Donald Trump’s victory splintered the already divided Never Trump movement into shards and further excluded his MAGA outcasts, leaving some of his most prominent Republican critics scrambling for relevance in a reordered Republican Party.
In recent days, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has attacked two of the president-elect’s top appointees, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on her radio show. Former Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock labeled Trump’s nominees a cabinet of “Putinists and pedophiles.” And former Vice President Mike Pence tried to unite anti-abortion conservatives against Kennedy as Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary.
But they are shouting their words of warning from the sidelines as Trump, having already overhauled his party, continues to reshape Washington in his MAGA image.. And he does this with the support of broadly supported Republicans in Congress, who have little political incentive to listen to his opponents.
“The Never Trumpers and Lincoln Project folks just need to crawl back under their rocks for a few years,” said Scott Reed, the veteran GOP strategist and leader of the Pro-Pence Committed to America PAC.
Trump’s convincing victory allowed the president-elect to quickly consolidate power within his party as he prepared to return to Washington. And it has scattered the remnants of Republican resistance to him back to their respective corners to regroup.
Some, like Haley and Pence, who criticize their former boss on some issues but remain aligned on others, still believe they can change a Republican Party that has almost completely bent the knee to Trump. But others, especially those among the pillars of the original Never-Trump movement who were long ago pushed aside by their party or left the party of their own accord, have given up trying to resurrect Republicanism as they knew it.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and prominent Trump critic who challenged him for the party’s nomination in 2020 before becoming an independent, said the former president’s reelection has taken Republican Party reform “off the table.” He also believes this has reduced the prospects for disaffected Republicans to form a new party.
“There are two options,” Walsh said in an interview. “Productively throw stones at the government – be like a group in exile and do what we can remotely to harm MAGA, knowing we can never go back – or become Democrats.”
Trump’s Republican skeptics generally seem to be starting with the former, seizing on his Cabinet selection process as a way to both challenge his MAGA agenda and reassert their own political relevance.
Haley, a more traditional foreign policy hawk, recently used her radio show to attack Gabbard’s foreign policy positions, criticizing the former Democratic congresswoman as a “Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.” She also attacked Kennedy as a “liberal Democrat” who “has no background in health care.”
She reiterated these “serious concerns” on Tuesday in an email to her political supporter list promoting her radio show, in which she also shared a survey asking for top priorities for the Republican governing trifecta in Washington. However, Trump has made it clear that Haley – his main Republican Party rival, who later embraced his candidacy – will not be invited to his second term.
Then there’s Pence, who refused to endorse his former running mate after his own failed presidential bid. The conservative former vice president initially said he was “very encouraged” by Trump’s initial Cabinet choices, only to later attack Kennedy, who has expressed differing views on abortion, as “very concerning to millions of Pro-Life Americans who have supported the Republican Party and our nominees for decades.”
But Haley and Pence’s opinions — or those of the more fervently anti-Trump Republicans who have criticized his Cabinet choices as bad for national security or simply inappropriate for their future posts — are not exactly widely appreciated within the MAGA movement.
“Who cares what Mike Pence thinks?” said Mike Davis, the former Senate GOP aide and Trump’s most outspoken legal defender. Pence’s team did not respond to a request for comment, while Haley’s team declined to comment.
And it remains unclear whether Trump’s critics will use the minimal political capital — and money — they have through their advocacy groups and super PACs, such as Pence’s Advancing American Freedom, to oppose his nominations that they see as problematic .
Instead, many across the spectrum of Trump’s skeptics are looking to Congress to continue opposing his more controversial maneuvers. And they see signs of hope in Senate Republicans’ early resistance efforts: selecting John Thune (R-S.D.) as majority leader over Rick Scott even as Trump’s allies support the Florida senator, and ousting scandal-ridden former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. of the attorney general nominee before he could vote — or Trump could use his nuclear option, recess appointments, to force him through.
“That’s the only way to control Trump … the kind of moderate members of the group, the people who are members of the Republican Party who don’t want to give Trump carte blanche and who will oppose the most damaging things,” he said. Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump GOP strategist and publisher of The Bulwark. “It’s going to take people in the Republican Party not to completely cave to Trump.”
But Republicans in Congress may be less willing to oppose Trump once he returns to office in January and the vetting of his Cabinet picks goes behind closed doors. Public acts of defiance risk not only Trump’s wrath but key challenges in 2026 — and few Republican senators are in a position to win reelection without his voters.
Meanwhile, the number of Trump’s opponents in the Senate will decrease again during the next Congress. And the remaining two Republican senators who voted for his impeachment, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, will no longer be enough to win a nomination on their own.
“It has to start in Congress,” Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia who supported Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump, said in an interview. “You have to have serious senators who are willing to toe the conservative line and filter out as much anger and grievance-filled decision making as possible.”
But as that stronghold crumbles, the last vestiges of the broader Trump resistance could collapse as well.
When asked where Never Trumpers go from here, Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan GOP and member of the Lincoln Project, told POLITICO: “You mean reeducation camps? I am an optimist.”
