When Donald Trump won his first presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, there were Republicans — quite a few, in fact — who, after initially resisting his hold over the party, succumbed to the allure of their new leader. Some within the Trump team derided these latecomers as the Nov. 9 Club: those who signed on only when victory was secure and influence was sought. Trump prizes fealty above all, remember, so members of that club would need to work overtime to prove their devotion to the president, to MAGA, to what Trumpism would become.
The historic rejection of Trump’s second term in the midterm elections on Nov. 3, a decade later, does not equal the end of Trumpism — Stephen Miller’s elevation to White House chief of staff suggests the president is not backing down — but it does signal the beginning of its end. As Trumpism begins its inexorable decline in our political life, there will be Republicans who strive to separate themselves from what the president has meant for country and for party, who will attempt a long, improbable trek back to respectability.
Already we are hearing the anti-Trump recriminations from party strategists and politicians. “This is all about him.” “Trump did this.” “It is now time to make America good again.” Most notably, Vice President JD Vance has begun carving out some personal space, blaming the atrocious Republican showing on the Iran war and calling for an “honest conversation” about it. (Whenever politicians urge an honest conversation about something, it’s a sign that they were less than honest about it previously.)
Welcome to the Nov. 4 Club, made up of Republicans who insist that they’ve finally had enough or that all along they were privately concerned, personally appalled, secretly dismayed or whatever euphemism best elides the abdication of principle for expediency.
It’s too late for them to be Never Trump. But could they credibly claim to be Never Again Trump?
It’s a tricky move, to apologize for being an apologist. There is too much evidence, too much accumulated memory. “Unite the Right” and “Access Hollywood.” Ukraine and the “perfect” call. The 2020 party platform that pledged to “enthusiastically support the president’s ‘America first’ agenda.” The farce of election denial and the travesty of Jan. 6. Operations Midway Blitz and Metro Surge. Renee Good and Alex Pretti and Lorenzo Salgado. The war against Iran and the submission to Vladimir Putin. DOGE and the endless campaign of political revenge. The corruption of the presidency to amass enormous personal wealth.
How do you summon up shame for so many years of shamelessness? It’s a challenge for all countries emerging from the cynicism of illiberal rule, for all voters realizing they’ve been had, for all the politicians who wallowed in so much muck that they grew accustomed to the stench.
For some, it will be impossible, even embarrassing, to keep Trump at arm’s length. Vance, for example, who long ago likened Trump to Hitler and to “cultural heroin,” is far too bound to the regime, too eager for a promotion, too memorable as MAGA’s highest-ranking smirk to bow out now. The vice president can pray that the Iran war is his party’s only problem, but the guy who promoted lies about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, who publicly supported fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and who defended the most reviled attack ad in the 2026 midterms might want to try that “honest conversation” with himself.
One day you’re riding the Trump train; the next, you find yourself tied to the tracks.
Just as victory has a way of obscuring principle, so defeat has a way of reordering priorities. Even before the midterms, some Republicans were striving to unwind embarrassing associations — suddenly proclaiming their bipartisanship, ducking the MAGA label or downing Canadian beer. Ron DeSantis, who won his first term as Florida governor with an ad in which he read Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” to his children, now says the midterms were “an extinction-level event” for his party and a rejection of, as he unsubtly put it, “Republicans in Washington.”
How should Americans regard these epiphanies? Just as some progressives now cringe at the excesses of Woke 1, what should we make of Republican enablers who might smile ruefully and say that MAGA, you know, just went a little crazy for a while?
They will need a better excuse than that.
Other explanations are being proffered. In his recent book, “Profiles in Cowardice,” Jacob Weisberg examines figures from politics, business, media, academia and law who gave in to Trump during this second term, even when they supposedly knew better. Calling out the likes of Jeff Bezos, Megyn Kelly, Mitch McConnell and John Roberts, Weisberg laments the “cascade of surrenders” from powerful people who lacked “political courage in a moment of moral vulnerability.”
