On May 8th, The Bull Elephant welcomed Steven Brodie Tucker’s contribution, “Why I am Voting for Donald Trump.”
I applaud Mr. Tucker’s generosity and civic mindset, as well as TBE’s role in promoting dialogue. But I believe he articulates widely-used logic and sentiment that will lead the GOP in the wrong direction.
Many frustrated voters feel voting for Trump is not an issue of moral or ethical significance, while arguing that the election of Hillary Clinton will have profound moral consequences for the country. If the consequences of Hillary Clinton’s election are of moral significance, the consequences of Trump’s election are also of moral significance.
The same voters assert that voting has no ethical impact. I disagree. Voting is an exercise of power, and power must be subject to ethical use. During WWII, General George Marshall was so committed to that truth that he famously abstained from voting while on active duty because he felt that participation by military personnel in civilian political processes was unethical. Marshall, unlike many today, understood that voting influences how we want to force others to live, and that is certainly an issue of ethics.
Many Trump voters claim this election is “The Pivotal Election of our Times,” a crisis of such proportions that anybody is better than the progressive candidate, who will unleash Hell and singlehandedly destroy the American Dream. I have trouble remembering an election in recent memory that was not described in similar Biblical proportions by the promoters of its candidates. Yet somehow, those elections failed to lead to the End Times, and certainly didn’t lead to heaven!
Instead, they yielded Democrats who pursued progressive agendas laced with moral relativism, while a Democrat in the White House ironically shrank the size of the federal government. The same elections yielded Republican legislators who tacitly endorsed the invasion of personal privacy and prioritized defense contractors over veterans, while increasing expenditures even as they cried out for fiscal restraint. In short, we didn’t get good vs. evil. We got hypocrisy, lack of accountability, and very muddled governance.
If we believe Trump’s proponents, a Hillary Clinton presidency will spell the end of the REINS Act and tax reform legislation. Those people seem unaware that all legislation not passed by noon of January 3, 2017 will die with the end of the current session of Congress. The inauguration of the next president will not occur until January 20, more than two weeks after the end of the 114th Congress. The next president will have zero impact on current legislation.
Trump’s proponents concede that his behavior during the campaign has been awful, but insist it is not entirely relevant to his potential performance as President. When I listen to Trump’s reluctant converts, I am reminded of my bachelor years, when I had a troubled relationship with a beautiful but controlling woman. After months of breakups and “one more try†reunions, I listened as a colleague observed that relationships only get harder with time, and asserted my hope for future smooth sailing was both wishful and flawed thinking. “Good from far, but far from good,†he used to say.
That quip comes to mind every time I see the presumptive GOP candidate. What if – doomsday imperatives aside – voters simply won’t endorse a failure? Hillary Clinton’s record as a federal official is checkered at best. Her penchant for military adventure and failure to create functional alliances are disqualifiers for a would-be president. Donald Trump’s record as a CEO is similar. As pointed out in countless periodicals, Donald Trump’s net worth would be higher today had he invested in the S&P 500 instead of his own corporations.
Both candidates have proven willing to walk back any statement in order to please the audience at hand, leaving voters uncertain of their real positions on issues. The results of this week’s Nebraska primaries indicate 40% of the Republican vote went to candidates who have suspended their campaigns. You read that correctly: 40% of Nebraska conservatives find Trump so unpalatable that they threw their votes away just to express their dissatisfaction. This flies in the face of political science, which asserts voters maximizes their power by voting for candidates who have a chance of winning.
Theodore Roosevelt claimed that a vote is like a rifle, whose usefulness depends on the character of the user. Nebraska voters have shown their character; GOP leadership should hear it clearly as the sound of incoming fire.
The defiance of political science seen in Nebraska was not a fluke. GOP officials have an ethical duty to use established procedure in selecting the Republican candidate for President of the United States, even if that candidate is Donald Trump. However, they have a moral duty to abstain from using fallacy to promote a failure whose moral and ethical codes are so convoluted that we can’t tell where he really stands on the issues.
If GOP leadership insists on actively supporting Trump, they risk the departure of a major chunk of their constituency. Instead, GOP leaders need to think strategically, by reuniting with conservative voters, providing platforms and congressional candidates who align with the desires of conservatives in 2016, and focusing on the presidency in 2020.
10 comments
Who is going to write the article about ” The moral and ethical hazards of the presumptive Democrat Party nominee”?
