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And this aspect of conservatism — I like a lot of people in it. Don\u2019t misunderstand me, now. This aspect of conservatism has been around a long, long time. And, look, people may not like hearing it, but there are some of these institutions that do have to fundraise, and they do have to accept donations in order to stay viable and for their people that work there to get paid. So that\u2019s something that has to be very, very well guarded and protected. And above all, the reputation must remain intact. That group is where real conservatism is located. That is where the intellectual truths, the sacred screeds, the Red Sea scrolls of conservatism are maintained within that group of people. <\/p>\n
And if you\u2019re not in that group of people and are conservative, you\u2019re okay, but you are an outlier. So here comes Trump. And many — not all — but many of the people who have been devoted to that branch of conservatism found Trump very attractive, and they began to shift to Trump. Well, the gatekeepers of conservatism said, “Wait a minute. Trump\u2019s not conservative. This is dangerous. We can\u2019t have conservatism redefined as what Trump is. Trump is a populist. Populism isn\u2019t conservatism. This is terrible. This is terrible.” <\/p>\n
Their life\u2019s work has been devoted to maintaining conservatism, promoting it, implementing it as best they can, and keeping it defined in an intellectual, ideological purity. And so here comes a bull in a china shop within Donald Trump, and many people are calling him conservative, and the true arbiters are bothered by that; they don\u2019t think he is. They don\u2019t want conservatism to get redefined, misdefined, even though many of those people, many of these people I\u2019m talking about have people in \u2019em who tell us we gotta forget Reagan, the era of Reagan is over, they warn us. We must move forward. The left never says the era of FDR is over, by the way. <\/p>\n
So Trump comes along and represents a threat to, in some cases, a lifetime of work, of defining conservatism, protecting it, writing about it, talking about it, implementing it, influencing power brokers to be conservative. Here comes Trump just stealing some of it, and he\u2019s not even a conservative, they say. So they had to oppose him. And they had to oppose him in a rock-solid, rock-ribbed way on a number of bases, but one of the bases on which they sought to protect it was they could not allow for Trump to in any way redefine conservatism in a way that would expose them as unnecessary going forward. <\/p>\n
So the Never Trumpers, there are many people in the group and they have very many different reasons for being opposed to Trump, but now Trump is coming along and as the emailer asked me about here\u2019s Trump nominating all these people that, I mean, if you\u2019re a doctrinaire conservative, you\u2019re gonna have a tough time opposing any of these people. I mean, Betsy DeVos at education is prime. I mean, there\u2019s no way! We might not have even gotten that with a Bush! And there\u2019s no way that we would have gotten Tom Price, somebody who is adamantly anti-Obama and maybe got some problem with Medicare.<\/p>\n