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An Open Letter to the NeverTrumpers from a Sympathizer
I am not here to condemn the NeverTrumpers. I share their instincts. Donald Trump is — I will not put a fine point on it — a swine. I followed him in the tabloids haphazardly in the mid-1990s when I was a visiting professor at Yale and took coffee each morning at a Lesbian-operated place in New Haven where the tabloids were always lying around. He was then and is now a man who revels in adultery. I was not surprised about his conversation with Billy Bush. I would even bet that he had similar conversations on the links with Hillary Clinton’s husband. He is seventy years old, and he is still engaged in the kind of banter typical of eighth-grade male hot dogs. Put simply, like Charming Billy, he never really grew up. But, unlike the Big Dawg, he has almost no impulse control. If you attack him for anything, you will set him off, and you will get schoolboy taunts in return. The man is desperately insecure.
He is also no conservative. He has no understanding of the road that we are on fiscally. As a businessman, he borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, and his lawyers arranged things so that, when his enterprises went bankrupt, someone else was left holding the bag. If he becomes President, that someone else is apt to be you and I.
He has no knowledge of foreign affairs, no sense of the fragility of the international order. He has instincts, not ideas. He is understandably annoyed that our allies contribute little to the common defense. But he does not appreciate the degree to which our well-being in the long run is tied up with our alliances. In office, if unrestrained, he could do great damage. He could take us back to the isolationism of the 1920s and the 1930s. Plenty of people on both the left and the right already long for that. The generation that now commands the stage has no memory of World War II and its origins, much less the Cold War.
But, I would suggest to the NeverTrumpers, you should hold your nose and vote for the slimeball anyway. I offer you two reasons: Hillary Clinton & the Democratic Party.
The second may be the more important. For, let’s face it. The lady is not well. Her doctors are lying to us. And she is not apt to last more than eighteen months — which means that, if she is elected, we are apt to have Tim Kaine, an admirer of liberation theology, for our president.
More to the point, however, whether she lives on and on or not, hers will be Barack Obama’s third term. Obamacare will be fully institutionalized and any reforms that are made will put us further on the slippery slope to a single-payer system. Think about it: you can have medical care as good as that which the federal government provides to veterans. To be sure, Trump has blathered nonsense about this at one time or another. But he is running for President today as an opponent of Obamacare.
That is not, however, the most important matter at stake. The real issue is whether in the future we will have open discussion of political issues and free elections. Think about what we have now — a federal bureaucracy that is fiercely partisan. An IRS that tries to regulate speech by denying on a partisan basis tax-exempt status to conservative organizations. A Department of State that hides the fact that its head is not observing the rules to which everyone else is held concerning security of communications and that colludes with a Presidential campaign to prevent the release of embarrassing information. A Department of Justice that ought to be renamed as the Department of Injustice, which does its level best to suppress investigations that might embarrass the likely nominee of the Democratic Party. An assistant attorney general that gives a “heads up” to that lady’s campaign. An Attorney General who meets on the sly with her husband shortly before the decision is made whether she is to be indicted. A federal department that promotes racial strife and hostility to the police in the interests of solidifying for the Democrats the African-American vote.
Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party, inventing false stories about the candidates nominated by the other party, managing the news, manipulating the public, promoting in the party not favored the nomination of a clown, protecting the utterly corrupt nominee of the other party from scrutiny.
Let’s add to this the fact that the Democratic Party is intent on opening our borders and on signing up illegal aliens to vote. If you do not believe me, read what Wikileaks has revealed about the intentions of Tony Podesta. Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally change America.” He called his administration “The New Foundation.” Well, all that you have to do to achieve this is to alter the population.
To this, I can add something else. Freedom of speech is under attack. Forty-four Senators, all of them Democrats, voted not long ago for an amendment to the Constitution that would hem in the First Amendment. Ostensibly aimed at corporate speech, this would open the doors to the regulation of all speech. The Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission have pressed for regulating the internet — for treating blogposts as political contributions and restricting them. Members of the Civil Rights Commission have argued that freedom of speech and religious freedom must give way to social justice. There is an almost universal move on our college campuses to shut down dissent — among students, who must be afforded “safe spaces,” and, of course, in the classroom as well. There, academic freedom is a dead letter; and, in practice, despite the courts, in our public universities, the First Amendment does not apply.
