Greetings dear listeners this is Jonah Goldberg host of the Remnant Podcast which is brought

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So we're reverting back to you know it seems like every other show since we've been on lockdown has either been a

return of a fan favorite on this podcast people like Jim Garrity and Lyman Stone or someone that we've wanted to have on for a very long time and finally thanks to this

unusual situation that we're in we can now get and so today that is Stephen Tellas who is both a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Nascannon Center

and he is also the co-author of a book called Never Trump the Revolt of the Conservative elites is by Robert P. Saldon and Stephen. So Stephen welcome to the Remnant.

Happy to be here Jonah a long time listener first time caller and we should just sort of get it out there in the open right now is that I am one of the many people

somewhat problematically but for the sake the purposes of your book totally understandable that you interviewed as a Never Trumper and so just people should know that it's not just a book I'm interested in it's a book I'm in and whatever conflicts people see in that they can talk amongst themselves about.

So what is your book and throughout the book there's a little bit of a question about what constitutes the subject of analysis right because the term itself was controversial and there are people who were

critics of the Republican they're conservative critics of Trump who didn't like the term I thought the term sort of died after the election but for our purposes the book is really about sort of persistent

critics of Trump right and in in this world regardless of what people call themselves you can observe behaviorally which of these camps people are in fairly distinctly and in the book we talk about people who are sort of somewhere in between but that was a pretty unstable place to be for the most part right which is you know which is a function of our general polarization and politics today yeah I mean and just you know I mean because I get this all the time I mean the people

people who talk about Never Trump the most are the people who insist that Never Trump doesn't exist anymore and that never really mattered but at the same time and stabbing us in the back and destroying the country

it's a very strange sort of cognitive dissonance on certain parts of the right is that you know I picture someone screaming incredibly loudly

God damn it you're irrelevant I hate you as they follow you around a shopping mall or something um but

for my own purposes I never really loved I use the term Never Trump before the election in some tweets and that kind of thing I guess I probably used in some columns I'd have to go back and look but

the thing is it basically emerged as a hashtag and you know there's going to be a lot of

different points of view captured in a essentially a bumper sticker phrase like that and so there are different there many rooms in the mansion of Never Trump let's put it in

that way um but so what what is your basic what is your so like listeners should know you you're one of these guys that I go to about

the role of parties you know there's a constant theme on this podcast about you know how the parties are weak how

institutions are weak and yet we live in this popular stage where we're constantly being told they're too

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