Anti-Trump conservatives ponder what to do in November — and beyond

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, right, speaks at a Milwaukee gathering hosted by the anti-Trump organization Principles First on Wednesday, July 17. Looking on, from left, are George Conway and Heath Mayo. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

MILWAUKEE — While 2,500 Republican delegates were gathering to nominate Donald Trump at the party convention in Milwaukee this week, a group of Trump opponents gathered four blocks away to talk about the existential threat the GOP candidate poses to the country.

The event was organized by Principles First , which calls itself “a nationwide grassroots movement of pro-democracy, anti-Trump conservatives.” Over the course of three hours about 100 people dropped by.

“The Republican Party is sick, okay — it has been led astray by populist demagogues and it has abandoned its principles,” Heath Mayo, president and founder of the group , told the crowd inside Best Place, part of the redeveloped Pabst Brewing complex just west of the convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

He condemned a convention speaker for saying the Russian invasion of Ukraine “wasn’t Vladimir Putin’s fault” but instead that of the United States. “That is absurd. It’s dangerous,” Mayo said. “It is absolutely antithetical to anything the Republican Party has ever stood for.”

He expressed dismay at the platform given to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien for “a complete class warfare speech.”

And Mayo summarized a recurring sentiment he heard while watching the convention: “That there are certain Americans out there — whether it’s based on their race, their religion, their job or their occupation, who are real Americans,” while others for the same reason are “not quite real Americans.”

That is “the most pernicious, new idea in the Republican Party that exists, because it goes right to the heart of what America is supposed to be,” Mayo asserted. “Where we all, no matter our race, religion, who we love, have the same opportunity to succeed and realize the benefits of this nation. And the Republican Party on that stage has abandoned it over and over and over again in the interest of just populist political gain. And it is infuriating.”

‘Politically homeless’

The Principles First website describes the group’s founding in 2019 by people “on the right and center-right who were concerned about the health of American democracy.”

“We are what the pundits and the writers would say are the politically homeless,” said Mayo. “We are the most important and critical voting bloc in the country right now, because we have stood up and said, ‘Republican leaders, Democratic leaders, you cannot count on our votes in November. We may have voted with you in the primaries. But if you abandon our principles, you cannot count on our votes simply because you are a Republican.’”

Among the speakers at the event was Charlie Sykes, who was prompted to leave a long career in conservative talk radio by Trump’s election in 2016.

The Republican party is in the midst of “a wrenching change,” abandoning free markets and international engagement, said Sykes. “I don’t think we can overstate the enormity of the moment that we’re in right now.”

Sykes now edits the anti-Trump political news and commentary outlet The Bulwark.

“This is a party that is very, very clearly intending on forcibly deporting perhaps 10 million human beings when they get into power,” he said. “Which means you may be a couple of years away from one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time. We better talk about it.”

Wisconsin’s easy embrace of Trump

One of the few Wisconsin residents at the event besides Sykes was James Wigderson, a widely followed conservative writer who has been outspoken not just against Trump but against leaders of the state Republican Party and its most visible politicians, including those he once supported.

“I don’t see any organized opposition to Trump on the right in Wisconsin,” Wigderson says. “I just see the gradual erosion of Republican  support in the suburbs that I’ve been watching from election cycle to election cycle. It’s falling without any organization or anything in the state that’s presenting a clear alternative.”

Wisconsin Republicans’ effortless shift to line up behind Trump even though he lost the state’s 2016 GOP primary had an important precedent, Wigderson believes: The state party establishment’s “seamless” embrace of the tea party movement in the previous decade.

In other states, “there was a definite tension” between tea party supporters and the local Republican establishment, he observed, but not so much in Wisconsin.

“Reince Priebus” — the state GOP chair at the time — “made a point of reaching out to the tea party and welcoming them into the Republican Party,” Wigderson says. “When Donald Trump came along, it was just a natural progression for that next step.”

