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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
Wrong. There must be an argument about the likely consequences, and to ignore the likely consequences and focus on the moral character of the person is to dodge one’s moral duty.
Think about our alliance with Stalin during World War II.
If I am wrong (and I may be), it has to do with my assessment of the likely consequences. I would only insist that in cases like this, prudence is the ground on which one should make one’s decision — and making a prudent decision in such matters is a moral imperative. Setting aside prudence out of disgust for an individual is morally wrong. It is not morally wrong to choose the bad over the worse. It is one’s moral duty.
Ahahahahahahaha!
I’m not saying it’s a reason to avoid voting for the guy at this point, but Trump’s propensity for petty malice was pretty well known even before he started running. I guess what it had going for it was that it does run petty. Desiring to choose petty malice over grand malice, I get.
Trump is also firmly opposed to entitlement reform. I am all for cutting taxes, but expenditures must be brought in line with reality.
They can easily find common ground on both.
Trump has never been a true immigration hawk, he has always supported touch-back amnesty, so he will get his wall and the tens of millions of “good” immigrants will get amnesty without the touch back and Trump will claim victory because he never cared about immigration, he cared about saying “wall”.
Free trade, they already have common ground. They will raise tariffs to “protect American workers” and force companies to hire more union workers by threatening to CEO pay or some other inane regulation that will allow Trump to say he created jobs while actually hurting the working class.
Chad hit on what’s always the problem with such arguments, folks.
You are right about free trade, and when I think about it I hold my head in my hands. I think that you are wrong about his allegiance to his stated positions. The details will be negotiable, no doubt, as they always are. But he is not going to do a complete flip on the open-borders question. Remember that the man is vain. It does not count as victory if you have to abandon your signature issues. On some of these matters –regulation, for example — he has been sounding off for years.
But you are right to be focusing on the crucial question. What are the likely consequences? In what shape will we be four years down the road? Those are the sorts of questions that Americans asked themselves after Pearl Harbor, and they then held their noses and forged an alliance with Josef Stalin.
That is my point. Of course, he lashes out — like an eighth-grader whose manhood has been questioned. Hillary holds grudges, and her malice against deplorable and irredeemable folk like you and me is very great, indeed. There is a huge difference between childishness and real hatred. In my judgment, the pettiness of Trump’s flailing about is distinct from real malice.
That is true. And thank you for recognizing there are other purposes for a vote besides the decisive one deciding between the two leads. Those wishing to have their vote matter decisively pick between the two leads, recognizing that this decisive power may be greatly diluted by the state in which they live. Those wishing to have their vote matter in some other way choose differently.
Fair enough. I’m used to thinking of malice as a quality that’s often petty, involving petty grudges and so forth. But I could see wishing to reserve the word for description of a grander evil.
Well lets have that one then. We agree that both Clinton and Trump will do damage to the nation during his/her term. Which one will do the most is really a craps shoot. So if we’ve accepted that damage will be done, then we must turn to the best way to undo their damage. Here is were Trump is, in my opinion, even more dangerous than Clinton. Conservatism is the only solution to the problems of poor governance both past and future. By wedding the GOP (the only vessel of conservatism in our system) to the man you describe in the beginning of your essay will likely do grave and possibly irreparable damage to both the party and the ideology it represents. In an effort to prevent or limit the harm we all agree is inevitable, we’ll have broken the tools required to repair the damage after its occurrence.
I’ll grant that the amount of damage Clinton can do through expansion of the executive and the courts is terrifying and quite possibly irreparable even with an intact conservatism, but at least we’d still have the option of trying. If Trump discredits the very ideas the nation was founded on then we’re done for. At that point my rational self interest would be to vote for whoever promised the best prices on whiskey.
I thought it was funny, especially in context – Most folks willing to call him “Egg McMuffin” are the ones who’ll tell you “voting McMuffin” is a vote for Hillary. That Rahe won’t is what makes the usage funny.
We’ve already seen how — as a candidate — he’s changed the NRA’s position on the Fourth Amendment. God knows what he’ll be able to accomplish this way once he has the trappings of the presidency behind him.
I think we agree that this is a rather close call, and I find your basic argument that we’re not just getting her but all her allies powerful. It’s just not powerful enough.
And then there’s the whole foreign policy business, as you say.
I’m not sure you do have history on your side. I think the recollection of many about what the Republican-controlled congress did, or did not do, is far from accurate. Congress does in fact, rather than in theory, have the power of the purse. But they also can not enact legislation themselves. When they have a president of the opposing party and do not have 2/3 majorities in congress, they can not ensure that their bills are enacted, regardless of our wishes. But they also can not be accused – as many like to do – of complicity because of these constitutional restrictions.
