It was pretty much the same people who hated Newt in 2012. Their pick was Santorum back then, & Newt was the ‘’sinner’’ & the ‘’liberal’’.
Exactly. They want purity, and they’ll never get it.
I always liked Newt Gingrich, but I didn’t vote for him in 2012, because I always thought he would have been perfect as the president’s Chief of Staff
Who do you think these "anti-Trumpers" are? Cruz supporters are busy backing Cruz; they have nothing to do with this phenomenology of which Allahpundit writes. The real Trump-haters are the pseudo-patrician New York and New England, school-tie Yankee Yacht Club folks who despise Cruz for the same reason they hate Trump: Below the salt! Not 'people like us'! Non-tennis-playing, non-whiteshoe, non-Bonesman air conditioning repairman, Joe-the-Plumber scum people! -- ewww!
This is a social phenomenon, not an ideological one. The conservative people are clustered around Cruz and Carson mostly, with some adhering to Rubio and Trump. This anti-Trumping is pure revulsion by the moneyed, powerful, and old-school GOP leadership and ownership against a parvenu, an arriviste High Prole with sleazy money (i.e., not yet purified by passing through two or three generations of trust funds).
(For the terminology of "High Prole", consult Paul Fussell's Class, which explains the worldview and lifestyle of "top-out-of-sight" "U" people. ["U" as in "upper".])
But in the language FReepers use, the anti-Trumpers are not "conservative": They're RiNO's, East Coast social liberals who know how to count, and who are presently being turfed out of leadership of the GOP by insurgents clustering around Cruz, Carson, and Donald Trump.
This is the final, eventual reply of the 2010 Tea Party people whom John Boehner told, when Michele Bachmann came to him with Nancy Pelosi's oversized gavel in hand and laid it on his desk and asked for a leadership role in return,
"It's not your turn."
A little grace and patronage at that time could have spared these guys, but no.
Now it's our turn.