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Politics, Principles, and Standing Up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage the Republican Party
by Kristen Monroe, University of California, Irvine
The presidential election of 2016 shocked both academics and the general public. In a special issue of The Atlantic, conservative columnist David Brooks described his response to Trump’s policies as personal grief, a mourning for what felt like a betrayal of his country and its basic values (2025). Brooks captured the deeply personal sense of loss that sent many Americans into a great depression. How could this have happened? What in the world was going on? It was a moment when the bottom fell out, and traditional Republican conservatives and liberals had to scramble to figure out what to do. This manuscript describes one pedagogical response to what is best described as political trauma. It asks about political moral courage by asking key Republicans: Why did you stand up to Trump when so many Republican leaders did not? The narrative interpretive analysis of morally courageous Republicans like Lynn Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Anthony Scaramucci describes what one class of students did to use scholarly research to understand the shock and pain they – and many of their fellow citizens – felt at Trump’s policies.
Personal shock, confusion and despair at Trump’s policies
I saw first-hand the reaction Brooks describes as people watched Trump violate and disregard long-standing political norms. Beginning in 2017, many students at UC Irvine came to my office deeply upset, confused as to how this happened. This sense of alienation intensified winter term 2017, when Trump’s attacks on immigrants increased with specific policy shifts, such as his Muslim ban. Students in a class on ethics voiced special concern. The course – The Moral of the Story – discussed how people get their moral values through stories, from bedtime stories to novels or religious texts. The final project asked students to interview someone they respected and ask about the moral choices they confronted and how they made these moral choices. In 2017, however, we decided to modify this final project to help students take their heartache and turn it into something that felt more positive. One of the students was also taking a course with UCI Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who sued Trump – unsuccessfully – for violation of the emoluments clause. I suggested students interview people like Chemerinsky who had demonstrated moral courage by standing up to Trump. These included the head of the Los Angeles School District, who got the School Board to pass a resolution keeping ICE from coming onto their campuses to look for DACA students. I eventually broadened the analysis to include students in a summer mentoring program I run at the UCI Ethics Center and over 100 college and high school students ended by interviewing a wide range of people who had demonstrated moral courage. The project thus did not limit analysis to Trump opponents. The book, When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in Times of Confusion and Despair, was published in 2023 by the University of Chicago Press to good reviews, and that helped us feel we had done something. But both my students and I remained uneasy. After Biden won the 2020 election, we watched as the Republican Party seemed stuck in the Trump orbit and decided to study moral courage in the Republican Party.
“Take your broken heart, turn it into art.”
Meryl Streep’s speech accepting the lifetime achievement from the Hollywood Foreign Press captured the response to Trump felt by many Americans, including my students. felt in response to Trump. How do you channel your heartache and anxiety at the shift in what passes for normal politics when that shift threatens your core values? Scholarly research provided an answer for both my students and me. These questions resulted in another book, done jointly with 13 students: Politics, Principle and Standing up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage in the Republican Party, which was published in June 2024 by Ethics International Press) I devoted the period from June to the election to writing op-ed pieces, being on podcasts, and generally doing whatever I could as a writer to ensure the people we interviewed who did oppose Trump were heard and not vilified. We were curious to learn whether the stature of people like Senators Flake or Mitt Romney would mean other Republicans might listen to them and switch their votes. It did not.
Mixed Methods
So what did we do? We tried to interview as many Republicans who stood up to Trump as we could using open-ended questions but were able to interview only Anthony Scaramucci and Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project. We began by asking what led these Republicans to break with Trump. We then asked what drove their moral courage. What had it cost them to oppose Trump? Did they regret it? Why had they spoken out when others did not? Because many Republicans were nervous about speaking on the record, we also turned to additional data sources. We thus analyzed the writings, speeches, interviews, autobiographies, and virtually anything we could from the others in our sample. Our question was simple: Why did you stand up to Trump when so many Republican leaders did not? We were especially interested in this topic since we knew many Republicans spoke out privately against Trump but supported him publicly. Senators McCain, Romney and Flake, Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and dedicated Republican politicos and officeholders such as Anthony Scaramucci, Miles Taylor and Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project, all diehard conservative Republicans, nevertheless found the strength to risk censure, political opprobrium, even physical attack, to do what they felt was right. Why? What made them different? And what did they tell us?
Findings
Analysis of a wide range of material – interviews, speeches, written works – reveals it was not policy concerns that made them refuse to go along with Trump. These people were hard-core Republican conservatives. Most voted with Trump over 90% of the time. They supported his policies. They broke with Trump for three reasons. First, they felt Trump was ignoring, disrespecting and thus hurting the Republican conservative agenda in which they believed. They feared Trump would limit the Republican Party’s ability to govern according to conservative principles in future. Second, they worried that Trump would do irreparable damage to the country’s underlying democratic institutions, culture, and processes. They were shocked, alarmed, and ultimately offended that Trump pressured elected officials to violate their oaths of office and disregard proper democratic procedures in pursuit of Trump’s personal agenda. Finally, they watched, appalled, at Trump’s coarsening of political life. Comments like “grab them by the p***y” and acts that put immigrant children into cages led to a shocked, visceral revulsion: As Miles Taylor said, “This is not who we are.”
If fidelity to individual freedom and democracy is the code of our political culture, then concern for human decency and compassion for our fellow human beings is the code of our humanity. These Republicans feared Trump would damage both. To remain silent would betray their core values. Such complicity warred with their underlying ethical standards, the moral values so deeply held that they effectively made them who they were. If they wanted to live with themselves, they had to speak out.
As the book documents, what can only be called moral courage on the part of these speakers now offers a warning and a challenge for the rest of us. Are they right? Policy agenda aside, does Trump threaten American democracy? Will his re-election change who we are as a people, irreparably damaging our civic culture and our democratic institutions and procedures? As my students and I read the evidence presented here, we were concerned. But others are not. Trump won the 2024 election fair and square. His victory was not a function of an antiquated Electoral College. Republicans at all levels in Congress seem to support his policies. Lawyers from the 2025 project have crafted clever legal twists that – most legal scholars tell us – will mean the Courts will support more of Trump’s Executive Orders than most liberals would like. Further, early public opinion surveys suggest a surprisingly large number of Americans are happy with what Trump is doing. True, they find it a bit absurd to blame DEI for things like the air crash at Reagan Airport. But they feel that DEI has gone too far and are happy with Trump’s attempts to roll back DEI initiatives.
If the Courts will not limit Trump and if public opinion shows surprising support for his policies, are we, as Anne Applebaum warns in Autocracy, Inc., just one or two bad elections away from losing American democracy? Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is concerned, and this certainly was one of the takeaways from our analysis of traditional Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. A recent study (Monroe et al 2025) of Gen Z finds this cohort deeply concerned about Trump’s attacks on democracy. Supposedly blasé and cynical, turned off by the two-party system and attracted to Trump’s willingness to bash the establishment, if this group is now turning on Trump, perhaps there is hope.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Best known for her award-winning trilogy on altruism and moral choice, her latest books are on moral courage: When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in Times of Confusion and Despair and Politics (2023) and Politics, Principle and Standing up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage in the Republican Party (2024).