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I’m voting for Trump
For about six months now, I’ve been a determined MaybeTrumper. I’ve been very unhappy with the choice forced upon me by my fellow Republican primary voters who selected this candidate. I am still unhappy with it.
But I assiduously avoided jumping on the NeverTrump train. I decided that the best course was to wait and see how the campaign developed, without committing myself either way. There was no hurry to decide.
I have now made my decision to vote for Trump. For whatever it is worth to my Ricochet fellows, I offer my rationale.
I. Trump is a deeply flawed candidate
I recognize that Trump is a deeply flawed candidate. I will not belabor the point. He has serious issues of personal character. He departs from my preferences on some important issues, most notably trade. He often comes across as a boorish bully, and seems to confirm some of the worst stereotypes that the Left applies to Republicans and Conservatives. I don’t really trust him, and he still, sometimes, gives me the feeling that he is a conman.
On the bright side, he presented a pretty good platform in his Gettysburg speech, and he’s said some excellent things on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to regulation to abortion.
II. Hillary is Horrible
There was never any chance that I would vote for Hillary Clinton. The campaign has, if anything, strengthened my opposition to her. I find her to be personally corrupt and mendacious. I am opposed to her policies virtually across-the-board, from taxes to regulation to trade to foreign policy to immigration to gay marriage to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand. Not to mention the Supreme Court.
I have always recognized that the best argument for Trump is the argument against Clinton.
III. My Vote Doesn’t Matter
I haven’t run the numbers, but I suspect that it is more likely that I will die before election day than that my vote will decide the outcome of the election. I live in Arizona. If Arizona is as close as my one vote, then Clinton almost certainly would already have won. And the chance of the Arizona result being tipped by my one little vote is negligible anyway.
So as a matter of winning and losing, my vote is inconsequential. What about using my vote to send a message?
I don’t see how my little vote would send any message that anyone could decipher.
Would my vote for Trump send the message that I enthusiastically support him? That I give him my lukewarm support, as I gave to Romney and McCain? That I greatly disapprove of him but find Clinton to be even worse?
On the other hand, if I did not vote for Trump, what message would that send? That I just couldn’t bring myself to support this candidate, despite my vehement opposition to Clinton? That I want to teach my fellow Republicans a lesson, so that they never again present me with such an unpalatable choice? That I’m a big fan of Gary Johnson, or Evan McMullin, or whoever I were to (pointlessly) write in?
No, I don’t think that my vote will send any message, even if it could be separated from the noise of millions of other votes.
IV. Will I Regret It?
For months now, I have been concerned that I would, someday, deeply regret it if I voted for Trump. That I would feel soiled by a compromise of this magnitude.
Hey, it’s just an election. I don’t think that I’ll feel any shame, in future years, admitting that I voted for Trump with great reluctance, because I thought that Clinton would be worse.
I’ll simply say, in my best impression of Jack Aubrey, that I sensibly chose the lesser of two weevils. Which is a good idea even if one is not in the Navy.
V. Unity Going Forward
The main reason for my decision is aimed at the future of the Republican Party and the Conservative movement.
I do worry that Trump, if he wins, will harm the Conservative cause. A Trump victory looks pretty unlikely now. I’ve decided to hope for the best in this regard.
In the likely event of a Trump loss, however, we’re going to have to put the Republican Party and the Conservative movement back together again. It will be hard work. I hear much talk of consequences, even purges, from both the avidly pro-Trump folks and the more vehement NeverTrumpers.
I don’t support Conservatism out of some religious conviction or tribal mentality. At least I hope not. I am a Conservative because I have concluded, based on reason and experience, that Conservative policies are far, far better for our country as a whole, and for the vast majority of our people. I agree with Lady Thatcher that the facts of life are Conservative.
So, for the good of myself, my family, and my fellows, I want the Conservative cause to prevail. This means that we need to keep together an effective electoral coalition. To be effective, that coalition has to include both the enthusiastic Trumpers and the NeverTrumpers. We simply must bridge this gap.
As I see it, the most effective way that I can bridge that gap is if I can say, to our pro-Trump friends, that despite major reservations and disagreements, I ultimately decided to vote for the guy. They gave me a choice that I found very unpleasant, and I went along for the sake of team unity. I will then be able to legitimately ask them to do the same in the future.
