Why conservatives failed to stop Donald Trump

It's not that Trump is a good candidate. It's that conservatives can't stop their bickering for long enough to rally around someone better.

John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz could not beat Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Photo illustration | Images courtesy of Joe Raedle, Andrew Burton, Darren McCollester, and Ty Wright for Getty Images)

With the Republican National Convention in full swing this week, it's all but certain Donald Trump will soon go from "presumptive" Republican nominee to just the Republican nominee. As a card-carrying founding charter member of #NeverTrump, the hashtag-based movement to prevent Trump from winning the nomination, this fills me with despair. Clearly, we've failed. (I know, I know. Who thought we could be stopped when we had a hashtag on our side?)

But there are many reasons why #NeverTrump never worked. The sheer number of candidates vying for the Republican nomination allowed Trump to win primaries despite having only 30 percent of the vote early on. All the candidates were waiting for someone else to attack Trump instead of doing it themselves (except for Jeb Bush, who did it in his hapless Jeb way), much to the detriment of the entire group. It was a sort of political version of the prisoner's dilemma. And by the time they finally started working together to bring him down, it was too late.

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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writing has appeared at Forbes, The Atlantic, First Things, Commentary Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Federalist, Quartz, and other places. He lives in Paris with his beloved wife and daughter.