They publicly denounced him. Now NeverTrumpers want jobs in his White House.

Yochi Dreazen · Friday, November 11, 2016, 10:57 am

During the 2016 presidential campaign, former Mitt Romney adviser Bryan McGrath helped draft an open letter from 50 Republican foreign policy experts slamming Donald Trump for being “hateful,” “fundamentally dishonest,” overly friendly toward dictators like Vladimir Putin, and possessing a worldview that is “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.”

“Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world,” McGrath and his colleagues wrote in their March 2016 letter. “We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.”

Eight months later, McGrath has a different message for the president-elect and his team: if they want him in the Trump administration, he’d be open to coming on board.

“I never believed that signing that letter meant you were signing some sort of non-compete clause,” he told me in an interview. “If they called, I would take it very seriously. He’s the president, and that really does change everything.”

McGrath isn’t alone. In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning upset Tuesday, the GOP’s “NeverTrumpers” are confronting a question they never thought they’d have to answer: stick to their principles and stay out of government at the risk of seeing key jobs go to less qualified people, or swallow their distaste for Trump and join his administration to try to ensure the country doesn’t go off of the rails (and to advance their own careers).

It’s a tough choice. In the days since the election, several of those who came out against the GOP nominee during the campaign have privately told me that they remain just as concerned about President-elect Trump’s temperament and policy ideas, particularly when it comes to potentially abandoning NATO allies and leaving Japan and South Korea to stand alone against North Korea and an increasingly assertive China.

Some NeverTrumpers, including Eric Edelman, who held a senior Pentagon post under George W. Bush, have told me that they’ll stick to their guns and stay out of a Trump administration even if asked to serve. But that appears to be a minority view: others, like McGrath, say the stakes are too high, and the issues too complex, to stay on the sidelines.

That decision can boil down to careerism; turning down a job offer now would mean spending at least the next four years — and possibly more, if Trump wins reelection — out of the kind of executive branch positions that can lead to more powerful, and more lucrative, jobs in the future. For some, it’s simple patriotism; if the president of the country you love asks for your help, you’re duty-bound to provide it. And for some it’s a mixture of the two.

The upshot is that you should expect to see many Republicans who had bashed Trump when he was a candidate agree to serve under him now that he’s president. And that is a very, very good thing.

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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13593254/president-donald-trump-administration-cabinet-gop-nevertrump