‘I’m interested to see where the never-Trump conservative movement goes from here.’

Josh Olson, 25, attended Grand Canyon University and majored in government with an emphasis in public policy. He works for a children’s camp and is raising a son with his wife. In the 2024 presidential election, Olson declined to vote for President Trump, even though he considers himself a conservative.

Dorothy Carpenter: Can you tell me about who you voted for in the 2024 election and why?

Josh Olson: I voted for Kamala Harris. I am a never-Trump conservative, very much of the Mike Pence variety. Most of my decision-making in that election came down to problems I had with Donald Trump, not only who he was as a politician and his record, but also where I believed he was taking the Republican Party. There were some policies of Kamala Harris that I liked, but obviously, a lot that I disagreed with as a Christian conservative, but I felt like I had seen enough comparing Joe Biden’s administration to Donald Trump’s first term, and for that reason, I voted for Kamala Harris.

Carpenter: Can you tell me a little bit more about your political values?

Olson: I would say, ideologically, the biggest thing that’s undergirding my political values is that I’m an evangelical Christian. That’s how I was raised. Small government, faith-based ideology is the backbone of where I developed in that way. Now, as I’ve gotten older, that’s certainly developed in some ways. I’m a big proponent of responsible government, not necessarily dismantling government. I would like our government to be more effective in how it governs, and I don’t necessarily think that big government is necessarily bad, or that small government is necessarily good. Foreign policy I’m a lot more hawkish. I guess you could say I like the idea of the US being an international arbiter of security and good. We certainly had our history of not doing that, but we also had a lot of history of accomplishing that goal. So, I would like to see that continue. So, I’m not isolationist in that regard, in terms of foreign policy. This is a real nerdy political term, but I’m big on federalism, so, the separation of federal government, state government, local governments. I don’t like when those intersect, or when the federal government has a real top-down, heavy approach toward local governances. I have a lot of faith and trust in local political action to have a better representation of their constituency than their federal counterparts. I’m big on democracy, and I’m big on fiscal responsibility too. So, the government always running up. The federal government specifically, always has a federal deficit. Every budget that’s presented, I think is putting us in a disadvantaged place moving forward, especially for my generation, as we age. But for our kids’ generations, I would like to see our government, be more responsible with their budgets.

Carpenter: Have you always had these viewpoints, or have they kind of changed over the years?

Olson: Oh, yeah, they totally changed. In college, I was a president of a conservative advocacy group for two years, and the highlight of that was my freshman year when we brought Ben Shapiro to speak on my campus. He talked about faith and religion, so it wasn’t necessarily a really divisive topic, but that was really formative in my college years. I guess my political breaking point was 2020. COVID happened and everything subsequent from that. A lot of the people that I had grown up respecting and learning from and reading about, I thought, just took the wrong position, or sometimes were lying about some of the things that were going on so related to COVID. I thought some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric was extreme and misguided, and I thought it led to serious harm in some circles, especially among conservative circles that were encouraging that. It’s wild to see that one of Trump’s greatest accomplishments in his first term was developing the vaccine. Operation Warp Speed was just an incredible, monumental achievement for Trump that he can’t take credit for because his base is so far in the other direction.

During the Black Lives Matter movement, I thought George Floyd and that case was an open-and-shut case that he was murdered, like I didn’t need to see all the punditry about it. It was on video, and he was in a court of his peers in Minnesota. Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. I didn’t think we needed to have the huge back-and-forth. The more conservative angle took this situation as fake, or George Floyd didn’t really get murdered, and the Black Lives Matter movement, all of that is in bad faith. I felt like there was this weird thing where it’s like, why can’t we talk about police reform as conservatives? Why can’t we have those conversations? It was frustrating for me to not see a push for greater nuance and smarter thinking. Then the real thing that made me be like, okay, I don’t even know if I could say I’m a Republican was January 6, and so that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. It was probably the reason I voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. January 6, not only the riot on the day of but all the decisions and everything that Trump did leading up to January 6 and on the day of, I think is disqualifiable. I think he should have been impeached and thrown out of office, and he should have been criminally convicted. So, I would say those three things in tandem, and they were literally back to back to back, are one of the reasons where I started thinking maybe these, maybe these people are at times, and I’m specifically talking about politicians and conservative media, are maliciously motivated to conceal the truth in a lot of political matters. And so went to more of a hey, I think I’m a conservative independent, and I’m going to identify as that moving forward.

