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If You Must Vote Trump, Please Hold Your Nose
Peter has made his decision, as announced on the recent podcast. In his view, a national election is indeed an A-B test, and he’s choosing, well, T. He’s with James Taranto and not Kevin Williamson. He’s not going to slink around apologizing for it anymore.
This isn’t surprising (he’s been reasonably clear about his views for awhile) and it’s not my place to scold him. I do think a respectable case can be made for voting for Trump. But I can’t resist the urge to point out that the way Peter has come out for Trump, to me, confirms exactly my reasons for not supporting Trump, and not believing that this can be as straightforward as the A-B test.
The best case for #NeverTrump has always been, in my mind, the Not My Monster argument. At this point is seems mostly settled that a heinously vicious and dishonest person is going to be America’s next president. Would we prefer, then, that that person be ours, or the other party’s? It’s actually a difficult question.
Our monster will, we hope, be at least a bit more susceptible to conservative influence, and a bit more congenial to our ideals and policy agenda. (That’s not certain, but at least it is possible.) The other party’s monster will be more absolutely hostile, but at least that gives us the advantage of being able to remake our party and agenda without the heavily compromising influence of an awful leader. Also, if Washington is a mess over the next four years (likely), it will be easier to win the next election if the monster in the Oval Office isn’t ours. In troubled times, voters tend to let the parties take turns in the executive office. Is it worse to give the Democrats two turns in a row, or to waste one of our turns on Trump?
Honestly, I vacillate week by week as to which candidate I hope to see win. I’m not voting for either, but I wouldn’t condemn everyone who is. Having said that, Peter’s attitude towards Trump these days is troubling.
It’s one thing to stop slinking, but it’s another entirely to stop frowning. It struck me how Peter repeated, I believe, three times in the podcast (but without much vehemence) that no, Trump is not the next Reagan. I thought: the next Reagan? He’s not the next Mitt Romney. He’s not the next John McCain. He’s not even the next John Boehner. We had seventeen choices and he was the worst. It wasn’t even close, in fact. Peter makes a negative comparison, but by choosing the conservative icon of the last four decades for contrast, he leaves the strong impression, “This outcome isn’t ideal, but basically, things are okay.”
Things are not okay. Trump is not just utterly untrustworthy and an awful person; he is also hostile or indifferent to most of the most critical planks of the conservative agenda. And he is running explicitly as a Caesarist, effectively promising to expand the abuse of executive power. It’s hard to decide whether to be dismayed or pleased by the overwhelming impression of incompetence and ignorance in all matters of state.
I was also struck by the way Peter was optimistic about Trump’s SCOTUS list, reasoning that Trump will be unable to violate his promises without totally alienating his voting base. That’s true, of course, and for most politicians it would be a compelling consideration, even for a politician of bad character. But Trump is not only vicious, he is also a complete outsider with no history of allegiance to either Republicans or conservatives. To put the point bluntly: Does he care? He seems to be the kind of guy who enjoys negative attention as much as positive, and his personal friends surely lean leftward. He might be entertained by the howls of betrayal after he picks the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
To be clear, I’m not saying with confidence that this will happen. If we were just nominating the selector of the next Supreme Court justice (or two, or three), then yes, I would prefer Trump to Hillary. He might betray us, but then again, it’s possible he won’t. What troubles me is how Peter talks as though he sees Trump’s betrayal of conservatives — in the one thing we most want from him — as a fairly outside possibility. Everything we know about the man suggests to me that it’s a very live possibility, and certainly one that should be considered if we’re discussing electoral SCOTUS implications.
To my mind, this shows exactly the reasons for rejecting the “A-B test” view of elections. If a vote is really just an expression of preference between A and B, it is perfectly possible to choose one without any appreciable level of support for either one. But once we decide to support a particular candidate, we tend to adjust ourselves psychologically to thinking of him as the sort of candidate that merits our support. It’s very hard to make that transition without compromising ourselves and our agenda, potentially quite severely.
