A few weeks ago, Mike Pence did what no other vice president in the modern era has done: He refused to endorse the re-election of the president under whom he served. When it comes to alumni of Donald Trump’s administration, Mr. Pence is hardly alone; the list of high-ranking officials who worked for Mr. Trump and have implied or outright stated that they can’t support their former boss under any circumstances has grown to an astonishing length.
The list of prominent Republican figures who did not serve Mr. Trump and regard him as unacceptable is equally impressive. It includes the 2012 Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, the former speaker of the House Paul Ryan, as well as Liz Cheney, who served in the House Republican leadership, and her father, the former vice president Dick Cheney, who summarized the situation bluntly: “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Despite Mr. Trump’s almost effortless sweep of the Republican nomination contest, there remain deep pockets of resistance to him in the ranks. More than a fifth of voters in the Republican primaries supported Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina; among many of them, there is intense opposition to Mr. Trump’s presidential run. And as The Washington Post points out, nearly one in five Republican primary voters across four contests on April 2 voted for an option other than Mr. Trump — even though he was the only Republican still campaigning at that point.
So two things are happening at once: The Republican Party is thoroughly MAGA and will be for the foreseeable future, and there is a small but influential number of Republicans who are deeply opposed to what their party has become but not prepared to shed their political identity and join the Democrats.
For this group, one viable course remains: create a Republican Party in exile, a counterestablishment dedicated to recapturing the party from the outside.
In world history, exiles, expatriates and their movements have played important roles in fighting unjust regimes. They bring detailed knowledge of their country and its politics to bear on efforts to change the government. They assemble agendas and personnel for its eventual replacement. They provide a rallying point and inspiration for regime opponents who otherwise might succumb to fatalism and fatigue. They connect and coordinate disparate exile factions.
Not least important, they show the world that they are committed to the fight and will not accept the legitimacy or inevitability of the current regime. To get a sense of the inspiration they can provide, think of Charles de Gaulle and Free France, the government in exile that was established in London after France fell during World War II.
There are, of course, profound differences between the task faced by de Gaulle in 1940 and the problem of reconquering the Republican Party today. But they share this position: Psychologically, an exile movement must recognize that it does not have a place in the system and must work from outside it.
That is a conceptual bridge that many anti-MAGA Republicans have been unready to cross. Yes, they have acknowledged the dominance of MAGA in the party. Yet they have hoped to act effectively as a faction within it.
Until now, Republicans who opposed Mr. Trump could point to state and local politics, where non-MAGA Republicans — and, much more rarely, anti-MAGA Republicans — have won elections, sustaining a Republican rump faction that holds MAGA at arm’s length. Non-MAGA Republicans believed that the party would feel stung by MAGA’s record of regularly losing elections that Republicans ought to have won, including the loss of the presidency by an incumbent, control of the Senate in the 2020 election cycle and the fizzle in the 2022 midterms, when voters in race after race surgically excised extreme MAGA candidates.
Non-MAGA Republicans expected that the multiple indictments of Mr. Trump would discredit him in the eyes of G.O.P. primary voters or at least lead them to abandon him as a likely loser. They imagined that Mr. Trump’s increasingly unhinged and self-absorbed behavior would alienate his supporters. They supposed that Mr. Trump might lose the nomination if forced into a one-on-one race with a single strong contender. And they thought, if all else failed, that the Republican base might simply grow bored with the stale, repetitive and witless Trump show.
Those suppositions turned out to be wrong, and Ms. Haley’s loss to Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries has extinguished all of them. Mr. Trump will be crowned in July. He commands cultlike loyalty among his MAGA base. He has taken over the machinery of the Republican Party. His election to the White House in November would further consolidate his control of the party, but even if he is defeated, MAGA will not believe it lost fairly and therefore will not willingly relinquish its grip.
Which brings us back to the non-MAGA faction. With its paths blocked inside the party, it can still bring formidable people, resources and ideas to the task of defeating MAGA from the outside, as an exiled party.
What would this mean in practice? A G.O.P. in exile — the Free Republicans, as it were — can be a loose network of organizations, think tanks, politicians, consultants, donors and activists; it can have a more formal structure, with its own national committee, state chairs and staff. It might hold conventions, develop chapters and auxiliaries and approve a platform, or it might rely on a more decentralized strategy that supports and coordinates assorted efforts to build a bench of anti-MAGA talent and ideas. Regardless of how those tactical choices are made, four strategic principles should define the project.
First, the Free G.O.P. should fully accept its exile status. No daydreaming about being welcomed back into the MAGA party any time soon. The project must look beyond the next month, the next year and the next election. It cannot be impatient or easily discouraged.
Second, even as the Free G.O.P. accepts its outsider status — even as it acknowledges MAGA’s control of the Republican Party — it should identify unwaveringly as the true Republican Party and reject the moral legitimacy of the Trump regime. The Free G.O.P. would insist that it, not MAGA, lays claim to the heritage of the party of Lincoln.
Third, the Free G.O.P. should develop an agenda — or, more realistically, a set of agendas — for a post-MAGA future. According to The Hill, Mr. Pence’s political advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, “plans to invest $20 million this year to shape the conservative agenda, an effort to directly counter what Pence had previously described as populism ‘unmoored to conservative principles.’”
The former vice president is putting his name on the line to oppose the Trumpian populism that controls the Republican Party. He and his partners have the right idea: Free Republicans must develop ideas and conversations about what 21st-century conservatism should look like. Looking backward to a pre-Trump G.O.P. won’t succeed.
Fourth and most essential, Free Republicans must set their sights on overthrowing MAGA, not influencing it, partnering with it, bargaining with it, coexisting with it or waiting it out. They must name and explain what Trumpism represents: lawlessness, moral anarchy, conspiratorial thinking and an assault on the Constitution. They must challenge MAGA Republicans in primaries, focusing in particular on state races for governor, attorneys general, state legislators and others. They must be prepared to withstand the hostile machinations of the MAGA Republican Party and the attacks of the Trump movement, which will be relentless. If they do not consistently oppose MAGA, they will be dragged under it.
A party in exile would establish a gathering point for emerging leaders and fresh thinkers. It would be a clearinghouse for resources and strategies with which to assail the MAGA establishment. It would train candidates, build political networks, gather donors and supporters and show the public a brighter future.
And the Free Republican Party would keep the fires of conservatism burning. In its travels from Lincoln to Reagan and the Bushes, the Republican Party has metamorphosed many times, as adaptable parties must. But it has stayed true to certain conservative fundamentals: the rule of law, the value of institutions, the necessity of virtue and (as George Will has said) the belief that the vision of the founders is what American conservatism conserves. Free Republicans can rightly claim title to the party’s ideological crown jewels, which MAGA’s nihilistic flimflam has tossed in the dumpster.
Recent history is replete with examples of seemingly marginal political movements that moved with surprising speed to overthrow exhausted establishments, including Goldwater-Reagan conservatism in the 1960s, supply-side economics in the 1970s, the New Democrats in the 1980s and the Gingrich revolution in the 1990s. If anti-MAGA Republicans unite, they can experience similar success.
Even if MAGA’s grip on the party were irresistible, organizing in opposition would still be worth it, because some things are worth fighting for. But it is also true that the MAGA movement, built on lies and antagonistic to America’s founding principles, is unsustainable. Its unpopularity and indecency will generate openings for challenge and change. The job of the Republican Party in exile is to identify, create and exploit such openings — and above all, to be ready when they appear.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He is the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