What they can do, however, is stop the agenda of the opposition’s executive. The Republicans in congress did just this with Obama after they took control of the legislative branch. They will do so with Hillary as well.
Paul,
OK, I’ve given you half a loaf. However, did you get entitlement reform from the Republican leadership in Congress? Did they give you entitlement reform after the Tea Party single-handedly gave them the House of Representatives in 2010? Did they give you entitlement reform when a more seasoned conservative movement gave them the Senate in 2014? Do you think Paul Ryan would help or hurt with entitlement reform if Trump were to propose it?
I will work on getting you the other half of the loaf but I don’t think it only rests on Trump.
Regards,
Jim
Do I believe as in being >99% certain he’d do it? No. I do consider it a likely contingency, though.
Say likely a one-in-ten chance or greater of it happening if he were elected, with “greater” perhaps going about as high as eight-in-ten, the wide spread reflecting my uncertainty about the guy.
just want to point out it wasn’t only Repubs who voted for Trump. He did very well in open primary states. So it’s not fair to say “45% of the GOP thought it was smart …”
Yep. “Hey baby, you look exactly like my future ex-wife. Wanna come back to my place?”
Kind of like, “You are worth half my assets”
“Your assets look like they’re worth half of mine, and I’m ready for some asset allocation!”
(Worst actuarial pickup line ever.)
There was a time when Trump was critical of Putin. This changed when Putin did nothing other than flatter the man’s ego. It would be a yuge mistake to assume any position he has taken in the primaries is something he actually cares about. There was a time when he was very pro-amnesty for example. If you believe that his feelings being hurt by Republicans, while some of the Democrats flatter his ego couldn’t force him to do a 180 on any issue, then you and I have completely different reads on the man.
So what’s the best actuarial pickup line? We’ll wait.
No, I don’t think Trump has learned anything. And Trump will be the first one to suppress any speech he views as critical of him. Trump is authoritarian in nature (his corporate management style is considered tribal). He is rude, he doesn’t listen and often interrupts others. Trump doesn’t read.
While I agree with all you said about Ms. Clinton, I see the same results from a Trump presidency.
Do you really think he has an interest in the Second Amendment? He’ll trod that into the dust whenever he fells like it.
Sill #NeverEverTrump
Hey babe, I do NOT suffer from percentile dysfunction, bell EVE me!
????
In my view, voting for Evan McMullin makes no more sense than writing in Egg McMuffin. Useless gestures, both.
The same results? How will he suppress speech? He won’t have the power. She will.
Here are the results of a Military Times poll from a few weeks back (presumably it’s tightened). According to them, you’re correct, though Trump isn’t winning a majority among either officers or enlisted men.
We do. He is not as empty as you suppose — though he is not good, I will concede.
I have decided this exchange is the perfect illustration of the problem with all of the debates about the future under Trump. Because the problem is they’re both right.
Mike LaRoche is right because during this period the United States staged interventions and stationed troops in Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and China – all while fighting the last remnants of the Philippine insurrection and ruling that country as a colonial power. It rejoined the banking consortium in China, took part in international naval conferences in 1921-22, 1927, and 1930, and signed a whole host on international agreements, all while being heavily involved in trade, expansion of telegraph lines and radio.
Paul Rahe is right because as Washington elites would have thought about it in the interwar period, none of the US’s extensive military and financial meddling abroad counted as much as the determination to stay out of entanglements in Europe. The US did not join the League of Nations, used the Kellogg Briand Pact to avoid an entagling alliance with France, passed a series of neutrality laws, and pursued a steadfast policy of nonintervention against the growing “epidemic of international lawlessness” of Japan in 1931, Italy in 1935, and Germany in 1939, culminating in the America First movement in 1941.
They’re both right, just prioritizing different issues. So goes the “is Trump worse” debate.
I think that you would get entitlement reform if a real Republican were elected President, and we had the requisite votes in the House and Senate. Yes.
Jim: This is not realistic, and I think this attitude is a big part of the problem that gave us a Trump candidacy.
There was never the slightest chance that the GOP House could enact entitlement reform when faced with a Democratic Senate. There was not even the slightest chance that the GOP House and Senate could enact entitlement reform with Obama in the White House, as this would require a veto-proof majority which the GOP did not have.
I don’t think that this influenced you personally, but I think that this was the source of frustration of many of those who supported Trump. They had unrealistic expectations and then, tragically, decided that GOP leadership was the real enemy.
This was not the only factor, and there was legitimate reason for distrust on issues which divide the GOP constituency such as immigration and SSM.