin campaign:
For the forces that backed him, McMullin was not the first, the second, or even the third choice for his appointed task—namely, to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency in the name of donor-driven True Conservatism™. Rather, the forces that supported McMullin leaped from one anti-Trump hero to another, starting with the plaintive-sloganed Jeb!, continuing with the vapid dreamboat Marco Rubio, and finally ending up desperately lining up behind Ted Cruz because at least he went on their cruises.
What separates McMullin’s backers from other Jeb!, Rubio, or Cruz supporters, however, was their total unwillingness to accept that sometimes a primary just wouldn’t go their way. In many cases, this was because they belonged to a class of people for whom losing wasn’t supposed to happen because of who they were. This was particularly true of Bill Kristol, arguably the man who built what little meager infrastructure there was for McMullin, hoping to put up someone, anyone, who would stop the GOP from rejecting its self-appointed neoconservative establishment rulers, and their domesticated coterie of social conservatives, who, goshdarnit, were just too Christian and principled to limit immigration, or to attack the interests of major metropolitan donor industries.
And so it was that people who had never had to fight to win a primary decided they were going to try and fight back against someone whose only experience was winning a primary he was never supposed to win by sheer force of will. First, they did it by attempting to force a brokered convention, which presumably would have produced someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan as the nominee. All they accomplished was screaming helplessly from the floor of the RNC like a certain highly distressed member of the #Resistance.
Not to be deterred, they then decided to follow in the august footsteps of George Wallace and John Anderson, and run a third party protest candidate to ensure that no True Conservative™ would have to sully his or herself with a vote for Donald Trump. And for a while, their push looked like it might be something to worry about. Names like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or even future Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis were bandied about with excitement. That is, until Romney, Sasse, and Mattis got wind of it and quickly made it plain that on no account were they involved in this, and would you please stop calling, Bill Kristol?!
But even after this, McMullin still wasn’t the first choice. That honor went to the august National Review columnist David French, who entertained the idea for just long enough to get a segment on Fox News complaining about how rude Trump supporters were. Then he promptly fled.
Only then, and finally, after casting about in the “darkness” of the dawning Age of Trump, the disappointed neoconservative Captain Ahabs realized they had to run someone if they wanted to look serious. Enter Evan McMullin, former House Republican Conference Chief Policy Director, former CIA agent, former investment banker, and man with nothing better to do because he was possibly the only unmarried Mormon over the age of 19 in Washington. And so, NeverTrump looked at McMullin, squinted, thought he looked enough like David French, and said: “OK, fine, you’ll do.”
Of course, quite rapidly it became clear that the chances of McMullin actually becoming president were someplace between zero and hahahahahahahaha . . . wait, what? But becoming president was no longer the point. It was all about sinking Trump, to prove to those awful populists who had dared to think for themselves, and not the way Bill Kristol and Bill Kristol’s donors wanted them to think, that they were servants, and could never live in the Big House as equals.
And so, a simple strategy for denying Trump the presidency was devised: McMullin would try to carve away enough of his voters in states with high Mormon populations so that even if Trump won a couple of swing states, the losses among Mormons would cancel out Trump’s victory. Whether McMullin won those states, or Clinton won them, was beside the point—which was, and only ever was, to hurt Trump. And, for a few moments, the strategy looked like it might work in Utah, right up until the Mormons thought it through, realized how much trouble they’d gone through making themselves part of the Republican coalition in the first place, and decided they’d rather not self-excommunicate for the sake of panicked Beltway grifters. Ultimately, McMullin came in third in Utah, behind even Hillary Clinton.
As has so often been the case, the light of the God-Emperor has revealed the true character of many a cuck and an America Secondist. I find myself wondering if McMullin even has the self-awareness to be ashamed of how he permitted himself to be used by Bill Kristol to screw over so many sanctimonious conservatives.
Then I recall who those sanctimonious conservatives were and how obnoxious they are, and I remember that I don’t care.