To save conservatism, flip the ticket and dump Trump
Or to save us all the effort, Trump should just drop out
Out of the ashes of former Gov. Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid in 2012 came the GOP’s 100 page autopsy and diagnosis of the campaign.
“Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “To be clear, our principles our sound, our principles are not old rusty thoughts in some book.”
In addition, Priebus noted that the 2016 GOP candidate had to, “campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.”
In essence, all the GOP had to do to beat the second most unfavorable presidential candidate of all time was promote the message of principled, small government, fiscally responsible conservatism to all communities, not just the base. Flash forward four years, and the Republican establishment has consistently lied for and defended a candidate who flagrantly insults Gold Star families, refers to Mexicans as “rapists” and “murderers,” calls NAFTA the “worst trade deal ever” and has now been caught on a hot mic reveling in joking about sexual assault.
Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has been and still is actively perverting the Republican Party beyond the point of no return. If true conservatives want any hope of a future party devoid of egotistical, bigoted Wilsonian “strongmen” who demand total and complete party deference at the expense of ideological and philosophical integrity, the Republican establishment must denounce any support of Trump and flip the ticket.
Trump should have dropped out by now. Realistically, Trump should have dropped out the moment he refused to denounce David Duke on live television. But Trump, at his core, is an egomaniac and one who is willing to take the major American vessel of conservatism down with him as the Trump Train crashes. So for argument’s sake, let’s reject the mythology that Trump will do the right thing on his own.
After months of cowering to Trump’s dictatorial demands out of fear that he would wage war on the Republican party – because apparently turning off an entire generation of women and minorities from the Republican brand wasn’t aggressive enough – Priebus has finally freed Republicans from servitude of the Trump camp.
But this is not enough. What Priebus, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Republican running mate and Indiana governor Mike Pence and all of the other party elders who have enabled Trump’s terrorism need to do is leverage the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to flip the ticket and elect Pence as president.
Every measure of Republican success, both by principle and by polling, shows that Trump is a Faustian bargain. “Grab them by the pussy,” which already has its own Wikipedia page, is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a head to head match-up, Trump’s now nearly five points behind Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, reflecting a growing gap that shows no signs of stopping. Even more damaging is the effect that Trumpism has had on the base.
Writing at the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro noted: “A March 2016 Pew poll shows that while 51 percent of Americans still think free trade deals are a good thing for the country, just 38 percent of Republicans now do, compared with 53 percent who think they are a bad thing. That’s again due to Trump supporters, 67 percent of whom said that free trade agreements have been bad for the United States, as opposed to just 27 percent who say they’ve been good. A 48 percent plurality of Cruz voters favored free trade, by contrast.”
With Trump spewing anti-free market and racist tirades as the standard bearer of the Republican Party, the GOP’s principles are being diluted and perverted by the second. Mike Pence is by no means a perfect Republican, but as Tuesday’s debate showed, he is well versed in policy details, knows how to stay on message and maintains some ideological consistency.
“Why couldn’t we have had a President Pence?” headline after headline lamented while contrasting Trump’s catastrophic debate performance to Pence’s poise. Well, the latest Wikileaks email leak reveals that the DNC, who have already been revealed to have been working with the media to promote a pro-Clinton agenda, specifically advocated for the rise of Trump because he was a “Pied Piper candidate,” one who they assumed would be easy to beat in the general election because his views were so extreme and non-conservative. And now:
Perhaps if the media started actually doing its job earlier than five seconds ago, Trump could have been stopped during the primaries as opposed to being favored with the equivalent of billions of dollars of positive media coverage. You see, I’m old enough to remember when the media lambasted the horrible and abrasive Marco Rubio as the most bigoted, hateful candidate of the race, with Matthew Yglesias of Vox writing an entire piece entitled “Why I’m more worried about Marco Rubio than Donald Trump.”
Trump stands under a 20 percent chance of winning the election. Given the proximity of Election Day, Pence may not have much of a better chance. But given Trump’s willingness to throw Pence under the bus during Sunday night’s debate – note that Trump not only took an opposite stance on administering humanitarian aid in Syria, but also revealed that he hadn’t even consulted Pence – Pence has no reason to stay loyal to the ticket.
Instead of having an orange-faced god king who literally jokes about crimes against women, let’s have a candidate who has been publicly opposing the Clintons for decades instead of, say, inviting them to his wedding.
The RNC’s bad bargain with Trump has already destroyed the conservative’s hopes of recapturing the White House, but if the Republican establishment can cut its sunk costs and dump Trump, perhaps the GOP can pave the path of its own redemption.