MILWAUKEE — This was supposed to be the Happy Place. There was a beer on tap with that name.
Michael Steele strode to the front of the room at the historic Pabst brewery on Wednesday to hoots and hurrahs. Not so long ago, the silver-tongued former lieutenant governor of Maryland was running the show at the Republican National Convention as the GOP’s national chairman. But when he tried to rile up a crowd of Republican fans with a simple “What’s up?” all he got was tepid nervous laughter. “Really?” he said.
The reaction seemed worrisome for a gathering of Never Trumpers who are typically glad to find a place — any place — where they can be both openly conservative and openly disdainful of the man being nominated just a few blocks down the street. But some of them also aren’t sold on the Democratic nominee, so a diagnosis was in order. Steele seemed disheartened that his fellow travelers weren’t exactly fired up to beat the man atop the GOP ticket.
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“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with anybody in this room right now,” Steele said.
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“I don’t know what the hell your problem is. I don’t know why you have questions or doubts. I don’t understand why anybody outside this room is sitting here wondering, ‘What am I going to do in November?’”
“So I don’t know what the hell your problem is. You need to explain it to me because I don’t get it.”
To recap: President Biden put on a disastrous performance at a debate against former president Donald Trump on June 27, prompting panic among Democrats that his old age and verbal cul-de-sacs are more of a political liability than they previously thought — and igniting a movement to push him out. At one of the former president’s freewheeling rallies in Pennsylvania, a gunman with an AR-style rifle literally shot at him, though Trump escaped with a bloodied ear. That united the Republican Party in officially nominating Trump on Monday, the same day a federal judge also dismissed a case against him. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) once called himself a “Never Trump” guy, and now he’s Trump’s VP pick.
“He just won the election,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said of Trump in Politico after the shooting. “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency,” a senior House Democrat told Axios. Earlier Wednesday, a top House lawmaker became the 23rd congressional Democrat to call on Biden to step down, and as the event started, phones buzzed with more grim news: the president tested positive for the coronavirus for the third time.
The anti-Trumpers at this function put on by the group Principles First are more than happy to explain how they’ve been feeling about all this.
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“Depressed. It’s pretty sad,” said Cass Davey, a 27-year-old electrical engineer from Peoria, Ill., sitting at a table by the entrance to the wooden-walled brewery.
“It’s been rather depressing, actually,” said James Wigderson, a 55-year-old political writer from Waukesha, Wis., who wore a hat that said “Make Red Hats Wearable Again” and recalled attending the RNC in New Orleans in 1988 — “a great year to be a college Republican.”
“I’ve been feeling like a stranger in a strange land,” said Jason Watts, a 47-year-old consultant from Allegan, Mich. He’s here serving as one of four delegates for Nikki Haley — the onetime United Nations ambassador who fiercely attacked Trump on the campaign trail before taking the stage at Fiserv Forum and declaring that her former opponent “has my strong endorsem*nt, period” as Trump smirked from the VIP box.
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Perhaps instead of panel presentations, this gathering might better resemble those clandestine occasions where people arrange the folding chairs in a circle. There’s not a lot of big-name Trump critics at the convention — no Liz Cheney or Mike Pence — but the other members of that endangered species are here. Half the reason Davey came was to see how she could get more politically involved to defeat Trump.
“The other half,” she said, “is therapy session.”
What brings you in here today, America? At the brewery, there was some rationalization and acceptance.
“I am a little bit of a realpolitik person,” said Amanda Stewart Sprowls, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group, at one of the panels. She started blinking insistently and looked down. It felt like she didn’t want the words to leave her mouth. “So I, I condone what she’s doing. I’m — I’m fine with it. I am one of those people who, you know, we do still have to have people who are within the party, working within the system to represent our values.”
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All right. One step at a time. Let’s lean on our coping mechanisms, change our thought patterns.
“Every time you’re tempted with that ‘I’m here on this island,’ and you know, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ — that’s not the right question,” said Charlie Sykes, a longtime political commentator and former host of a conservative radio show here. “That’s not the right question. You aren’t the crazy ones. Right?”
If the calmer heads were here at the brewery, it didn’t seem like there was much left for them to say to the MAGA-minded Republicans down the street.
“Okay, deep breath in,” began Joe Walsh, a tea party guy who U-turned and ran against Trump in 2020, during the panel discussion with Sykes. Then a sobering note: “Anybody that thinks the fever is going to break, that we could return to normal anytime soon, is completely wrong.”
George Conway, the conservative lawyer turned Trump critic turned Biden fundraiser, produced two orange poster boards from a bag during his panel. They were the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. He spent six minutes evaluating You-Know-Who, and you know what he concluded.
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It’s unclear where the Never Trumpers go from here, beyond the platitudes about putting country before party. Biden, up until now, had been the alternative. “Biden can be in his underwear sitting in a corner drooling with covid, and I’d still vote for him,” Steele said, and almost the whole room agreed with that idea, judging by applause.
Others aren’t so sure: Both Davey and Wigderson think he should step down.
“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,” Walsh thundered. (The next day, Steele would post on social media that Democrats “need to administer Last Rites to the Biden Presidency and move the hell on.”)
Watts, the Haley delegate, is still not sure who he’ll vote for in November. He’s been riding the bus with the Trump delegates for an hour and a half each way between Milwaukee and Madison, where the delegation is staying, and listening to the chatter. The election: rigged. This or that person: a fake Republican. The whole time he’s sitting there thinking: “How long before I can get off? Why am I here without my wife? Is this the party that I signed up for?”
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He thinks “kvetching sessions” like this one can only make a difference if the undecided voters like him show up to vote, because he’s not sure the others on the bus with him can be convinced.
“Those people that are saying ‘I’m voting for Trump,’ we’ve probably already lost. It’s those that are on that fence. And there are still a lot of those. They’re on the fence. And I don’t know what other appeals to make. Because you’ve made the existential argument. You’ve made the rational argument. You’ve made every other possible argument under the sun. What is left?”
Steele left the downtrodden with some parting advice.
“I’m good. I hope you’re good. If you’re not: Get good now. And do the right thing this November.”
Okay. Do we feel a little less depressed?
Wigderson kind of shrugged, looking a little resigned.
“I’m not alone,” he said, before exiting out to the Unhappy Place.