I’m sure many of the politicians and public figures who gave in to Trump or restrained their criticism did so out of fear — for their jobs, their businesses, their fortunes, even their personal safety. But I’m not sure cowardice is the most damning accusation Weisberg could level against some of his subjects. Bezos wanted to win government contracts; Kelly hoped to restore her media cachet; McConnell aspired to remake the federal judiciary; Roberts sought to shift the balance of power decisively toward the executive branch. The vehicle for these desires, and the price they had to pay for them, was to provide support, in different ways, to Trump.
These were self-interested trade-offs, not flags of surrender. There is a difference between cowardice and opportunism.
Democrats, flush with temporary victory, may be tempted to embark on their own campaign of retribution against the acolytes and accomplices of the Trump era. They’ll couch it as high-minded accountability, and I hope they mean it.
Accountability is vital in a democracy, and the president’s former and current minions will have to stand before Congress and answer for their incompetence or corruption. (When the Republican Party sent us the Trump administration, it did not send its best.) We need to hear more from Pete Hegseth about the conduct and the origins of the Iran war, from Kristi Noem about her mismanagement of the Department of Homeland Security, from Kash Patel about his antics at the F.B.I. and from Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche about the politicizing of the Justice Department.
There will never be enough Nov. 4s for all those who traded away democratic integrity and common decency for personal ambition, financial advantage and policy preferences. They should have a hard time winning grace or making amends. “Forgive them, Father, for they knew exactly what they were doing” is an unpersuasive case for absolution, no matter how many pardons the president grants or how many meditations on Catholicism the vice president writes.
In his 2019 book, “American Carnage,” Tim Alberta chronicled the Republican Party’s civil war over Trump and its capitulation to him. Back then, the new president’s electoral victory “ended the squabbling that had defined the G.O.P. in the post-Bush era,” Alberta wrote, “replacing disputes over policy and principles with a simpler question that spoke to the dueling identities in the party: ‘Are you with Trump or not?’”
As Trump begins to fade — weighed down by war, inflation, unpopularity and these midterms, not to mention the 22nd Amendment — the movement’s energy will dissipate, and new identities and new questions will surface. MAGA will not disappear altogether; it has been too entrenched in the G.O.P. for too long. But a successor to the movement’s leadership, if one emerges, would claim just a narrow slice of a struggling party. Much like the Democrats must settle on an agenda beyond their anti-Trump opposition, so must Republicans determine what they stand for other than attachment to an aging, out-of-touch, lame duck.
The questions for Republican officials and politicians will no longer be “Are you with Trump or not?” Any party leaders backtracking on their allegiance to the president have some fessing up to do. If you were a MAGA true believer, what finally made you change? If you were an opportunist, how can you ever earn back public trust?
Even with the fracturing of the MAGA coalition, it is now clear that authoritarian politics can happen here and that the impulses of Trumpism are more normal, more American, than we might want to admit. That knowledge should haunt a nation too trusting in the arc of its history. But there is a difference between the leaders who deliberately enabled lawlessness and deceit, who deployed racism and cruelty as instruments of politics and policy, and the voters who, for so many different reasons, went along with it. If ordinary Americans who voted for Trump once, twice or even three times now show willingness to leave MAGA behind, they should not be met with “deplorables”-style disdain. If they are, the divides of the past decade will only widen and deepen.
Writing early in Trump’s first term, Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan economist and journalist, recalled how gleefully Hugo Chávez’s opponents denigrated the regime’s partisans, and he cautioned Trump’s opponents against doing the same. “We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chávez’s electoral base. ‘Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts,’ we’d say.” As a result, “whole generations were split in two,” Rondón wrote. “A sense of shared culture was wiped out.”
It’s hard to stop pontificating and recriminating, especially when your side feels vindicated by elections and by history. But to keep the American project going beyond these first 250 years, we need to try. “Don’t feed polarization, disarm it,” Rondón urged. “This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind.”
Trump has given us theater for a decade now — a theater of cruelty, grievance, corruption and vulgarity — and no one should minimize the real injuries that people have suffered by his hand. Rapprochement does not require amnesia, and right now there is so much to investigate and legislate, so many to hold to account.
But as Trump begins his slow, ungraceful exit — a repudiated politician and debased human being — I hope that some of his former supporters, those who come to see themselves more as “Americans first” than “America first,” can join with some of his former antagonists in a long, improbable trek toward reflection, even reconciliation.
That’s a Nov. 4 Club worth joining.
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