MILWAUKEE — While 2,500 Republican Party delegates gathered to nominate Donald Trump at the party convention in Milwaukee, a group of conservative anti-Trump activists gathered four blocks away to talk about the existential threat the GOP candidate poses to the country.
The event was organized by Principles firstwhich calls itself a “national grassroots movement of pro-Democratic, anti-Trump conservatives.” Over the course of three hours, we had about 100 people visit.
“The Republican Party is sick, of course — it has been misled by populist demagogues into abandoning its principles,” said Heath Mayo, president and founder of the grouphe told the crowd at Best Place, part of the redeveloped Pabst Brewing complicated just west of the convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.
He denounced a convention speaker for saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “was not Vladimir Putin’s fault” but the United States’. “That’s absurd. That’s dangerous,” Mayo said. “That is absolutely antithetical to what the Republican Party has ever stood for.”
He expressed outrage at the platform on which Teamsters President Sean O’Brien delivered “a speech that was totally about class struggle.”
Mayo summed up a recurring sentiment he heard while watching the convention: “There are some Americans—whether by race, religion, job, or occupation—who are true Americans,” while others, for the same reason, “are not really true Americans.”
This is “the single most pernicious new idea in the Republican Party that exists because it goes straight to the heart of what America is supposed to be,” Mayo said. “Where all of us, no matter what race, no matter what religion, no matter who we love, have an equal chance to succeed and realize the interests of this nation. And the Republican Party on this stage has abandoned that time and again in the interest of populist political gain. And that is infuriating.”
“Politically homeless”
The Principles First website describes the group’s formation in 2019 by individuals “from the right and center-right who were concerned about the state of American democracy.”
“We are what pundits and writers would call politically homeless,” Mayo said. “We are the most important and most important voting bloc in the country right now because we stood up and said, ‘Republican leaders, Democratic leaders, you cannot count on our votes in November. We could have voted with you in the primaries. But if you abandon our principles, you cannot count on our votes just because you are Republicans.’”
One of the speakers at the event was Charlie Sykes, who stepped away from a long career in conservative radio after Trump’s election in 2016.
The Republican Party is in the midst of a “painful transition” as it abandons free markets and international engagement, Sykes said. “I don’t think we can overstate the enormity of the moment we’re in.”
Sykes is currently the editor of the anti-Trump news and commentary site The Bulwark.
“This is a party that very, very clearly intends to forcibly deport perhaps 10 million people when they come to power,” he said. “Which means you could be a few years away from one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of our time. We better talk about that.”
Wisconsin Takes Trump Easy
Besides Sykes, one of the few Wisconsin residents at the event was James Wigderson, a widely acclaimed conservative writer who has been outspoken not only against Trump but also against the state’s Republican Party leaders and its most prominent politicians, including some he once supported.
“I don’t see any organized opposition to Trump on the right in Wisconsin,” Wigderson says. “I just see a gradual erosion of support for Republicans in the suburbs that I see from election cycle to election cycle. It’s declining without any organization or anything in the state that presents a clear alternative.”
Wigderson believes the seamless shift by Wisconsin Republicans who supported Trump even though he lost the state’s 2016 GOP primary had an critical precedent: the state’s party establishment’s “smooth” embrace of the Tea Party movement over the previous decade.
In other states, he noted, “there was clearly tension” between Tea Party supporters and the local Republican Party establishment, but not in Wisconsin.
“Reince Priebus,” then the state Republican Party chairman, “made it a point of honor to reach out to the Tea Party and welcome them into the Republican Party,” Wigderson says. “When Donald Trump came along, it was just a natural next step.”
Throughout the Principles First event, Wigderson listened attentively, transcribed the conversation, and took notes.
“I think, unfortunately, there’s still a mess of views,” he said in an interview a day later. “And it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear path forward yet for anyone who’s conservative but anti-Trump.”
A wide range of perspectives
The three-hour session featured anti-Trump conservatives from across the board.
One of them was Amanda Stewart Sprowls, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group, a group composed of supporters of Nikki Haley, Trump’s main rival in the primaries.
During the panel discussion, Sprowls said she voted for Trump twice but is done with the former president. She cited his repeated marital infidelities and her skepticism about his business practices.
“Is he trustworthy? No. Is he honorable? No. Will he pay his contractors? Well, no, right? There’s nothing surprising about that,” she said. “And I think as women… and as Haley voters, I think a lot of us have come to understand that we just want something better.”
However, Sprowls said she may vote for independent candidates in November rather than vote for a Democrat.
Sprowls casually mentioned that she is a Republican who supports abortion rights.
On the other hand, Kendal Unruh of Colorado, an evangelical Christian, said she has always opposed Trump but worked on the Republican Party’s 2016 Approach Committee to ensure the agenda included provisions affirming the “fundamental right to life.”
Unruh criticized the party’s 2024 platform for its muted language on abortion and dismissed “Trump’s ‘platforms don’t matter’ theme.”
She could never vote for a Democrat, Unruh said: “What do they represent in terms of the value system I share?”
And she left the Republican Party for a very similar reason: “They certainly elected the most immoral man in the history of the presidency,” Unruh said.
Stephanie Sharp is the co-founder of the super PAC Women4US, which aims to mobilize women voters in key battleground states, including Wisconsin, to vote against Trump.
“There aren’t enough Republicans to elect Donald Trump,” she said. “There aren’t enough Democrats to elect the Democratic candidate who ends up being elected. They have to have a middle ground — it’s just math.”
Republicans for Democrats
Mayo said that “we’re going to have to do everything we can to make sure that everything goes according to plan in November” — but he did not openly endorse the Democratic nominee.
The evening’s stars were not as reserved. Several also predicted the fall of the Republican Party, especially if Trump loses—as they hope he will.
“Either you believe at this point that he is a threat to our democracy or you don’t — end it,” said Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who voted for Trump in 2016 but later disowned him.
“Steel [before] country a month ago and said, “If I lose, I will not accept the results,” Walsh said. Donald Trump Jr. suggested this week that if his father loses in November, it will be because the election was stolen, he added.
“This is an attack on democracy,” Walsh said. “Either you believe it, people, or you don’t. And if you believe it, you have to vote for the only person who can beat this man — and that’s the Democratic candidate, no matter who the hell he is.”
George Conway, now divorced from Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, after spending much of Trump’s term publicly criticizing him, said he only understood Trump’s behavior after reading psychological analyses of the former president. Conway pulled out a pair of posters listing diagnostic criteria for narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.
“When you put those two things together, it explains Donald Trump,” Conway said. “It explains his criminality, it explains the fact that he’s a rapist and a convicted felon, it explains his love of authoritarianism, it explains his desire for revenge, it explains his racism, it explains his misogyny — it all comes down to the fact that he’s a narcissistic sociopath.”
Michael Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee who parted ways with the party leadership after Trump’s rise in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump “is not worth the paper his name is written on,” he said. “Because you don’t care about him in this room. You don’t care about his neighbors, you don’t care about his family, you don’t care about his community. He doesn’t care about this country. He cares about himself.”
Steele said he will vote for Biden again.
“You can’t abandon us,” he said. “And I know it’s not effortless. Right now, the Republican Party that I led, that I was a county chairman, a state chairman, an elected official, needs the biggest political enema it’s ever seen.
“And the only way they’re going to get it is if we give it to them. And the only way we’re going to give it to them is if they vote.”
