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Why I Will Never Vote for
Donald Trump
Peter Wehner * | JAN. 14, 2016
Beginning with Ronald Reagan,
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became
eligible to vote in 1980. I worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
administrations and in the White House for George W. Bush as a speechwriter and
adviser. I have also worked for Republican presidential campaigns, although not
this time around.
Despite this history, and in
important ways because of it, I will not vote for Donald Trump if he wins the
Republican nomination.
I should add that neither
could I vote in good conscience for Hillary Clinton or any of the other
Democrats running for president, since they oppose many of the things I have
stood for in my career as a conservative — and, in the case of Mrs. Clinton,
because I consider her an ethical wreck. If Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were the
Republican and Democratic nominees, I would prefer to vote for a responsible
third-party alternative; absent that option, I would simply not cast a ballot
for president. A lot of Republicans, I suspect, would do the same.
There are many reasons to
abstain from voting for Mr. Trump if he is nominated, starting with the fact
that he would be the most unqualified president in American history. Every one
of our 44 presidents has had either government or military experience before
being sworn in. Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality-television
star, hasn’t served a day in public office or the armed forces.
During the course of this
campaign he has repeatedly revealed his ignorance on basic matters of national
interest — the three ways the United States is capable of firing nuclear
weapons (by land, sea and air), the difference between the Quds Force in Iran
and the Kurds to their west, North Korea’s nuclear tests, the causes of autism,
the effects of his tax plan on the deficit and much besides.
Mr. Trump has no desire to
acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that
he doesn’t prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things
get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever
been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled
by his benightedness.
It is little surprise, then,
that many of Mr. Trump’s most celebrated pronouncements and promises — to
quickly and “humanely” expel 11 million illegal immigrants, to force Mexico to
pay for the wall he will build on our southern border, to defeat the Islamic
State “very quickly” while as a bonus taking its oil, to bar Muslims from
immigrating to the United States — are nativistic pipe dreams and public
relations stunts.
Even more disqualifying is
Mr. Trump’s temperament. He is erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled. He
possesses a streak of crudity and cruelty that manifested itself in how he
physically mocked a Times journalist with a disability, ridiculed Senator John
McCain for being a P.O.W., made a reference to “blood” intended to degrade a
female journalist and compared one of his opponents to a child molester.
Mr. Trump’s legendary
narcissism would be comical were it not dangerous in someone seeking the
nation’s highest office — as he demonstrated when he showered praise on the
brutal, anti-American president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, responding to Mr.
Putin’s expression of admiration for Mr. Trump.
“It is always a great honor,”
Mr. Trump said last month, “to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly
respected within his own country and beyond.”
Mr. Trump’s virulent
combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and
vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very
well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in
chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
For Republicans, there is an
additional reason not to vote for Mr. Trump. His nomination would pose a
profound threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, in ways that Hillary
Clinton never could. For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the
Republican Party, she could not redefine it. But Mr. Trump, if he were the
Republican nominee, would.
Mr. Trump’s presence in the
2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they’re nothing compared with
what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after
all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump
heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will
be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break
with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.
The Republican Party’s best
traditions, of course, have not always been evident. (The same is true of the
Democratic Party, by the way.) Over the years we have seen antecedents of
today’s Trumpism both on issues and in style — for example, in Pat Buchanan’s
presidential campaigns in the 1990s, in Sarah Palin’s rise in the party, in the
reckless rhetoric of some on the right like Ann Coulter.
The sentiments animating
these individuals have had influence in the party, and in recent years growing
influence. But they have not been dominant and they have certainly never been
in control. Mr. Trump’s securing the Republican nomination would change all
that. Whatever problems one might be tempted to lay at the feet of the
Republican Party, Donald Trump is in a different and more destructive category.
In these pages in July 1980,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, declared, “Of a
sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas.” If Mr. Trump wins the
nomination, the G.O.P. will become the party of anti-reason.
I will go further: Mr. Trump
is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid,
the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view
himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to
it.
I understand that it often
happens that those of us in politics don’t get the nominee we want, yet we
nevertheless unify behind the candidate who wins our party’s nomination. If
those who don’t get their way pick up their marbles and go home, party politics
doesn’t work. That has always been my view, until now. Donald Trump has altered
the political equation because he has altered the moral equation. For this
lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits.
No votes have yet been cast,
primary elections are fluid, and sobriety often prevails, so Mr. Trump is
hardly the inevitable Republican nominee. But, stunningly, that is now
something that is quite conceivable. If this scenario comes to pass, many
Republicans will find themselves in a situation they once thought unimaginable:
refusing to support the nominee of their party because it is the best thing
that they can do for their party and their country.
* Peter Wehner is a
contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a senior fellow at
the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has served in the last three Republican
administrations. In 2001, he was named deputy director of speechwriting for
President George W. Bush. He later served as director of the Office of
Strategic Initiatives, where he reached out to prominent thinkers and advised
the White House on a range of domestic and international issues. A senior
adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he has been affiliated
with several leading research organizations.
Mr. Wehner is a frequent
commentator on television and radio and has written widely on political,
cultural, religious and national security issues. A regular blogger for
Commentary magazine, he is the author (with Arthur C. Brooks) of “Wealth and
Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism” and (with Michael Gerson) of “City
of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.” The Washington Monthly has called
him one of the most
influential reform-minded conservatives, and in Forbes, the
political consultant Mary Matalin featured him
on a short list of conservatism’s leading “educators and practitioners of first
principles.”
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