Here is my final example, taken from a comment of Peter’s in the thread following that podcast. Peter is explaining that, however bad he is, he can’t be as bad as Hillary. In that context, he writes:
Hillary may be polished where Trump is vulgar, but that’s purely a matter of taste.
I thought I was losing the capacity to be amazed, but I admit that I was quite thunderstruck. Trump publicly insults women. He winks at white supremacists. He speaks gleefully about torture and war crimes. He discusses the size of his manhood in nationally televised debates. His remarks on immigration are so offensively nativist that Texas Democrats have successfully shrunk the Republicans in that state simply by playing tapes of Trump on the radio. I could go on but it’s all too familiar by now, and to this, the genteel and civilized Peter Robinson says: a matter of taste?
I appreciate that even this level of offense must sometimes be borne when the options are so exceedingly poor. But even if we have to live with it, we should at least try to resist the normalization, shouldn’t we?
Vote for Trump if you must, but please, not this! At least do us the favor of publicly holding your nose!
Published in General
This may be the greatest condemnation of the current political season I’ve seen yet. Peter Robinson, stalwart Republican, openly entertaining the possibility of voting independent this year. I can add nothing to that.
We know that those supporting Hillary are trading liberty for power. What we fear is that supporting Trump is trading liberty for power as well, even though our intent is to use power to enforce liberty.
This is one of the best explanations I’ve read yet as to why I won’t vote for Trump. It also doesn’t contain the #nevertrump rhetoric that I don’t care to associate with.
But who is Peter? I gather that he is a podcast person, but I don’t listen to podcasts. Does this Peter person have an existence outside the podcast world?
Peter, all you ever seen able to articulate is that you’re sure Trump isn’t as awful as Clinton. I find the reasoning to support that more than wanting and an act of utter credulity, but put that to the side. You always dodge the question of what a Trump candidacy, not to mention presidency, means or would mean to the future prospects of the conservative movement or the identity and governing philosophy of the GOP.
It would seem much easier to see your defenses of Trump as more than dubious rationalizations if you took up the entire argument of Never Trump and considered openly what Trump has done to the future political prospects of the ideas and policies you’ve championed for so long, rather than just looking at what might be less worse in the next four years.
Trump or not Trump?
It doesn’t much matter. Our republic is ended. It has been dying since GHW Bush crushed the Reagan agenda. I was so angry with Bush for giving the FCC unconstitutional authority over cable tv that I had a one man boycott of cable tv until 2005. Bush the Younger was a mild improvement over his father, but his socialist tendencies and his disastrous bailout before he left office left us in ruins. His bailout destroyed McCain’s chances, not that McCain didn’t do enough on his own.
We’ve had socialist after socialist trying to run the republican party since Reagan. Our only hope was to hold out with one weak candidate after another until someone good could step in.
That is ended. Obama has completely crushed any pretense by the republicans that they favor freedom, federalism, and small government. The Bushes were the nails in the coffin, Obama piled the dirt on after lowering our system of government into the grave.
So, Trump? I don’t much care. Hillary? It won’t much matter. We are done. There’s nothing left except the hope that the governors might wrest some control back from the feds. Barring that, I see no result except oppression and the end of the American experiment.
In this year’s Texas primary, Trump carried the border city of Laredo, which is 95% Hispanic.
It seems painfully short sighted to say this is an A-B race. It is an A-B-C race, with the C standing for conservatism.
By the way, as a Laredo native, that didn’t surprise me at all.
This is a A-B-C election, not an A-B election, not unlike 1992 and 1912. The “C” is the Libertarian Ticket of Johnson-Weld, two fiscally conservative/socially moderate GOP former Governors. Trump is disqualified from being President by being an unrepentant birther, mocker of the disabled and POW’s, and minority groups. Hillary is, well, Hillary. Compared to them, two fiscally conservative former GOP Governors look pretty damn good.
In 1912, the Republican candidate came in third; at one point in 1992, Perot was polling in first place. If Johnson-Weld can get 15% in the polls, then they will be invited to the debates. And then the contrast will be obvious to all.
You have a different understand of conscience than I do if you think anything is more important, or could justify violating it.
