Friend,

I was all geared up to fire off a bunch of jokes about Matt Gaetz and mock Trump’s impending war plans over Greenland and Panama, but what really got me over the past few weeks has been the absolutely feckless, ridiculous level of capitulation I’ve seen from… basically everyone who needs to be fighting back.

What folks miss about being “done” with “Never Trump” is that the alternative is Trump. It’s capitulation.

Folding to Trump? It’s part of a long tradition of self-described conservatives who dress up their aesthetic distaste for Donald Trump in polite excuses to accommodate his assaults on our republic—his low character, casual criminality, and the damage he’s inflicted on our institutions and political culture.

Trump and his acolytes aren’t offering policy debate or thoughtful governance. They promise an even darker carnival of cruelty and revenge. Anyone taking any path other than spirited, long-term opposition, is enabling them.

Never Trump was never easy.

Some of us who refused to bow faced professional ruin, harassment, and even threats of violence. Still, we held the line against surrender to a leader whose brand of statist, authoritarian instincts has wrecked the rule of law and undermined 250 years of constitutional tradition.

The fallacies you hear are unbelievable to most — but just sound cowardly to me. You’ll hear the fantasy that today’s Trump is a wiser, more disciplined figure. To cast him as potentially statesmanlike isn’t magnanimity — it’s appeasement, thinly disguised as maturity. Men in their late 70s rarely experience moral epiphanies, especially those who’ve shown nothing but contempt for the truth.

Pretending that Never Trumpers “overreacted” to January 6 is willful blindness. That assault on the Capitol wasn’t a momentary lapse; it was a deliberate outcome of the election denialism, sedition, and conspiracy theories that Trump stoked for months. Many of those who cheered it on are now poised to become the next administration’s senior officials.

History doesn’t look kindly on those who dismiss existential threats simply because they’ve grown tiresome.

Conservatives once championed free markets and the rule of law. Now they face a candidate who promises a reign of tariffs, cronyism, and a systematic purge of perceived enemies. Our economic vitality depends on stable institutions, not on an executive’s vendettas.

Yes, our institutions are strained. But who wants to break them entirely? Who aims to fill the government with loyalists bent on turning America into an illiberal, vengeful caricature of its former self?

We sounded the alarm early and often. Trump hasn’t changed; what’s changed is his courtiers' obsequiousness and his enablers' brazenness. Looking away is how democracies fall: not through a single cataclysm but through a slow erosion, aided by polite excuses and reluctant nods.

Never Trump matters because it refuses to normalize the absurd and the abhorrent. To abandon the fight now, simply because it’s taxing or unpopular, is a surrender no serious defender of our nation and our values should contemplate. 

Let the apologists contort themselves. For me, never means never. If I am the last priest of a dead religion, so be it. 

But I know that I am not, because you are reading this message and standing with us on this pirate ship.

We’ll stand, as we always have, against the gravitational pull of a man and a movement intent on hollowing out our Republic from within.

2025 is going to be a big year for this movement. We're not slowing down. We’ve got a whole mess of our usual devious ideas.

But if you take one thing from this email, it’s that we’re not going away. We can’t. We’re in this for the long haul. You see our day by day action. But it’s all part of a larger, longer-term movement that you are already a part of. Sure, they had a big head start. But we’re fighting like hell to catch back up.

So with the new year upon us, I’m asking you to help fund our work through 2025. It’s up to all of us to build this thing, and I’m honored you’re still with us in the fight.

-Rick