Going forward, we need to consider compromises with pro-Trump folks on issues like trade, immigration, and more help for the working class. Personally, I won’t need to compromise much on immigration, but I’m fairly stubborn on free trade and opposition to welfare. Nevertheless, I recognize that working class folks have been having a really tough time, and we need to be willing to bend a bit to bring them some relief.
So I’ll be voting for Trump.
And praying. A lot.
Published in Politics
Even there, the following logic, similar to @arizonapatriot‘s, can be used if Trump somehow wins:
Sure, such an attitude expressed too late to change the speaker’s vote from “other” to “Trump” lacks the effective gesture of an actual Trump vote, but once ED is behind us, everyone knows others’ votes cannot be retroactively recast.
As long as they are willing to compromise as well. Both sides have to be willing not to turn it into a purity test. All attacks against the establishment seem to take the form of being insufficiently “conservative,” whatever that means anymore.
Whatever one’s position on Trump is, he blew this election. We won’t know for sure if anyone else would have won, but it seems likely they wouldn’t have shot themselves in the foot nearly as much.
Now the people who brought us Trump are going to suffer much much more than they would have under a Republican administration. They sent a message to the GOP, but they also seem to have sealed their fate. I’m guessing they’ll say it was worth it, that it would have been just as bad had the GOP been able to maintain its status quo, but that’s an incredibly controversial statement.
I have much more trouble with immigration restrictions that almost anyone. One of the biggest frustrations I have is that otherwise intelligent people claim that immigration is different than free trade. Yes, people come with more baggage, but the free movement of labor is economically indistinguishable from the free movement of goods.
The list you’ve spelled out above is essentially Bernie Sander’s platform, the only reason people on the right are against him is because he is a man on the left who doesn’t seem to want to help “real Americans.” It saddens me that the Republican party seems to be shifting to simply buying off different people than the Democrats.
This is bad for two reasons. The first is the whole country is shifting away from the Truth that at least one party use to pay lip service to and the other party was less bad than their rhetoric implied. The second is that the right will lose this game more and more as time goes on and they cement themselves as the anti-immigration party in the land where less and less of the population are of European descent. We are showing active disrespect to a majority of the population and we somehow expect this to win elections. How are we supposed to win people over when our platform is to actively stop their family and friends from immigrating? “We have too many people like you here, please vote for us!”
This turned into much more of a ramble than I meant it to. I seem to have thrown all my disjointed thoughts down. Probably should have turned this into its own post.
More than with Clinton? Because As unpalatable as it is, that’s the choice we have.
My initial response is they are equally bad.
If pressed for more detail, I say I think Clinton will cause more harm to the country in the next four years but Trump will cause more harm to the country in the long run, so the determining factor is the appropriate utility discount rate to convert future harm to its present value equivalent. As a what used to be called a conservative who believes in delayed gratification, I typically apply low discount rates to future harm, so in my estimation, on a present value equivalent, Trump causes more harm to the country.
But I can’t vote for someone as unqualified as Clinton either, so by not voting for Clinton, I am helping Trump win.
Well… that @arizonapatriot acknowledged concerns that Bernie & co have expressed does not mean @arizonapatriot intends to compromise by caving into their proposed solutions for these concerns.
For example, doctors often feel pressured to prescribe folks with an infection an antibiotic not because there’s good evidence that the infection is bacterial (or that, if it is, antibiotics will really clear it up much faster), but because patients expect to get medicine like antibiotics from a doctor’s visit. Some doctors (perhaps sensibly) deal with this by prescribing things that aren’t antibiotics – for example, if it’s a sinus infection, they may prescribe a nasal spray or a decongestant, with special directions, even if it’s OTC stuff or home remedies that the patient could have just stayed home and googled. That’s a kind of compromise – the patient comes in expecting an antibiotic, doesn’t get the antibiotic, but does get medicine and instructions on how to use it.
I think conservatives have a much harder time than doctors do selling their remedies as “a better remedy than unnecessary antibiotics”, which makes it more likely for Republican compromise to involve “unnecessary antibiotics”, just in weaker form. Nonetheless, it remains possible, even if difficult, to sell, “I don’t think the remedy you want will work, but your ailment is serious enough that I’ve come up with a remedy that will work even better” as a form of compromising. Not that I’m holding my breath or anything.
That’s fair. It is going to taste just like crap. Your only other alternative is the crap steak with a fecal milkshake. Your choice. Just don’t complain about a Clinton presidency if you choose the steak and shake over the sandwich.
And don’t complain about a Clinton presidency if you supported Trump in the primaries.