We entered on a slippery slope some time ago when the legislatures passed and courts accepted laws against so-called “hate crimes” — that punished not only the deed but added further penalties for the thought. Now we are told that “hate speech” cannot be tolerated — which sounds fine until one realizes that what they have in mind rules out any discussion of subjects such as the propriety of same-sex marriage, sluttishness, and abortion; of the damage done African-American communities by irresponsible behavior on the part of fathers; and of the manner in which Islam, insofar as it is a religion of holy law, may be incompatible with liberal democracy. If you do not think that a discussion of these matters is off limits, you are, as the Democratic nominee put it not long ago, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” You are “deplorable and irredeemable.” You are, as she said this week, “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision.” It is a short distance from demonization to suppression. And, let’s face it, the suppression has begun — in our newspapers, on television, on our campuses, on Facebook, on Reddit, in Google searches.
One more point. The courts are now partisan. Thanks to Barack Obama’s appointees, in many parts of the country, the circuit courts have ruled out expecting people to present picture IDs when they vote. Elsewhere — for example, in Michigan — the circuit courts have ruled out eliminating straight-line party voting. All of this is aimed at partisan advantage — at making voter fraud easy and at encouraging straight-line voting on the part of those not literate in English. Who knows what the courts will do if the Democrats can get a commanding majority on the Supreme Court? We have already had all sorts of madness shoved down our throats by those who legislate from the bench. If you think that it has gone about as far as it goes, you do not know today’s Democratic Party. I doubt very much whether the Democrats will really try to shove through a constitutional amendment in effect revoking the protections extended to speech and religion in the First Amendment. That would be too controversial. They will do it, as they have done many other things, through the courts. Can we tolerate “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” speech — speech that is “deplorable and irredeemable,” that is “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision?” Surely, surely not. And this would be easy. If we can punish the “hate” in “hate crimes,” why not punish it or outlaw it in speech? All that you have to do is to “reinterpret” the First Amendment.
We live, moreover, in a world of rampant prosecutorial indiscretion — where a Clinton, guilty of something that would have put anyone else in jail, gets off without an indictment and a Bob McDonnell, who has done nothing illegal, is prosecuted to the hilt. We live in a world in which colleges and universities are pressed to use kangaroo-court procedures in adjudicating the love-life of randy undergraduates and in which only the man can be held responsible for the tomfoolery that both are engaged in.
Need I go on? If Trump is elected President, this is apt to end. The man has been burned. This campaign has been an education for him. If Hillary is elected President, this will not only go on. It will deepen. That is a certainty.
As for Hillary herself, what should I say. She worked for the investigation that nailed Richard Nixon, and she was fired for lying. She put her cronies from Arkansas in charge of the White House Travel Office, driving out nonpartisan folks who had been serving everyone well for thirty years, and to cover her indecent behavior, she sicced the FBI on these hapless folks. At her behest, the head of the office was tried for malfeasance and, of course, ruined financially — though he was found not guilty. Think about what she did: she destroyed the lives of ordinary, innocent folk for her own convenience.
I will not go on about what she did to the women foolish enough to fall prey to the allure of her husband — though that, too, says much about her willingness to damage others for her own convenience.
She is also inept. In her husband’s administration, she pushed single-payer and nearly brought Charming Billy down. In the Obama administration, she pushed an intervention in Libya that soon turned quite sour. And when the ambassador who had begged for more security lost his life, she deflected responsibility from herself by blaming it all on a hapless Egyptian Copt who had made a short film that nobody had hitherto noticed, and she and her colleagues in the Obama administration saw to his imprisonment.
As Secretary of State — in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative and what Doug Band calls “Bill Clinton, Inc.” — she ran a shakedown operation aimed at enriching her family and illegally raising money from foreign donors to pay for her Presidential campaign in waiting. To get around the Freedom of Information Act, she did all of her business by email on a server kept in her home that the world’s intelligence agencies could and did hack. In short, she is both corrupt and irresponsible.
Is Donald Trump unfit to be President? I fear so. Is Hillary Clinton unfit to be President? As Nancy Pelosi would say, “Are you kidding? Are you kidding?”
So we must choose. I suggest that we swallow our pride and pick the lesser evil.
Is it not obvious when you think through everything which of the two is the lesser evil? Both will do damage. Both will do serious damage. Neither is admirable. But Donald Trump is apt to do less damage.
