As midterms approach, conservative ‘Never Trumpers’ find allies outside the lines

Max Boot’s life changed the moment Donald Trump announced for president.

Suddenly, the lifelong conservative Republican – historian, author, foreign-policy adviser to three GOP presidential candidates – began to question his place in his adopted home. Mr. Boot, who is Jewish, had fled the Soviet Union as a boy with his family, and here was a major Republican contender tarring immigrants in the ugliest of terms.

“I was outraged when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, denouncing Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers, and my outrage has not diminished at all since,” says Boot, now a columnist at The Washington Post, in an interview. “Writing is my therapy.”

Boot quit the Republican Party, and now decries President Trump regularly on cable TV alongside Democrats and other elite “Never Trumpers,” some still inside the GOP tent, others in the political wilderness like Boot. The term “strange bedfellows” almost no longer applies; at this point, these one-time ideological adversaries have the on-screen rapport of old friends.

“It’s a very odd place to be in,” says Florida-based GOP consultant Rick Wilson, another vocal Trump