The vast, vast majority of never Trumpers are Neo-cons - eg: Neo Cons try to make peace with "unfit" president. McCain, Kristol, Bush II, Boot, Rove, etc - all neo-cons that hate Trump.
And while the AHCA is a bad bill, it is still much better than the ACA and given the current makeup of the Senate, your choices are either ACA or AHCA (or even closer to ACA than AHCA) for the meantime.
You’e simply wrong. You’re not telling the truth. Most of the Fox people were promoting Trump during the primaries. Megyn Kelly wasn’t (one reason she’s no longer there), and O’Reilly studiously tried to stay neutral but did detailed coverage every time Trump coughed, usually favorable. Hannity was in the tank, still is, and most of the others (Bolling, Guilfoyle, Baier, etc.) were highly partisan Trumpers from the beginning. Most of their panelists were at lest soft Trumpers.
The other channels didn’t carry every moment of every Trump rally unfiltered the way Fox did. And it was very hard for any other candidate to get time on Fox. It was noticed by many people. Go back through the threads from the primaries. Many of us were noting this phenomenon at the time.
As to “The vast, vast majority of never Trumpers are Neo-cons”, that’s just not so. While there is that branch — and you cite many of them — there were also the people who despise neocon RINOs even more than Trumpers do, but saw Trump as a progressive: Lowry and the National Review crowd, Beck, Ben Shapiro, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, other conservatives of that ilk who are anything but neocons, but also could not bring themselves to vote for Trump for entirely different reasons. (Many, unlike the neocons, have been fairly supportive of the President these days, although not universally so and obviously not on everything.)
Sasse and Lee are two of only three Senators with lifetime 100 percent ratings from ACU. (The other, FTR, is Ted Cruz, whom many FReepers seem to want to oust.)
AHCA is absolutely NOT “much better than the ACA.’ It isn’t repeal or replacement, simply a little tinkering around the edges of 0bamacare. All major features of 0bamacare remain in place. THAT IS NOT WHAT REPUBLICANS PROMISED US, and for Trump to throw his weight behind that is disappointing. Get a better bill.
Even if we can’t get full repeal (which passed both houses at least once and went to the Oval Office, where Zero killed it), at least get a better bill than either AHCA or the even-worse Senate monstrosity. The Cruz compromise looks like it might be promising, and it moves further away from 0bamacare than either the House or Senate bill. I haven’t seen President Trump say one word in support of something along those lines, but he pushed hard for the AHCA disaster.
Or why not the Sasse solution, which President Trump tweeted support for? — repeal now, replace later. It was great that the president endorsed that, and most of the so-called “Never Trump” people praised him for it (and for many other things.)
Further, as the author of “The Art of the Deal” must know, you begin any negotiation by asking for EVERYTHING — or at lest much more than you are expecting to get — and you throw away certain things (that perhaps weren’t that important anyway) to get a good deal, even if it’s an imperfect compromise. But when you start with the compromise position (i.e., AHCA), all you do is negotiate your way to something worse than that (i.e., the Senate monstrosity.)
You Ever Trumpers who blindly support anything he says and does, even things you would have opposed from President McCain or President Romney, amuse me.
It’s not about “defending your guy” at all costs — it’s about getting our ideas enacted as much as we can. President Trump has been very helpful on that is a number of areas but not helpful in some others. When he is moving our principles forward, it’s our job to back him up as strongly as we can. But when he’s backing things that undermine our principles,it’s our job to oppose that — again, as strongly as we can.
There are too many in the media who just oppose the President automaticlly, and a smaller number (although many) who support him automatically (and blindly.) Most people fall into neither camp, and I think that is the right position to hold.