Or, “The moral and ethical hazards of the Republicane”?
Or, “The moral and ethical hazards of selling our jobs to China”?
Or, “The moral and ethical hazards of cheap, illegal, imported labor”?
Or, “The moral and ethical hazards of our campaign finance system”?
This article is nothing but a Clinton for President banner.
Guys like this author who fed us years of Bushes, Romneys and McCains now are talking about conservative candidates.
Conservatives? Yes you can parse back through Trump’s statements and tell me about how he isn’t a conservative by some statements… ok… BUT did Trump actually enact Romney Care, the blue print for Obamacare? Did he spend on the level of any Democrat while actually holding office?? Did Trump bail out Wall Street in the hundreds of billions of dollars? Did Trump enforce immigration laws like there was no border, enact amnesties and back door amnesties? Did Trump spend 1 trillion dollars on a useless war that will only lead to more spending?
But yet guys like this want to attack Trump for talk… why don’t you attack the slimy GOPe for its ACTIONS?
Should I have pointed out that elected officials gave us “hypocrisy, lack of accountability, and very muddled governance,”? I did, in the article above.
I’m not in the business of feeding anybody anything. I was in the Defend My Country business for 23 years and have been in the Family business for 20 years. I’m currently in the Figure Out How To Send 7 Kids To College business. I’m also going into the What Kind of Country Will My Kids Inherit business. As a Voter, I’m so appalled by our poor options for president that I feel we voters need to sound the alarm.
I’m in violent agreement with your frustration over poor governance, and the very mediocre caliber of candidates offered by the parties. If a patriot lIke James Mattis would decline to follow Eisenhower’s footsteps to the White House, you know our political machine must be in poor shape.
However, we don’t agree over Trump’s status as different. You see him as a rebel who is beholden to nobody. I see him as the ultimate product of a system that has, over time, placed less and less emphasis on character and accomplishment, and more on the ability to plug into emotion. Trump may not be the GOP establishment’s desired choice, but his ascension to the candidacy is a result of the modern day political machine.
I don’t want people to vote for Clinton. However, I do hope conservatives wake up from the spell that has them thinking that Trump’s opposition to Clinton makes him a good candidate, or that his defiance of the GOP makes him a champion of the people. His history is that of a Clinton family friend, a long-time employer of illegal aliens, and four-time filer for corporate bankruptcy. Trump remains in business today only because he made deals with the banks when he was in financial trouble. He still beholden to the banks, and if he goes to the White House, they will be there to remind him. Trump is no champion of the people. Trump is a champion only of Trump.
We the People are going to lose this presidential election, regardless of who is elected. That’s why I recommend in the article above that the GOP should do what it can to make things right with policy platforms and decent Congressional candidates, avoiding a party split that is likely if they lean too far into support of a Trump candidacy. Conservatives need a voice. It’s time for damage control, not wishful thinking.
Your article is a mass of nothing. Some nonsense about moral imperatives and you seem to be okay with Hillary winning… I guess…who knows what you are actually advocating here except you don’t like Trump. Although all you have is to assume that Trump is evil like the rest of you guys with NeverTrump as your mantra.
I find the Bushes as repulsive as you find Trump as they have actively engaged in ending conservatism as political insiders for a fifty some year period. Supporting Teddy Kennedy’s massive immigration scheme to change the demographics of the US for fifty years has meant that the GOP which is at best a useless standard bearer for conservatives is soon going to be buried by third world voters. Then let’s talk about the Bush’s support for government spending…
I didn’t see guys like you writing about the evils of the Bushes. That family has ended conservatism more than Trump ever will…
You speak of dooms day predictions… If you don’t elect a guy who will close the border and enforce immigration laws, conservatism is doomed… it may already be too late. Barack Obama is not encouraging more mass immigration because he wants to help the cause of conservatism.
The GOP can barely win in VA now with the demographic shifts and it is a magnet for illegal immigration. It is soon California.
You had better support Trump and an effective immigration system or you can live in California across the entire US…
How I feel about the Bush family doesn’t matter, as Bush isn’t on the ticket. I have one goal — to disabuse my fellow conservatives of the notion that Donald Trump is any better than the worst candidates out there.
