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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
Amy,
I was giving the creativity award to Tom Meyer but you just blew him away. This is the faintest faint praise I have ever heard. Dr. Rahe may yet get the other half of the loaf and we will see entitlement reform. Halleluyah!
Regards,
Jim
I think it goes beyond that. Simply put I don’t think the alliance with him was moral or good, even though it was seemingly effective. The good and moral thing that should have been done was to win on our own and actually free all of Europe. At the time that seemed too difficult, so instead of doing the good thing we chose the lesser evil, which was easier and seemed more certain. But the lesser evil is still evil and how can doing evil be moral? People fail to do the good thing all the time, that is the nature of man. It is also in our nature to then justify that failure as some sort of new form of good, but this is just a lie we tell ourselves, because our conciseness knows better.
No good deed no matter how small or insignificant is useless.
Ted Cruz had it right at his convention speech, “vote your conscience”. So I would make this argument simpler. I am voting for McMullin because it is the truth of what I want. Of the candidates running he is the one I want to be president. Our duty as citizens is to be honest with our votes. If we can’t cast our vote honestly then we should not cast it at all.
But this argument for Trump, as all arguments from the reluctants do, relies on the assumption that Trump isn’t offering what he explicitly says he’s offering. That Trump supporters don’t actually want what he is offering. That he doesn’t really understand what he’s saying and when he becomes president he’ll fall neatly into the left-right continuum and be more right than her and all will be normalized.
But he does know what he is saying. He’s a smart man. He wants to “run government like a business.” That includes entitlements.
He’s not saying what Clinton and the Dems want is bad. He’s saying he can do it better.
A novel argument.
Frankly I think arguing how great Trump’s proposed policies will be is far more honest and effective means of convincing people to vote for him. In fact I think it even has a better chance to convince me more than any lesser of two evils argument. It hasn’t yet, but I don’t see how reminding me how terrible they both are is better.
He’s said he’s not going to touch entitlements, which is exactly what the Dems are saying. And I’m sure there are lots of people who are voting for him because they believe he won’t touch entitlements. And they may be right; entitlement spending may be a bridge too far, even for him.
But if character really is destiny, if past performance can predict future performance, then my gut says that if Trump has to choose between what other people expect and what he wants, the other people better get used to disappointment. And if I’m right, then his boorish, self-absorbed behavior might actually do something good for the nation, even if totally unintentionally.
There are lots of things he can do that would be good. And lots of things he would do that I’d like.
But the way he would do those things would also be to grant the heart of the liberal argument. That people are of the government, by the government, and for the government.
He and his supporters have been very clear and very consistent about this point. They think conservatism is a loser. It is naive. That ship has sailed. Time to play with the big boys.
They may be right. Perhaps we should look at it that way. But that way is a different way than the conservative way.
I’m with you on that. Please don’t take my ability to imagine some kind of theoretical positive out of his presidency an endorsement of him or his methods or his policies.
For me, a Trump win is akin to discovering that the pig in the poke is blind and thinking, “Well, even a blind pig might find a truffle.”
What comment is that?
I understand. But a vote is an endorsement as much as a repudiation.
And that endorsement is an endorsement of what Trump is offering. That small government conservatism is old news and that we need to grab the bull by the horns and run this thing so they don’t.
As the Professor outlines, Us running it is better than Them running it. But my problem is with the idea of running it.
Like I said earlier, I’m not voting for him either, so I’m confused as to your point …
In case I’ve been unclear, I’m not voting for him and the best I can say for him is that despite his campaign promises, he is more likely than any other politician to cut welfare payments (by which I mean Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) in order to ensure he has money to blow on vanity projects, which is only a good thing because welfare payments are going to have to be cut at some point anyway to keep our fiscal house from collapsing completely.
Sorry, there are so very many conversations. My point is only that we ought to be discussing the idea of the thing. The politics. And not the tactics and the policies.
If you believe that Trump will appoint real civil liberties people to the FCC, you are wrong. He will appoint people who will be wiling to suppress criticism of Trump. Trump makes almost everything personal, and revenge is a strong emotion for him.
And yes, Trump would work with Democrats to get what he wants, and in many cases, it is the same as Clinton. He will push for equal pay for equal work legislation, as it is dear to Ivanka’s heart. He is protectionist, unless it suits him personally otherwise; its personal. What’s good for Trump is good for…Trump.
If I go into a restaurant and they are serving two versions of a crap sandwich, I won’t order either. I’ll wait for the next meal.
” Donald Trump is — I will not put a fine point on it — a swine. ”
I am unconvinced he is merely that.
I think he is as bad as Hillary Clinton is in every way, and that it is solely a lack of an as yet held public office which has kept him from just her sort of worst crimes. I live in a swing state, Virginia, and I will write Ted Cruz.
I think Hillary being the more partisan will help her to be the more constrained, where the “yuuuge deals” Trump would cut with both sides will entice the worst of each to do their worst. He is no friend of free speech (1st Amd.) nor of private property (5th Amd.), and no visible enthusiasm for a proper and insurrectionary view of the 2nd.