I realize that what I have said is not reassuring. But we should not succumb to wishful thinking.
Nonetheless, for all of his failings, Trump will do some very good things. And, in his way, he has already done some good — by forcing Americans to think about issues that we are forbidden to discuss.
We are in for a bad four years. But there is nonetheless bad and there is worse. Unpleasant though it may be, it is better to pick bad. I will not tell you that a vote for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Egg McMuffin is a vote for Hillary. That it is not. But it might allow her to squeak into office — and, if she wins, there will be hell to pay.
Published in Politics
I seek clarity and understanding only, not agreement. I’ve made no statements that others should change their actions to mirror mine.
I don’t give two craps what others will do in this. They will make their own choices for their own reasons.
The very crux of my reasoning is this: there is no moral imperative to vote for either Trump or Clinton. There may be political reasons, and darn fine ones, but the decision is not merely a political one, at least not for me. You or Dr. Rahe or the Man in the Moon may make your voting decisions based solely on political calculations, but I will not. I will factor in other things, weigh the decision on my own scales, and do what I conclude is appropriate with a clear conscience.
And voting for someone who can’t even spell conservatism is what exactly?
No, Trump is not a threat. He does not have a party behind him that is intent on snuffing out dissent. He is immature, and he flails about. But he is in effect toothless. The Lady MacBeth of Little Rock is another matter.
I may have attributed to you something inaccurate. Do you think Trump is fit for the office of the presidency?
I brought that up because when asking the rhetorical question of “Is Donald unfit?” Rahe answered, “I fear so.” For me, that’s the ballgame. Everything beyond “He is unfit to be president” is ancillary; he is undeserving of my vote. Again, not out of pride or fit of pique; rather, out of my simple understanding that in our democratic republic, my vote represents me and my values. If neither major party candidates represents those things, I shouldn’t vote for him.
And, I’ll note, this is the first election in my lifetime that I’ve had to vote third party (McMullin, in my case). While Bush 43, McCain, and Romney were all imperfect — they were humans, after all — they met the basic requirements of being a serious person fit for the office of the presidency. This is a crazy election where 45% of the GOP thought it was smart to nominate a reality TV star that is a “swine,” isn’t a conservative, and is ignorant of fiscal and foreign policy issues. But, then, they say it’s pride and moral preening when people say they won’t vote for said swine. Right.
I already said what I thought earlier on this thread – today I think Hillary will be less bad by a razor thin margin, and I explained why (your quote here is from the follow up conversation). To be honest, three days ago I thought Trump would be less bad by the same. It is constantly shifting, which matters little because it’s only my assessment on how I’ll feel about the outcome (i.e. lousy either way). I can’t predict the future, so I hope my dire predictions about how bad it would be if either won are dead wrong. I’m not voting for either, and not in a swing state where I could be made to feel bad about that, so the “who’s worse” argument at this point is simply academic to me. They’re both bad.
His instincts are no doubt authoritarian, but he will not have behind him an authoritarian party. Hers are totalitarian, and she does have behind her a party that savors the totalitarian temptation. I believe that you underestimate the danger that lies ahead. She is not just flailing when she calls you deplorable and irredeemable, and she and her partisans mean business.
Otherwise, I think your criticism of Trump just.
Tom, he will not be able to loosen our libel laws. As President, he will not have that power. She, together with her party and their allies in the judiciary, will.
Look, the man is awful. But he is not a real threat (except, perhaps, in foreign affairs).
I disagree. I think Trump is a lot worse than immature and full of hot air, and quite possibly dangerous, as I’ve said before. You replying with the opposite in an emphatic and declarative tone does not convince me otherwise.
I’ve argued otherwise. He’s a threat not only to the nation over the course of his tenure (should he win), but he is a threat to that which is required to repair the damage either one of these two jackals with inflict.
I think there has been some misunderstanding. I think that watching Trump betray the conservatives who are talking themselves into voting for him is a good affirmative reason to vote for him. Trump is a comeuppance for all those who talked big about no compromises and principles and conscience folded without much of a fight. There is a certain amount of justice in watch Rush Limbaugh praise new entitlements and Ted “Ugly-Wife-Father-Killed-JKF-Vote-Your-Conscience” Cruz buckle without getting an apology. If Hillary is elected, this ends and they get to act tough again, like most conservatives will. But Trump…he is justice served very cold. I could live with that.