If you don’t want an authoritarian central planner in the White House, the GOP should have had a nominee that wasn’t an authoritarian central-planner. I don’t buy the argument that authoritarian central-planning will work just fine as long as it is wearing a red-jersey. I am obviously a minority in that respect, so I will take the very loud hint that I am not wanted in the Republican party.
Although, when it comes to tariffs, “just in weaker form” may not be so bad. We already have about a 3% custom duty on imported goods, and if a small increase were enough to count symbolically, it’s possible it might not be harmful enough to outweigh the political benefits gained by expressing some solidarity and willingness to compromise. Maybe.
I’ve heard some (James of England maybe) argue that similar logic should be used to support increases in the minimum wage, as long as they’re small increases – that way we get leverage and head off an even larger increase, and so forth. I disagree with that because I see the minimum wage as utterly shattering many poor, unskilled people’s opportunities. I am less sure that, say, increasing the 3% custom duty 1.5-fold to 4.5% (which is, multiplicatively, a 50% increase, and 50% increases sound impressive), especially if offset by other tax reductions, would be nearly as immiserating. I could be wrong, of course. Mainly, I’m trusting my husband’s judgment on this – that small tariffs used as a means of revenue collection aren’t provably worse in all cases than other forms of revenue collection, even though there’s pretty widespread agreement that large tariffs are awful – since he’s the real economist in the family.
“Ironically, just two days after showing a landslide victory for Hillary, ABC and Wapo now see a much tighter race with her 12-point lead being cut in half to just 6 points. So, you tell us…did voters suddenly have a massive change of heart, in just two days, on no incremental news? Or, did ABC / Wapo have other reasons to “goal seeking” a 12-point lead over the weekend? Certainly, it seems convenient that a controversial poll reflecting a massive lead for Hillary would be “embargoed” for release to just prior to the start of the busy Sunday political talk shows while more “realistic” polls would be released just days later, in the middle of the week, without the same mainstream media fanfare.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-28/rigged-abc-poll-shows-hillary-lead-collapse-12-points-6-points-two-days
He’sShe’s not my anything and never will be. Not only do I findhimher manifestly unqualified for the office, I have profound differences withhimher on domestic and foreign policy.Which of Clinton’s policies do you agree with?
I voted for Rubio and the Trump nomination still seems like a bad dream.
The Clintons are worse than Trump, much much worse.
I didn’t. I supported Walker, went on a remote vacation and came back to the unpleasant surprise that he was no longer in the race. That was a bad day. Then my second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth choices dropped one by one. My last choice was Ted Cruz, a flawed human being who I tend to agree with on most issues. Then he died, electorally. For a long time I was #never, but slowly came to grips with the fact that voting in Florida for anyone other than Trump was, effectively, supporting Hillary. As the wife of a friend has said, Trump may be a bad man, but Hillary is Satan incarnate. And that was before the wikileaks disclosures of their crud anti-Catholicism.
I think it is a very close call. I have no problem with those who decide Trump is the lesser of two evils, I have a problem with the people that wanted Trump to win the nomination and then complain that Hillary won.
I do think Trump demonstrates that there is not much of a limit to the amount of evil Republicans will vote for, so I’m concerned that both these nominees have communicated to their respective parties a blank check to nominate ever greater levels of evil with the comfort that other party will also increase their evil game. The lesser of two great evils is still a great evil.
The caveat is that as I said back in comment 22, I think we have to accept that the Republican Party is a big government central-planning party, so what I consider evil (authoritarian central-planning) is actually what a plurality of the party supports and wants in the next President. If the Republicans want an authoritarian central-planner President, they will get one no matter who wins in November.
Regardless, I think I have reached my limit as the amount of evil that I can endorse in the Republican nominee by giving my useless vote in a state that 538 gives a 99.1% chance of winning
As I said above, I have no problem with people that believe Trump is the lesser of two evils. My parents live in Florida. I told my father that for the first time in my life, I’m glad I live in a state where my vote doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I would do if I lived in a close state.
I’m glad I am absolved of having an impact in this election. I will spend my time after the election researching countries that are picking up the mantle of freedom and capitalism that we are shedding as quickly as we can. When neither party wants economic freedom, our decline in economic freedom can only accelerate.
But not with Hillary, I presume ?
Maybe you should stop reading the New York Times and Washington Post.
I see no evidence that Trump is an “authoritarian central planner.” Do you think all successful real estate developers are?
