The Never-Trump wing of the Republican Party is sharpening its knives ahead of the 2028 presidential primary.
After losing the 2016 battle to President Donald Trump, members of the establishment wing of the GOP wailed and gnashed their teeth. They labeled Trump and MAGA as racists, started organizations to undermine the movement’s success, and framed every political and cultural argument as a fight for common decency against radicals. A decade later, nothing has changed.
Infamous Never-Trumper Erick Erickson’s Substack essay, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff,” arrived Wednesday, marketed as a pastoral warning about churches and young minds. Unsurprisingly, it was promoted by the same people who feverishly pushed the Trump administration into the Iran War and have spent the last three presidential election cycles claiming that Trump and MAGA were the enemy.
Everyone from David French to Mark Levin urged Americans to read Erickson’s piece, arguing that it was an important warning for what ails the right. But hidden behind the supposed preaching on why the Republican Party is dying of white racial grievance lies the old GOP’s 2028 opening bid in the fight to take the party back from the coalition that beat it in 2016 and again in 2024.
A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 16, 2026
Commentators like Erickson only seem to support Trump and his administration when their policies align with the Bush-era GOP. These people are the ones who belong to the supposed conservatives who managed the American decline and drove voters into the populist movement.
There is a point to be made that some on the right court ugliness on purpose. Still, none of that justifies packing an anti-globalist, anti-forever-war voter-driven revolt into one bottle marked “racial grievance.” The old GOP has always focused on the worst comments in the new coalition, declaring it a manifesto. That trick started their careers against the Tea Party and against MAGA. However, they are still not able to successfully explain why their supposed respectable alternative sent American soldiers to die in the Middle East, why immigrants should replace citizens, and why a professional class is allowed to talk about Americans as if they are only a number on a workforce spreadsheet. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
If you oppose the core tenets of their political faith, all of a sudden, you become lumped in with Nazism and Franco. In their view, the only conservatism that should be left standing is the kind that can survive a D.C. donor dinner.
