Why Conservative Peter Wehner Will Never Vote for Donald Trump

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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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/opinion/campaign-stops/why-i-will-never-vote-for-donald-trump.html?emc=edit_th_20160114&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944&_r=0

* 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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The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

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The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

by David Brooks | Jan. 12, 2016

In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.

Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took thecase to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

Some justices were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let Haley out of prison, after six years.

The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.

Traditionally, candidates who have attracted strong evangelical support have in part emphasized the need to lend a helping hand to the economically stressed and the least fortunate among us. Such candidates include George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

Cruz lays down an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”

As the Republican strategist Curt Anderson observed in Politico, there’s no variation in Cruz’s rhetorical tone. As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat.

The fact is this apocalyptic diagnosis is ridiculous. The Obama administration has done things people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down. Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years.

Obama has championed a liberal agenda, but he hasn’t made the country unrecognizable. In 2008, federal spending accounted for about 20.3 percent of gross domestic product. In 2015, it accounted for about 20.9 percent.

But Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse I’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.

Some of these positions I agree with, but the lack of any positive emphasis, any hint of reform conservatism, any aid for the working class, or even any humane gesture toward cooperation is striking.

Ted Cruz didn’t come up with this hard, combative and gladiatorial campaign approach in isolation. He’s always demonstrated a tendency to bend his position — whether immigration or trade — to what suits him politically. This approach works because in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges court decision on same-sex marriage, many evangelicals feel they are being turned into pariahs in their own nation.

Cruz exploits and exaggerates that fear. But he reacts to Obergefell in exactly the alienating and combative manner that is destined to further marginalize evangelicals, that is guaranteed to bring out fear-driven reactions and not the movement’s highest ideals.

The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.

Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/opinion/the-brutalism-of-ted-cruz.html?_r=0

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Flash Mob: The U.S. Air Force Band at the Smithsonian

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https://youtu.be/-cKE8pyfcZc

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The Definition of Terrorism: Fear in the Air

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Fear in the Air, Americans Look Over Their Shoulders

by N. R. Kleinfield | Dec. 3, 2015

The killings are happening too often. Bunched too close together. At places you would never imagine.

As the long roll call of mass shootings added a prosaic holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., to its list, a wide expanse of America’s populace finds itself engulfed in a collective fear, a fear tinged with confusion and exasperation and a broad brew of emotions. The fear of the ordinary. Going to work. Eating a meal in a restaurant. Sending children to school. Watching a movie.

Wendy Malloy, 49, who lives in Tampa, Fla., said she now worried about being caught in an attack on a daily basis, just doing what anyone does. “When my son gets out of the car in the morning and walks into his high school,” she said. “When I drop him at his part-time job at a supermarket. When we go to the movies, concerts and festivals. When I walk into my office. It is a constant, grinding anxiety. And it gets louder every single day.”

After all, a festive gathering of county health workers in San Bernardino would not seem likely to make the top million of a list of shooting targets. It was not an iconic symbol of American freedom or American muscle. It was not a target draped in ideological conflict.

If you were not safe there, where were you safe? A common office party. That was everywhere. That was everybody.

A complicated tangle of emotions has taken hold. For some, the shock of repeated slaughters is leaving them inured and resigned. With others, there is recurrent bewilderment. And anger. Why doesn’t the government and law enforcement do more? Why must I feel so helpless? What world must my children live in? Why won’t it stop already?

Jean O’Sullivan, 54, who lives in the Los Angeles area and thinks about shootings multiple times a day, wrote, “Just as I naturally consider how I would survive if there was an earthquake, now I have added mental contingencies for a shooting — and THAT is a sad state of affairs!”

In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, coming close on the heels of the Colorado killings, The New York Times invited people to respond online about their fear of a mass shooting.

More than 5,000 wrote in. In addition, many others were interviewed on Thursday around the country: teachers and students and office workers, even some Army veterans who confided that they felt safer in war zones than on the streets of the United States.

People spoke of being spooked by gestures once ignored as utterly unremarkable. As one young woman from Massachusetts put it: “The guy in the corner always looking at his watch or the woman reaching into her bag too quickly.”

Of course the man is probably wondering where his date is already. Of course the odds are the woman simply heard her cellphone vibrate.

But is it? Could it be? Must I run?

This woman said she planned to have children in the future, probably not for a decade, and yet she had already made the decision to home-school them.

By no means is this deep anxiety causing life to grind to any sort of standstill. Many Americans remain steadfast that they will not crumple in the face of terrorists or other strains of mass murderers, foreign or homebred. Some want to buy their own gun. Many insist they worry more about a car accident or slip in the bathtub befalling them, statistically more probable events than gun atrocities. People work, go out, live. But still, a creeping fear of being caught in a mass rampage has unmistakably settled itself firmly in the American consciousness.