Well, thank you for that! I appreciate that effort and am half-reassured. One-handed typing is the worst.
Part of the problem with Trump, of course, is that he has no track record as a politician so it’s very hard to know where to put him on many/most issues. He says all different things, puts positions on his website that he contradicts and doesn’t seem to understand, etc. Cherry-picking the best it can sound pretty good. Cherry-picking the worst, it sounds pretty awful, and the fact that we have a candidate that confused and unreliable is itself pretty awful.
On a broader level I think of conservatism in fusionist terms, and it would be nice to have a candidate who seemed reasonably committed/sensitive to at least one side of the conservative compact. I’d say that’s a resounding no.
I also think, from the standpoint of preserving conservatism for the future, that it’s important not to soft-pedal too much the really offensive elements of Trump and Trumpism. Yes, we have to find a way to broker peace with the Trumpites eventually, but we also have to be clear/realistic about the impossibility of somehow revamping the party in this kind of mold. Trump’s core supporters like to call themselves the “Silent Majority” but really they’re just not. We’re going to have to persuade the rest of the country that that isn’t what we are or we’ll be relegated to rump-party status for a good long while.
Dan Hanson said something above about “preserving reputation”. I don’t have nearly as much reputation to preserve but insofar as there’s any, I think more in terms of figuring out where we can all do the most good. (This is also a little different from what you say about Kristol and others setting themselves up for a fall.) Some people should position themselves to potentially influence a President Trump if he is elected, and possibly to help mend fences with his supporters in time. Other people need to maintain credibility with the people who are completely alienated by Trump, which is a sizable group that includes both principled conservatives and a lot of moderates whose votes we need over the long-term.
I reflected on a lot of relevant questions (my views, my target audience, the fact that I already live in a very blue state) and concluded that consistent non-support is not just permissible for me but actually the best thing. I don’t demand that everyone draw that same conclusion for themselves, but it would be nice if we could all (everyone who recognizes Trump’s nomination as a deeply unfortunate development) remain broadly sympatico, which I don’t think will happen if the efforts to rehabilitate Trump get too over-enthusiastic.
That would be in the Congress and in our relationship with Congress, but the GOP Congress does not want that role.
Yup–decide to vote for this man and you have to defend that vote. All the qualifications in the world can’t change that. I can’t defend him now, don’t want to in the future, and I sure don’t want to have been any part of the inevitable bad he is going to do to constitutional government. I do think Hillary does less damage to that just because we can blame her damage on her and the other party. But I worry that if Trump loses, we will just get another Trump in 4 years. I worry that there is now an appetite in the nation, and most sadly in our party, for a demagogue.
How many people are telling themselves now or will do it later: I’m doing what’s necessary because of the evil partisans on the other side?–How many of those evil partisans are going to say the same about our side!
Funny how necessity works in politics-
Fine. Don’t vote (or vote 3rd party, or write in Captain America, or whatever).
Also don’t be surprised if you have a diminished audience for anything you may have to say about the eventual winner.
Like Peter, I’m finished apologizing for voting Trump in the general (for the record, as if anyone should care, I’ve been a “supporter” of almost all the other Republican candidates at one time or another this cycle, and some of them twice! Shades of 2012).
For once, I’d like one of the #nevertrumpers to speak as vehemently against Hillary in one of these posts. That would be refreshing. My decision for Trump is almost exclusively because Hillary has been working her entire adult lifetime to get into a position of power allowing her to tell you and me how to conduct our affairs.
Speaking of affairs, it’s morally outrageous, imo, to enable that man, Bill Pedophile Island Clinton, anywhere near the West Wing again. But, maybe that’s just me.
It’s possible the most conservative thing about Donald Trump is his record of building things (yes, even some things that failed). Contrast that with Hillary Clinton’s career, which has been about attaching herself to power. You better believe she’s going to wield it when she gets it– “good” and hard.
She’s a leftist. A cultural Marxist. An Alinsky disciple. She’s an enemy of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. She will erode the 1st Amendment and nullify the 2nd with her SCOTUS picks.
