Peter Wehner, the “Never Trumper” and former George W. Bush adviser, is so distraught that President Donald Trump’s supporters are sticking by Trump that he is calling for Republican officials to form a “shadow government” to undermine Trump and his agenda.
Writing in the New York Times, of course, Wehner declares “what’s required now is a comprehensive, consistent case by Republican leaders at the state and national levels that signals their opposition to the moral ugliness and intellectual incoherence of Mr. Trump.”
“Rather than standing by the president, they should consider themselves liberated and offer a constructive, humane and appealing alternative to him,” Wehner writes in his “Sunday Review” column. “They need to think in terms of a shadow government during the Trump era, with the elevation of alternative leaders on a range of matters.”
He says “this approach involves risk and may not work” and predicts it will provoke “an angry response” from the “Breitbart-alt-right-talk-radio part of the party.”
“So be it,” Wehner continues, adding that “Republicans who don’t share Mr. Trump’s approach have to hope that his imploding presidency has created an opening to offer a profoundly different vision of America, one that is based on opportunity, openness, mobility and inclusion.”
He calls for a “new intellectual infrastructure to address what may prove to be one of the largest economic disruptions in history” and implores “people in positions of influence” to “appeal to moral idealism.”
Wehner believes “confrontation is inevitable” and urges anti-Trump Republicans to go all-in because “half-measures and fainthearted opposition are certain to fail.”
Using the tired threat that every establishment “pundit” reflexively spews when the Republican establishment does not get what they want on issues like amnesty for illegal immigrants and other corporatist or neoconservative policies, Wehner warns that if Republicans do not “make a clean break with” Trump, “it will be generational.”
Wehner—the insufferable elitist who also bashed Tea Party conservatives nearly every chance he got during President Barack Obama’s tenure to enable the legacy media to use him as their go-to useful moron—never mentions that his establishment Republicans friends in Congress and former boss George W. Bush lost blue-collar Reagan Democrats, young voters, people of color, and the conservative base with their oh-so-brilliant neoconservative foreign policy agenda, crony capitalism and excessive spending at home that turned Washington into the nation’s boomtown, and support for policies like No Child Left Behind and comprehensive amnesty legislation.
While Wehner’s “Never Trump” allies like Bill Kristol have been plotting behind the scenes to “oust” Trump in 2020, Wehner may be proposing a “shadow government” because he realizes that, as a House Republican apparently told him,” anti-Trump Republicans are “never going to have a majority of people against him [because Trump’s voters still make up the biggest faction in politics].”
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