I’ve made no secret of my contempt for the ridiculous, fraudulent, bizarrely deformed crybaby who’s allegedly leading the Republican Party primaries. I’ve tried to think of a single reason to support him, and none of them make any sense to me. I loathe Hillary Clinton as much as the next teabagger, but hating a criminal is no reason to fall in line behind a lunatic.
I will not allow myself to be herded into a boxcar on the Trump Train, and I’m not alone. Here’s Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard on the steep price of Trumpism:
Nine months ago, if you had asked Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Jerry Falwell Jr., or Ann Coulter whether they would endorse a figure who takes the Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of Iraq (“Bush lied, people died”), one suspects they all would have recoiled at the prospect. Yet in the hours after Trump insisted that George W. Bush intentionally lied the country into war, not one of the major figures who have endorsed him was willing to contradict his claim…
People who ought to know better — who almost certainly do know better — seem to have embraced this article of faith: Trump is leading in the polls. Anyone leading in the polls is brilliant. So Trump is brilliant. Therefore everything Trump does or says must be brilliant, too.
This weird, unfalsifiable dogma winds up crowding out honest analysis among Trump’s endorsers and enablers. They see their suspension of rationality as the cost of doing business in promoting Trumpism. If that truly is the price of Trumpism — if one can’t be against illegal immigration and the donor class, yet also think that conspiracy theorists ought not be suffered in high office — then it is too high.
Yep. It’s cult thinking. It’s idol worship. It’s everything I’ve stood against for the better part of a decade. Now, apparently, I’m a traitor and an “establishment cuck” if I don’t fall for it, just because the new cult is centered around a guy who only put an (R) after his name five minutes ago.
Here’s Jon Gabriel at Ricochet, addressing the people who believe a single, solitary thing Trump is promising:
How will Trump usher in this utopia? He just will. He’ll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. He’ll start a trade war with China, which will somehow lower prices and create jobs. He’ll pull out of the Middle East, while bombing it and taking their oil. He’ll give everyone government health care, make the economy grow like you wouldn’t believe, and change the First Amendment so people won’t say mean things about him…
Trump praises the strength of Vladimir Putin and the Chinese communists who crushed the Tiananmen Square protestors. He approvingly retweets Mussolini fan accounts, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. He refuses to denounce David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, bizarrely assuming that will help him with voters in the Deep South.
I still hope, and pray, that Republicans won’t fall for this Democratic demagogue. But if Trump were to win the nomination, it would prove that the Party of Lincoln and Reagan was dead.
I’m not giving up on the Grand Old Party just yet. But if it’s so damaged and debased that it can be taken over by this undisguised flim-flam man and his growing army of “nationalists,” then it doesn’t represent me anymore.
And on that point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse reminds us what a political party is, and what it isn’t:
Now, let’s talk about political parties: parties are just tools to enact the things that we believe. Political parties are not families; they are not religions; they are not nations – they are often not even on the level of sports loyalties. They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.
If our Party is no longer working for the things we believe in – like defending the sanctity of life, stopping ObamaCare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. – then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed.
Exactly. There’s no law saying you have to vote Republican or Democrat. I don’t see “Coke or Pepsi” anywhere in the Constitution. You don’t owe either party, or any party, a damn thing.
I became a Republican because I got fed up with liberals. I’m not voting for a liberal — if Trump can even be said to have a political philosophy beyond “Gimme Gimme Gimme,” it sure as hell ain’t conservatism — just because he decided he’d have a better shot at the White House as a Republican.
I don’t work for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is supposed to be working for me. If they can’t do their job, I’ll just have to say:
You’re fired.
P.S. You really need to make up your “minds,” Trumpkins: Either he’s inevitable, or by refusing to vote for him I’m basically pushing Hillary’s wheelchair into the Oval Office myself. Either my support is irrelevant, or you can’t achieve Trumptopia without me. Pick one and stick with it.