People who don’t see this are naive about the Left. They think because she’s not as crude as Trump, she’s not dangerous. Wrong!
‘Obey or we will not listen to what you have to say!’
If he wins, at least Hillary lost, and won’t get to appoint judges, select cabinet members, write executive orders, and stuff the DOD and State with more anti American destroyers.
Not a single person, left or right, has tried to persuade me to vote for Hillary. Definitely can’t say that about Trump! That’s why I spend more time explaining why I’m not voting for Trump.
I like your points, Rachel. I respect people who hold their nose and vote Trump because they’ve got to stop Clinton. I also respect the decision to hold your nose and vote Clinton because Trump must be stopped. For me, I just can’t vote for either… I’m anxious to see who my alternative will be!
What part of the body should be held by those who will make a Clinton presidency more likely by refusing to vote for Trump?
Right, and why do you suppose the lefties aren’t trying to persuade you? Because they know that simply by withholding your usual vote for the Republican, they’ll put Hillary in the White House.
Also, Rachel, do you ever have hesitation in using such strong language to denounce Trump’s character? A lot of what we’ve seen isn’t the decorum we’re used to in presidential elections, but I’m guessing you don’t know Trump personally, and some conservatives who do have spoken favorably of him (Kudlow). Also, apparently his family is quite impressive, which certainly reflects well on him in some way.
I know of no insiders who’ve come forward to bash him — unlike, for example, Carly Fiorina’s employees, many of whom “would never work for her again.” In fact, if you look around the net, there are some who have come to Trump’s defense. I’m thinking of a YouTube put out by a black woman he employed, and the woman who said the NYT’s (misfired) hit piece mischaracterized his conduct toward her.
I’m not going to try to make him out to be some hero of conservatism, but I’d recommend some restraint in assessing his character.
Thanks, Aaron. That’s exactly what I meant.
Here’s the thing, sufficient evidence of Trump’s low character is public knowledge that he would have to be akin to Mother Teresa in private for it to even out.
Why? We’re talking to conservatives, and there is virtually nobody here who would defend Hillary. The reason we talk about Trump is because that’s the big decision conservatives are making. It seems silly to spend time talking about things that aren’t even on the table. Obama sucks, too, and we’re not arguing about him… for obvious reasons.
No, they don’t try to persuade because they know I would never vote for Hillary and that they have no right or reason to ask me to.
What do you count as an insider? The people scammed by Trump University? The widow whose house he tried to eminent domain so he could park his limousine? The many former business partners he’s shafted?
He’s the kind of person who collects sycophants, so yes, members of his inner circle tend to like him, but that doesn’t tell you much. I actually find the whole story of Trump University particularly harrowing, not only because the scam itself is so despicable but also because I keep pondering: why did he do that? Why does a very wealthy man go to these lengths to bubble desperate down-and-outs out of their pitiful life savings? He doesn’t need the money. He has legitimate business ventures to take up his time and energy. He’s putting himself at risk of legal reprisals. It’s sort of hard to fathom on a rational level.
I think he’s just the sort of man who enjoys using people. It amuses him and makes him feel powerful. To be frank, I don’t see a lot of people contradicting that who don’t stand to benefit personally from maintaining those warm ties. So no, I am not inclined to moderate my assessment of his character.
Peter, can you take up these two questions:
What do you think Trump’s winning the nomination has done to the credibility of the conservative movement and the political prospects for a truly conservative agenda, regardless of whether he wins in November?
What will a Trump presidency, particularly a troubled or even failed one, do to the viability of the GOP and the chances for conservatives to be trusted by the electorate in 2020 and beyond?
While posts like these can be cathartic, I don’t think anyone changes their mind. No one wants to lose face by backing down. Only the inevitability of the A-B choice makes people face reality. I still maintain that most #Never Trump people will end up voting for Trump when they are alone and all there is is the names on the ballot staring at them.
I didn’t mean I would violate my conscience by voting for Trump. What I mean is that whether one’s conscience is violated shouldn’t necessarily be based on what one thinks of Trump’s personality. For me it’s based on the results I hope will come from a Tump presidency.