I find it really amusing when a process based on non random sampling mysteriously always converges as the end date nears. ANd further amused as people are always ‘surprised’ at how they narrow.
Some folks, as Lincoln said, you can fool every damn time.
I didn’t say that. That was ASquared. Please be more careful with your quotes.
Sigh. Yeah. If you find someplace, preferably not within range of Russia, and preferably either English speaking or whose language is on Duolingo for English speakers, please share.
Meh, I don’t read the NYT at all (I did get temporary access to WashPo with Amazon Prime, but I don’t read it much).
I don’t have to. Trump is very clear that he strongly believes in central planning, in fact he brags about it. Trump famously said the government should not allow companies to decide where to manufacture its products and has said countless times that he will punish companies that don’t do what he wants and brags about how many inner city jobs he will create as President. He has said he will force people to say Merry Christmas and force the military to commit war crimes and they will do it because he is a great leader. He is an authoritarian central planner. His recent change to wearing a red jersey from a life of wearing blue jerseys hasn’t been accompanied by a change in view on the efficacy of central planning.
The problem is, the only part of the world that seems to understand how bad socialism is are the countries that recently lived under the thumb of the Soviet Union (unlike American voters), so Eastern Europe is high on our list. My oldest son was born in Prague and my wife learned to speak Czech fluently when we lived there (and of all the places I’ve lived, Prague was by far the best place to live).
I will say Prague is a very easy place to live if you only speak English. In two years of living there, I had one issue (at a dry cleaner no less) where my inability to speak Czech caused me to spend (approximately) an extra dollar on something I didn’t need. When my wife picked up the pants, the woman behind the counter said “I told your husband that he didn’t need [whatever it was].” The woman was shocked to learn that I didn’t speak Czech after being a customer for the last six months.
Hogwash, people can break faith with other people, companies can break faith with clients or customers. No gods or churches are needed. Whatever Shapiro is, he is no longer GOP, he betrayed their base and their nominee. Now while still inflicting maximum harm on the nominee and still ridiculing their base he wants to be open to a reconciliation. Nuts, he went his own path, let him be brave enough to continue his journey into obscurity.
Thanks for the comments and the upvote.
I want to reiterate the importance of building and holding together a successful electoral coalition on the Conservative side. By definition, it’s going to have to be center-right, just like Ricochet itself.
I myself am a pretty hardcore conservative on almost all issues, but I think that only about 15-20% of the voting population agrees with me. We need to have a reasonably big tent if we hope to avoid becoming a fringe party.
The good news is that, from the reports that I’ve read, the folks at the Trump rallies rival the Tea Party, and traditional Conservatives generally, in being good neighbors. The rallies are orderly, polite, and they leave the grounds in good shape. You know, the kind of folks who leave a park cleaner than when they got there.
I want to see a big, happy, Republican party filled with friendly rancor. I want everyone in a big, big tent, from the fervidly pro-Trump folks at Breitbart and in the Rust Belt, to RINOs like Kasick and our own lovable Rob, to conservative extremists like Ted Cruz and Mark Levin (and me), to our brilliant Conservative egg-heads like VDH, Goldberg, Epstein and Klavan. Oh, and some Mad Dogs and Englishmen, too.
Someday the Lord is going to return and make everything right. Until then, we need to muddle through together.
Thank you. I waited and waited for the GOP to embrace all these new folks interested in the GOP, to invite them in and listen to them and ask them to participate. I asked the Ricochet management if they would try and attract these folks. I paid for subscriptions to a few to Rico late last year and they felt unwelcome.
The GOP will decide to embrace the new arrivals or it will splinter . My fear is the Dems are better at adapting and will now go after this electorate in a big way. If Trump does get over 20% of the black vote, they will have to do this for damage control.
There is a quote bug. Sometimes, higlight+quote grabs the wrong name from a nested quote. That may have been what happened.
If Trump gets more than 20% of the black vote he will be elected.
That would be the most beautimous thing I can imagine resulting from this election. It would mean blacks finally awakened to the exploitation they’ve suffered under Democrat governance. And it would cause the Democrat elitists to soil themselves. I would enjoy that yuugely!
My point is the Dems are going to go after the blue collar white vote whether Trump wins or not. They are much better at adapting then conservatives, who tend to be slow to evolve.
I suspect that is what happened. So we need to be careful when quoting snippets. I get in enough trouble with what I do say.