No, he will have behind him a spineless party who can’t stand up to anything (or so I’ve heard them described, repeatedly.) Correct me if I’m wrong, but the main argument people made for his winning the primary was that congressional Republicans are feckless. Are we now to expect them to stand athwart Trump yelling stop when they can’t even be relied upon to consistently oppose the democrats and leftism? Is our only real hope a stalwart opposition party to the president from within his own party?
You are confusing making a moral choice and making a political choice. In voting for Trump, you need not be endorsing him or praising him or embracing him. You would be choosing bad over worse.
In World War II, we allied with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. It was a nasty choice we had to make, and we chose the ally that posed the lesser threat to our well-being at the time.
Especially, in foreign affairs, we make such choices every day. This time, alas, we have to do so in the domestic political sphere.
The analogy does not apply. This is not about an immoral act on your part. It is about an act of political judgment. That you would find it disgusting to vote for Trump — that I understand. But sometimes one must set aside one’s disgust and make a prudential judgment. Which outcome would be worse for my country? That is the only question that you should be pondering.
And let me add that I know full well that the conclusion I have reached about the answer to that question might be wrong. In foreign affairs, he might be the more dangerous figure. That is where my argument could most effectively be attacked.
Your last point strikes me as the only ground on which my argument is legitimately subject to attack. The only real question here is the prudential question. Which of these two candidates is likely to do us more harm?
That you for the letter, Dr. Rahe, but I’ve been comfortable with my decision for a long time and voted accordingly this morning.
I will admit there’s a small part of me that enjoys so many people caring so deeply about how I vote.
You underestimate how bad things are. Give thought for a minute or two to where we would be if the First Amendment were compromised and the sort of arguments we make here were judged “hate speech” and prohibited. We are surrounded now by censorship — in the universities, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit — and that censorship is the work of those who also want to reconfigure the First Amendment. The deplorable and the irredeemable — they must be silenced. Michael Anton may be over the top. But things are far worse than you think. The State Department is thoroughly politicized. The Department of Justice is thoroughly politicized. The IRS is thoroughly politicized, and the courts are close to being thoroughly politicized. It is ugly now. It will get much uglier if Hillary Clinton is elected President.
Not all of us agree with you on this.
Is it shame then? I understand that. It is why I used the word pride. In voting for Trump, I will feel tainted. If he is elected and does something silly or awful (which he will do), I will feel in some measure responsible. It is an awful situation, and I can understand your reluctance. But the choice we face is this — which of the two unfit individuals should we make President. In such a situation, prudence is the only proper resort. Checking out is an irresponsible dodge. Our moral duty is to choose the one less likely to do harm.
We did that when we allied with Stalin in World War II. We do it every day when we make deals in foreign affairs with nasty characters of one sort or another. Should we be guided by shame? Or should we make the best of a bad situation?
I started thinking more seriously about the nature of the Conservative core of the Republican Party over the last thirty years in 2012 when I watched Romney a lifelong fellow traveler of the Left with a long history dating back to his Father and Mother of opposing every Conservative. Romney attacked and savaged the Conservatives who ran against him in the primary more aggressively than he ever attacked Obama in the General but we were assured by all the “Wise Men” that moderate to liberal Romney was the only candidate to beat Obama. It was only when he picked Ryan that convinced me that he was worthy of my vote.
Trump’s personal history appears worse than Romney’s as far as can be surmised of a member of secretive cult with a history of underground polygamy and other odd practices but his political history is really not much different than Romney’s or Clinton’s. He and Romney sat out the conflict and victory over the Soviet system and were on the wrong side of every political argument of their adult life.
The rise of the Alt-Right and the widespread conservative Apostasy in favor Trumpism kill any inclination to vote for Trump while Pence’s selection failed to even interest me.
No sale. I am not going to own any part of this mess. Blank is my Presidential candidate and straight R for every other office.
They would not have to display courage. They would simply have to not vote with him. The party is spineless in the face of Barack Obama but it has denied him things that he wants. Trump as President would be in a very weak position. He could either act as a Republican or function as a man without a party.
If you really want to take me on, focus on foreign affairs where Presidents are relatively unchecked. There my calculations may be wrong. In the domestic sphere, Trump would be strong only insofar as he took up the issues that the Republicans in Congress care about.