Times readers responded by the thousands to a simple question: How often, if ever, do you think about the possibility of a shooting in your daily life?

Any number of people said that gunmen cross their mind when someone gets up or walks in late to a crowded movie theater. Is he the one? A 64-year-old man in Charlottesville, Va., said he now watched movies exclusively at home. For him, he said, the idea that “it can’t happen here” is gone.

Others feared that whenever a work colleague was fired, he would return armed and shooting.

Arthur Grupp, 64, who is the head custodian of an elementary school in New Hampshire, said, “Every time I lock the doors at school, I think about it.” His school was having a Homeland Security training session just as the violence in San Bernardino unfolded.

A person in Denver said that not long ago the fear used to enter his mind every few weeks. Now it is at least once a day: “Because at any moment it could be my little brother at school, my siblings running errands, my parents at work, me on my way to class who could be the next name having ‘thoughts and prayers’ sent their way.”

A 23-year-old woman in Cleveland said she was frightened of doing anything and that she “hated this world.”

“Everybody is filled with what we sometimes refer to as anticipatory anxiety — worrying about something that is not currently happening in our lives but could happen,” said Alan Hilfer, the former chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn who is now in private practice. “And they are worrying that the randomness of it, which on one hand makes the odds of something happening to them very small, that randomness also makes it possible to happen to them.”

People are able to recite with precision how often they think about a mass shooting touching them. Every day. Twice a week. Up to four times a day. Every other day. Every two weeks. Every time they’re in a crowded space. Whenever her teenagers are out. Every time she walks into her office and back to the parking garage. Every day. Every day. Every day.

For a 16-year-old in Berkeley, it is “almost constantly.”

Tracy Gill, 32, works at the Joe Van Gogh coffee shop in Durham, N.C. She finds herself being much fussier about her public activities. No movies on opening night. When she goes to a theater, she always sits in the back.

“If there’s a possibility of there being any kind of danger, I’ll just pick and choose what I’m going to go to,” she said. “Is it even worth it? I hate that that’s even a thought in my head.”

A 32-year-old woman in Green Bay, Wis., said that she and her husband discussed a plan whenever they were heading to a place that could be a target. Now, she feels that is everywhere.

Judith Mitchell, 62, who lives in Austin, Tex., and works for the state, has four grandchildren and is exasperated that her country cannot solve this. She does not see why she must live how she does.

“If I’m in a shopping mall,” she said, “I’m always aware of what’s around me and where I can hide, the closest exit, where to go, especially if I have a grandchild with me.”

Kevin Bloxom, 50, who lives in Louisiana, wrote: “I think where I would hide my kids from shooters every time I am in public. No matter where. Not just movies or public events. I was in the grocery store last weekend with my four year old. I found myself scouting places I could hide my little boy. It’s sad.”

The fear sneaks up on some people, catches them off guard. Amanda Cusick, 23, a law student in San Francisco, said that with school demands she barely has time to worry about anything. “I don’t wake up and think, what if I’m shot today?” she wrote. But then she will be driving or in a meditative moment, and she thinks, what if her younger sister is shot and she never sees her again? Does she know whom to contact for her parents’ will?

On Wednesday, after news of San Bernardino had filtered in, a spontaneous discussion began among several co-workers at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Manhattan. The subject was which room to lock themselves in should a gunman arrive.

Emily Johnston, 26, a college student in Cincinnati, said that a year ago there was a threat against her university involving guns and explosives. Ever since, she worries about an attack multiple times a day.

She steers clear of crowded areas. And the fear infects her sleep. “I have had nightmares in which I am sitting in class when a gunman enters,” she wrote. “I realize I have nowhere to go and feel trapped, panicked, helpless. In another nightmare, students are running from a shooter in one building but there are more than one and another is waiting.”

How does one navigate this swirl of emotions?

“I think awareness of your own fears is the only way to go and to do the things that are soothing and comforting and distracting to do, and to do things that bring meaning to your life and bring comfort to other people,” said Dr. Sherry Katz-Bearnot, assistant clinical professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. “It’s what your grandmother said: Keep busy.”

Some people find that they have reached a numbed state of resignation.

Eric Hsu, 37, who lives in Los Angeles and shoots videos for a living, said that because of the volume of massacres, the San Bernardino shooting “didn’t even register amongst my friends and family during dinnertime conversation or on social media.” It was too common.

“I saw a picture of a woman being taken out on a gurney,” he wrote. “I go to buildings just like the one in San Bernardino all the time. I do my work with innocent and unsuspecting people. Life is fine until it happens to you. That’s how I feel about it now. I’m fine. Until it happens to me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/us/fear-in-the-air-americans-look-over-their-shoulders.html?emc=edit_th_20151204&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944

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