Trump’s border claims are pure scare talk. I work this issue and understand it in detail. Publicly available numbers: FY15 apprehensions at the border — 40,053. ICE deportations — 235,413. Border fence? A strip of fence that is 12-18′ high stretches across the vast majority of border miles. Blimps with high resolution radar and patrol aircraft with multisensor arrays fill in the gaps. Every walkable mile is covered by acoustic, electro optical, or radar sensors in addition to 20,000 Border Patrol Agents. How much more wall do you want to build???
Consider this if you want to make sense out of politicians’ behavior. Conservative politicians say they want to be tough on the border, but big business loves cheap labor and big business fills Republican campaign coffers. Progressives advertise love for the little person but they bow to labor unions, and laboring unions fill Democrat campaign coffers. The result is that politicians take a public position on these issues, but frequently act in opposition behind closed doors. Look at the legislation behind the border fence in California. Yes, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein championed it back in the 90s. Both are famous Democrats who are as liberal as liberal can be.
President Obama says everything he can to make the immigrant heart beat faster, but he has deported historic numbers. Why? He wants his voters to vote for him, but first he needs his donors’ money to reach the voters who he is wooing. So he talks a good game, but then he deports.
Money talks, and lately it has been shouting. When the supreme court struck down campaign finance limits 2 years ago, they put political office into the palms of corporations. The estimated total cost of the House campaigns in 2008 was $900M. In 2012 it was $1.1B. As of December 31st, 2015, it was already $200M. This is tracking to be the most expensive election in history.
It’s estimated that today’s legislator spends 3 days out of 5 in efforts to raise funds. Review the voting record of any politician and then get a ranked list of his donors. Politicians never cross big donors. Why do you think Rob Whitman voted to reduce veterans benefit inflation adjustments within weeks of voting to remove caps on defense spending? Because defense corporations are his biggest donors and veterans are not.
You say concervatism is doomed if we don’t close the border. I say conservatism is doomed if we give in to fear and don’t question what we are told.
Trump couldn’t get by without illegal immigrants and most US citizens refuse to do what illegals do. I remember a farm laborers strike in CA when I was a kid. A bunch of frustrated, middle class Americans flooded the fields to work — for ONE day. ONE. The pay sucked so bad and the work was so backbreaking they all quit. I watched it happen. I’ve bused tables, been on construction work, worked side by side with illegals. My observation was that most of them work harder than most of us because they are tough and they are desperate for a better life.
You want to get rid of illegals? Take a job picking fruit, or cleaning filthy rooms in Trump’s hotels for minimum wage. That’s where they work.
The only way to end cheap labor is to close our borders to commerce with foreign countries. What will we do then? Sell to ourselves? Sure, until the economy collapses.
Unless you’re ready to make babies as fast as they do in India, China, or South America, the US will never again have competitive labor rates, and labor will go overseas until something — transportation costs, security, etc, bring it back. Until you refuse to shop at WalMart or Target, You (not Obama) will promote cheap overseas labor over American workers.
But what voter backs a candidate who calls him greedy and lazy? So candidates pour honey in your ear and tell you to blame the other guy, blame the Mexican, blame the other party. And when they are in office they work for their biggest donors. Trump is no exception.
I trust you will vote carefully. You obviously care. I don’t want to convince anybody to vote for a particular candidate, but I do hope I can disabuse a few fellow conservatives of the many illusions that are part of the Trump campaign.
Guess what? If the GOP leadership does not insist on actively supporting The Donald, they won’t have to worry about a constituency, they will have to worry about finding a job. We don’t need the Paul Ryans that populate the feckless GOP leadership. The party would be so much better without them!
http://www.paulnehlen.com/
Trump is a no good, lying, stinking, hot mess of a no good….
And your viable alternative is what? Don’t vote? Like millions did with Romney and we got 4 more years of Obama. Yeah, that was brilliant.
If you don’t like Trump, plan something else 4 years from now. Until then, to quote the great political observer George Costanzo, “You’re not in the mood? Well, you get in the mood!”
or you could vote for a progressive candidate that will attack the wealth injustice of the country, bringing jobs and money to the middle class all while preserving our individual freedoms against a big government that wants to interfere in personal liberties
progressives are the suppliers of big government that already interferes in personal liberties …. the biggest is obamacare
The price for Sanders’ health care plan is $19T. That won’t help anything.
And despite all that social justice junk, we saw in the 20th century that socialists killed more people than all wars combined. Socialists want to strip the individual of all they have for the sake of the state, which really means all power goes to the political class. Unifying power in the political class is the worst idea ever.