Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the Never Trumpers face their Alamo

CLEVELAND --- On the floor of the Q, way in a back corner, about as far from the power podium as they could put her, Kendal Unruh had just removed herself from another scrum and was standing on a folding chair so that everyone in the convention hall could see her as she led her troops in chants of "Roll call vote! Roll call vote!"

Unruh is a long, tall Coloradan in tan-and-baby blue cowboy boots, and to understand her role as a leading Never Trumper at this celebration of all things Trump, it helps to know how to pronounce her name. Just say unruly and stop before the "lee."

When it came to the Republican rules of the day - rules that she and her troops thought favored Donald Trump at the expense of their consciences - she wanted no part of them. Not exactly a sagebrush rebellion, but the next closest thing in this reality-show Republican version of the wild, wild West.

As Unruh exhorted her fellow Coloradans, to the right of her sat the Texas delegates, all uniformed in blue jeans, flag-like red-white-and-blue shirts and white cowboy hats, and directly in front of her were the Montanans, with their denim vests and red shirts. This seemed appropriate, since the first few hours of the convention amounted to her Alamo or last stand at the Little Bighorn. In a figurative version of those two events, she and her followers got slaughtered but gained some measure of fame, or notoriety, in the process. At least they got on television a lot, their discontent lending some measure of juice to the usually dry opening daytime hours of the convention.

Unruh had arrived at Quicken Loans Arena an hour before the 1 p.m. opening benediction with a lime-green hat packed inside her shiny plastic black-and-pink purse. The hat was supposed to have a symbolic meaning. The Never Trumpers had ordered a batch of them and planned to wear them as a symbol of their courageous stand against rules that would force delegates to be bound by the results of the primaries in their states instead of being free to vote for whomever they wished. Every revolution needs it color - remember the Ukrainians' Orange Revolution? Why not lime green for Republicans who were revolting against Trump?

Alas, the hats never made it on a single rebellious head. Word came from an inside source that the Trump people had outfoxed them by buying a whole bunch of green hats themselves, just in case, or so Unruh and her people were saying. Who knows? It was a day of whispers and little plots and conspiracy theories. Some in the Colorado delegation talked of attempts to buy them off with word that their favored candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, was being promised a Supreme Court seat by the man who used to put the description "Lying" in front of his name. The next rumor was that Republican National Committee floor whips had devised a plan to cut off the microphones of the rump delegations if need be. Anything to make things smooth and easy for the political gilding of Mr. Trump.

It seems that everyone represents the grass roots these days, challenging the status quo, taking on the establishment, so it can be hard to tell who's who and what's what. Just as Trump had appropriated those words and themes, so too had his antagonist, the unruly Unruh. Between a flurry of text exchanges with her compatriots in other delegations, she said that hers, not Trump's, was the grass-roots movement. As far as she was concerned, his first move at the convention was to "sell out to the establishment" by aligning himself with RNC Chairman Reince Preibus and the party power brokers by stifling the call for unbinding the nomination vote.

The Never Trumpers, trounced in the convention's Rules Committee last week, since arriving in Cleveland had devised a Plan B, which was to gather enough signatures on petitions from enough state delegations to require a roll call vote on the rules. There is more to it than that, but that is enough detail for anyone who is watching but not playing the game. Unruh and Gordon Humphrey, a former senator from New Hampshire, were among those quietly rounding up the petitions, and by the time the gavel went down to open the convention they thought they had enough, with nine states instead of the needed seven.

But the establishment was not to be stopped on this day. The Rules Committee, in a final meeting, rammed through the Trump plan, and then it was put to a voice vote of the full convention. Unruh and her crew yelled nay as loudly as they could, bellowing with full throats, but the chair ruled that the ayes had it, a decision that inspired the first round of "Roll call vote! Roll call vote!"

What to do when the shouting died down? "Game on! Time for a walkout," said Unruh, a 51-year-old civics teacher at a Christian school in Englewood. She left her seat and headed up the aisle and out a corridor leading to apparently nowhere but a dead end, then worked her cellphone for a few minutes, noticed that not many people were following her, took a sip of water, heard that something was going on inside the hall, and headed back in.

Humphrey and the other Never Trumpers had managed to force the chair to recognize a call for a roll call vote. But not so fast. The chair noted that while nine states had originally sent in petitions, three had since retracted them, leaving only six when they needed seven. So much for that. Roll call denied. This time the shouts of "Roll call vote!" were accompanied by boos and jeers and demands of "Show us! Show us! Which three? Which three?" until the Trump people countered with the traditional fallback, all-purpose chant of "USA! USA!" - and that was pretty much that.

What next? Was Never Trump nevermore, as one party boss said? Maybe, but Unruh insisted that she would not be silenced. "They'll have themselves a show when it comes to the roll call of the states," she said.