Is it not? To quote again from Dr. Moore:
Absent Hillary, there is no way either you or I would accept Trump as president. There must be a positive argument for the candidate and not merely a negative argument against the alternative to justify affirming that person’s use of my delegated authority, however diluted that authority might be in a nation of millions. I can vote against her without voting for him. If the question is to whom will I delegate my authority, then I choose neither. For me that is the only right option.
In line with my original comment that I do not accept the premise that “Trump is the lesser of two evils”, Trump is likely, in the long term, to do us more harm. I have just completed commenting elsewhere that Hillary will enter office as a weakened, scandal-ridden president with no mandate. She’ll face a Republican-controlled House and it appears now more likely she will also face a Republican-controlled Senate. She can not advance a radical first term agenda in the manner Obama (a popular first term president who enjoyed Democrat super-legislative majorities) did. In light of this, Democrats will face disaster in the 2018 mid-terms where they must defend 25 Senate seats against these headwinds.
A Trump victory would make him the face of conservatism and Republicans (which he is neither) and substantiate for the left the caricatures of both that they have unfairly propagated for years. Instead of 2018 being a challenge for the Democrats, he would turn it into a wave in their favor. There is no evidence he is guided by principle and he is ignorant of (and intellectually incurious about) policy and constitutional structure. Long term damage to the party and to conservatism will be irreparable.
Or he’ll ally with the democrats so he can win, and winning is all he cares about. It’s one of the only things he’s said that I believe.
Fair enough. But you should explain how he is dangerous. I took the trouble of explaining in my second sentence (above) why I do not believe him dangerous. He does not have the backing of a party intent on snuffing out dissent. You have not yet explained why you think him dangerous.
And what will he do in alliance with the Democrats? They might agree on this or that. But what about his signature issues? Immigration? Free trade? Where could they find common ground?
You are right that Trump will do damage. I think your assessment pretty much accurate. You are wrong about Hillary. The circuit courts are now stacked; Obama has shown how the executive power can be deployed in defiance of Congress and the law; and the courts will now rubber stamp our increasingly dictatorial executive — especially if she puts a left-liberal on the court, as she will. Do you expect the Republicans in the Senate to resist this? If so, dream on.
The bottom line is that legislation is no longer necessary. In theory Congress has the power of the purse. Will they use it? I think not, and I have history on my side.
Meh. It’s not funny enough to overcome being a poor pun on someone’s name. I put it roughly on a par with tRump.
Paul,
I am late to commenting here. I agree with the general tenor of your post. Trump is flawed and a gamble for conservatives but Hillary is an across the board disaster. The quote I picked above is something I must take issue with you on.
To extrapolate Trump’s actual economic policies from his time as a swashbuckling real estate developer isn’t really likely. The opening of the very last debate told me what I wanted to know. Hillary would raise taxes and double down on the lunatic green energy nonsense. That would drive an already super weak economy into a deeper ditch. Meanwhile, Trump pledged to drop the corporate tax rate down below the world average. I would be satisfied with dropping it to the world average as we are way above it now. This plus our hyper-regulatory regime is driving investment out of America and with it very good jobs.
Thus on economics Trump committed to rational change that would make a great difference. Hillary doubled down on economic lunacy. This is not a hard choice, especially for a conservative.
Regards,
Jim
His bar pickup lines you mean? We have no reason to believe he has any allegiance to his stated positions. His character and history would indicate they are a means to an end, not the end. I’ll grant that he could have had a political road to Damascus event, but there’s been no evidence so far.
On free trade I think he’ll find a lot of common ground with the Sanders/Warren wing of the democrat party.
It seems to me that classical liberals have to acknowledge that the Republican Party no longer agrees with classical liberal ideas. However you vote on Tuesday, you have to decide whether you want to continue to invest your time, energy, and vote in a party that believes that an authoritarian central planner like Donald Trump should be President.
I happen to believe that the future of our country will not be determined by the outcome on Tuesday, but what the ever shrinking number of people who believe in freedom, capitalism, and smaller government decide to do on Wednesday.
If you do nothing, you are allowing the party to continue to nominate the greater evil, and you will be forced to vote for someone more evil in 2020, and you will do it because the Democrats will also nominate someone more evil in 2020. And in 2024, the level of evil will continue to increase, and so on and so on. But every year, there will be lesser of two evils, and I for one refuse to accept that the letter R next to someone’s name is the dispositive determinant of the lesser of two evils.