GOP’s Stop-Trump fever breaks

[The Mikado]

The #NeverTrump crowd has to ask themselves this: If Trump is the Republican nominee, are they willing to go all the way to vote against him.

That's the definition of #NeverTrump, yes.  As distinct from the people who have been trying to stop Trump from getting the nomination, but have never ruled out voting for him in the general election.

AFAIK, no one prominent who's actually #NeverTrump (that is, who's been saying that they'll vote against Trump in the GE) has yet doubled back on that commitment and said that they're willing to vote for Trump in the GE after all.

Rubio issued several "#NeverTrump" tweets during his campaign at one point, and is now saying he'll probably support Trump in the general.

EDIT: Here's one:
https://mobile.twitter.com/marcorubio/status/703583966973075457

He used a #NeverTrump hashtag without actually knowing what it meant.  When he was asked about it very soon afterward, he said that he thought #NeverTrump just meant that he would never vote for him in the primary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3kUlpyBwZc

The actual #NeverTrump people, those who said they'd never vote for Trump in the GE like Romney, Baker, Whitman, Sasse, and a bunch of conservative media personalities like many of those at National Review....I'm unaware of a single one of them going back on their earlier statements and now saying that they'll vote for Trump in the GE.  Some of them probably will, sure, but for now #NeverTrump is intact.

I bet the "actual" #NeverTrump crowd isn't that big.

The rest are a bunch of phonies.

No we're not.  We are just saying that he would be a terrible and completely unacceptable choice to be the de facto leader of conservatism, but that he would still be miles better than Hillary.

Never definitely implies never. It should have been #NotTrump or something. Of course Hillary is a gift to the Republican party for unity.

Again, #NeverTrump as used by most people using the hashtag really means never.  There are some interlopers like Rubio, who used the hashtag when they didn't understand what it meant.  But the original intention of the hashtag was "I'm not voting for Trump even in the general election".

As I have said, the "actual" #NeverTrump crowd is relatively small.

The rest are a bunch of phonies.

Of course it's a small group of people...it's a movement among op-ed columnists and media elites (consultants etc.) in the conservative press. That's a few thousand people, tops, in the United States. The size of the group was never the issue, the prominence of its membership was.

[The Mikado]

Steve Deace ‎@SteveDeaceShow
Apparently @secupp has a #NeverTrump list to see who keeps their word to the end. You can sign my name in blood.
3:46 PM - 3 May 2016

I mean, say what you will, but I'm not seeing Steve Deace, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Rick Wilson, Liz Mair, Amanda Carpenter, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, or the rest of that "Never Trump" gang changing their tune.

Their problem is that they're about a dozen irrelevant people, but they're also pretty much the sum total of the #NeverTrump movement, a movement that never really existed outside of the conservative press.

There's all this "Will #NeverTrump bend the knee" talk and I really don't think it will. The problem is that #NeverTrump probably never hit the triple digits in terms of actual membership.