I think he is the greater threat to all the liberties those amendment protect, because I think his success is the abandonment of the effort to shrink government–but the success of the idea it should serve those who vote for Trump!
I have even heard from some Trump! supporters that because the Democrats will always say their opponent is a racist, those opponents may as well have the “benefit” of being openly racist.
No, I can’t vote for him.
You haven’t been looking at all the Republicans, then.
No, they are not right. They want to be just a successful group of takers.
And he’s saying who he will do it for. He hasn’t exactly been subtle with the taking two to four days to faintly condemn David Duke. 40% of the GOP went for him. I can think of no better way for the goals the GOP ostensibly holds to be undermined for decades if not permanently, than for Trump! to succeed in making true what is the worst of the lies the Democrats tell of us.
Ridiculous. Of course you have a moral obligation to vote for one over the other!
That is, if you dare call yourself a conservative. If you’re just a centrist roadie then you’re right: you’ve got no allegiance to anything and are not obligated to anything.
Reagan said it best: “How can we not do what is right and needed to preserve this last best hope of man on earth?” Only one candidate is more likely to help preserve this Republic. The other is committed only to its destruction. “No moral imperative” . . . what a load of horse pucky.
It’s taking the best option available that’s consistent with sustaining the last best hope for mankind to live in a nation based upon popular sovereignty, ordered liberty, with protections for minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
That’s not a good enough reason for you to hold your nose and vote for Trump? What is more important and achievable via the ballot box on November 8?
He is more fit than his only realistic competitor. That makes him the most fit candidate who might be President. What more do you need to know? The choice I have is the choice I have. We don’t get imaginary choices—we get exactly one real choice. This is not hard to fathom, is it?
You are implicitly saying Hillary is more fit than Trump. Why? Her resume? What is it about a lying, thieving, venal authoritarian that promises to destroy the last vestiges of decency in our federal government which makes her more fit than the billionaire developer and reality TV personality? Is his narcissistic personality disorder bothering you? How is his screw-loose disorder any worse for the nation than her’s? Did she demonstrate some great acumen regarding foreign policy when SecState? Name three significant pieces of legislation Senator Clinton authored and got passed. Hell, name one! What in the hell are you seeing in that Left wing loon bag that makes her less frightening than Trump? At least he is likely to do a few things that move the football in the right direction. She will never, ever do anything that’s helpful or healthy for the Republic.
Neither Dr. Rahe or most of the NeverTrumpers are being prideful or preening. If you feel a sting when other people are making a judgement call, that may be something in you saying you aren’t making the right judgement.
BTW
HVTs: Ridiculous. Of course you have a moral obligation to vote for one over the other!
And HVTs means Trump! should be voted for. What were you saying again, iDad?
I think your claim is ridiculous, when the two main party candidate are this bad there is an obligation to vote for neither of them.
I don’t see it as more distinguishing from his vulnerability to be bribed, and what I suspect is his vulnerability to being blackmailed for sexual indiscretions with young ladies–very young ladies.
No, you can write in someone who’s fit for the office. What you have said is literally untrue. What is it with Trump! and his supporters that he and you lie so easily?
That you will have another opportunity for a meal is an assumption. This post was all about why that assumption is likely a dangerous delusion should Hillary get elected President.
I think it will seem less ridiculous if you read the sentences after the one that you clipped.
But it’s not a matter of 20 vs 75mph, it’s a question 99 vs 100, and they areboth hacking the seat belt with a X-Acto.
I hope she wastes her effort on impossibilities.
None were silenced in the politics they sought.
But I do think Kelo was wrongly decided, so he does want to crush me every bit as much as Hillary does,
He isn’t going to try to, he’s going to cut deals with them. It’s the one thing he’s been consistent on, it’s what he’ll do.
He’s incentivized to cut deals, what he knows how to do, he’ll deal with the powers that be, Ryan, Pelosi, McConnell, and Reid. You won’t like the deals the cuts with them. Clinton is impeachable precisely because of her husband’s experience and because she won’t compromise, Trump! won’t be because, he’ll deal all in on the graft. he may even give you your cut–I have no reason to look at that as a positive.
No, it is our duty to oppose evil, never to embrace it. And I see not reason to think Trump! is not as much an enemy of the 1st amendment and election integrity as she is.
My apologies if someone else has already made that observation.
You must have forgotten, we can morally kill people to restore liberty, it’s how it was created in the first place. Never?! That categorical seems like a conclusory effort to end debate.
I do not think 1775 was a harsh or immoral thing, do you? Was 1787 & 8?
Trump! is no friend the first amendment, and I have no reason to believe him when he says he will appoint people to the court who are friendly to it, and I have reason to think he will seek it’s harm…and that he will have the help of both the GOPe and the Dems to do it.
Bottom line, throughout his life, if he ever wanted my vote, he shouldn’t have lied so much.
I am convinced he is every bit as bad as she is.
If you write in or vote third party you are effectively sitting the election out. You are choosing to have no say in who the next President will be.
BTW, why are you #NeverTrumpers such a prickly bunch? Self-righteousness can be a side effect of prolonged constipation. Have you tried Metamucil? Just some advice from a concerned friend.
@tomdperkins