Carpenter: How are you feeling about everything that’s happened since Trump took office?

Olson: It’s been a wild couple 100 Days. So as a, I would say traditional conservative, not a fan of legislating via executive action. I grew up listening to people talk about how Obama overused executive actions. I think Trump has signed over 400 executive orders since his first 100 days. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors with his base where he’s signing these executive actions that purport to do a lot of things in name only but don’t pack a lot of punch in terms of what Congress can do in writing legislation. It’s weird that he’s playing for a lot of social media likes, rather than pushing Congress for action to affirm his agenda, which Republicans have literally all parts of government. If Trump was going to get legislation passed, this would be the time to do it, but he’s more focused on executive action that is going to promptly be overturned when the Democrats get back in power, which is likely to happen eventually. His treatment of Zelensky, I thought was disgraceful in the Oval Office. JD Vance just flatly was factually incorrect about so many things and was instigating a president of a democratically elected country that was invaded by Russia and so for the US to essentially cut off aid funding for now, and to treat him like that in that time, I thought was shameful. Oh, and the other one is tariffs, he’s terrible on tariffs. It makes absolutely no sense, his tariff model, and the way that he’s using it. I mean, this is extreme language, but it’s almost schizophrenic the way that he’s using it. He’ll threaten the tariff and then pull back in a couple of days once the markets start to take a dip from his language. The president, as head of state, just has such a role in how he speaks about the markets too. It’s not even necessarily always backed by policy. Trump has been really reckless with how he’s waged tariffs on some of our closest trade partners, like Mexico and Canada. He’s threatened to tear up Mexico and Canada, which are closest trade partners outside of China, and then has not been as strong when it comes to China with trade-related issues. So, yeah, Trump, in terms of foreign stuff, is very cozy when it comes to Russia and China, and then if you’re Canada or Mexico, he’s going to rename stuff, and act like Canada is going to be the 51st state, which is all that stuff is ludicrous. I think his executive action regarding transgenders participating in women’s sports is a political win. Even many Democrats agree with that decision.

Carpenter: Do you feel directly impacted in your daily life by anything that’s going on?

Olson: I would say no, and at least not immediately. We’ll see what happens when these tariffs impact trade, especially with these other countries, if that’s going to raise prices. In many ways, I am Trump’s base. I am a young, Christian, conservative male, and so a lot of the things that Trump purports to care about are going to help people who are similar to me and in my situation. So, in some ways, I recognize that it’s sad to be in a position to not have any immediate harm. But also, again, it’s like back to my roots. It also goes back to why I’m faithful about our institutions, that the executive branch, though it has a lot of media hype, and it has a lot of attention, we still have so many checks and balances that keep the average American from feeling a lot of these impacts from their day to day lives. So very thankful for that, that our system has set it like that. We still aren’t set up to have a king who can come down and make a bunch of daily changes to everyone’s lives.

Carpenter: Do you have anything else that you want to share?

Olson: I’m interested to see where the never-Trump conservative movement goes from here. We were a dying breed after 2016. I joined after 2020 and now after 2024, where do they go? It’s very dependent on what Democrats do and what Republicans do. For me, moving forward, that’s kind of why I’m politically homeless. Some of that’s like, kind of nice, because I can really look at both parties and say: what do you what are you going to offer the country, and what are you going to offer me? I’m moving forward knowing I’m going to make both sides mad in different ways, in different capacities, by my political philosophy and how I vote.