Throughout the Principles First event, Wigderson listened intently, recording the conversation and making notes.

“I think, unfortunately, there’s still a muddle of views,” he said in an interview a day later. “And there doesn’t seem to be a clear path forward yet for anybody that’s conservative, but is anti-Trump.”

A wide range of perspectives

Anti-Trump conservatives came in all flavors during the three-hour session.

One was Amanda Stewart Sprowls, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group made up of supporters of Trump’s primary challenger, Nikki Haley.

In a panel discussion, Sprowls said she voted for Trump twice, but she’s finished with the former president. She pointed to his repeated infidelities in his marriages and her skepticism of his business practices.

“Is he trustworthy? No. Is he honorable? No. Will he pay his contractors? Well, no, right? There is no surprise in any of that,” she said. “And I think that as women … and as Haley voters, I think a lot of us understood that we just want better.”

Sprowls said that she might cast a write-in vote rather than voting for Democrats in November, however.

Sprowls mentioned in passing that she was a pro-choice Republican on abortion rights.

On the other hand, Kendal Unruh of Colorado, an evangelical Christian, said she has always opposed Trump but worked on the 2016 Republican platform committee to ensure the platform included language affirming “the fundamental right to life.”

Unruh criticized the party’s 2024 platform for muting its language on abortion and scorned “the Trump talking point of ‘platforms don’t matter.’”

She could never vote for a Democrat, Unruh said: “What do they represent to a value system that I share?”

And she left the Republican Party for much the same reason: “They certainly have elected the most immoral man probably in the history of the presidency,” Unruh said.

Stephanie Sharp is a cofounder of the super PAC Women4US with the goal of mobilizing women voters in swing states, including Wisconsin, to vote against Trump.

“There are not enough Republicans to elect Donald Trump,” she said. “There are not enough Democrats to elect whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being. They have to have the middle — it’s just math.”

Republicans for Democrats

Mayo said that “we’re gonna have to do everything we can to make sure we keep things on the track in November” — but he steered clear of an outright endorsement of the Democratic ticket.

The stars of the night weren’t so reticent. Several also forecast the collapse of the Republican Party, especially if Trump loses — as they hope he will.

“You either believe in this moment that he is a threat to our democracy or you don’t — stop there,” said Joe Walsh, a one-time tea party congressman from Illinois who voted for Trump in 2016 but subsequently renounced him.

“He stood [before] the country a month ago and he said, ‘If I lose, I won’t accept the results,’” Walsh said. Donald Trump Jr. suggested this week that if his father loses in November it would be because the election was stolen, he added.

“That is an attack on democracy,” Walsh said. “You either believe it, folks, or you don’t. And if you believe it, you have to vote for the only person who can defeat that man — and that’s the Democratic nominee, no matter who the hell it is.”

George Conway, now divorced from Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway after he spent most of Trump’s term in office publicly criticizing him, said he only understood Trump’s behavior after reading psychological analyses of the former president. Conway pulled out a pair of posters listing the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

“When you combine these two, this explains everything about Donald Trump,” Conway said. “It explains his criminality, the fact that he’s a rapist and a  convicted felon, that he tried to overthrow democracy, explains his love for authoritarianism, his desire for vengeance, explains his racism, his misogyny — everything comes down to the fact that he is a narcissistic sociopath.”

Michael Steele, the first Black chair of the Republican National Committee, who parted ways with the party leadership after Trump’s rise in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump “is not worth the paper his name is written on,” he said. “Because he doesn’t care about you in this room. He doesn’t care about your neighbors, your family, your community. He doesn’t care about this country. He cares about himself.”

Steele said he would vote for Biden again.

“You cannot give up on us,” he said. “And I know it’s not easy. Right now, the Republican Party that I led, in which I was a county chairman, state chairman and elected official, needs the biggest political enema it has ever seen.

“And the only way they get it is if we give it to them. And the only way we give it to them is to vote.”

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