(Nov. 1) For plenty of Reaganite conservatives of four- or five-decade-long standing, the thought of voting for former President Donald Trump always has been anathema. And still is. Even for those who absolutely can’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump remains a rocket blast too far. We’ll cast write-in votes instead.
Because so many Trump fans repeat the asinine line that Never Trump conservatives are merely verklempt about “mean Tweets,” a brief explainer is necessary. Not all Reaganite anti-Trumpers will cite the same reasons with the same emphases, but after probably thousands of conversations on this topic for the past nine years, the summary below seems representative.
To begin, three threshold considerations make it impossible to support Trump even if all other assessments come out in his favor (which they don’t). The first is that many of us have concluded Trump is an egregious bigot in multiple ways. This column is not the place to convince readers of that assessment, but only to say that if that is someone’s assessment, and if someone feels ethically compelled to never vote for an egregious bigot, well, that means Trump is out.
The second and third threshold disqualifiers are two versions of the same imperative. Some of us believe the Senate should have responded to both Trump impeachments by finding him guilty, removing him from office, and disqualifying him for life from any federal office.
If Barack Obama had withheld legally obligated arms shipments to a foreign government while pressuring that government to gin up a criminal case against, say, a member of the Bush family, even after Obama’s own Justice Department said there were no grounds for a case — or if President Joe Biden had done the same to, say, Ivanka Trump — almost every conservative in the nation would have been demanding a Senate conviction. Likewise, if any Democrat had tried to overturn a valid election and inspired a mob to invade the Capitol to block the election’s certification: There’s no way that most conservatives in the land wouldn’t want permanent disqualification.
Either way, there is a basic and almost irrefutable logic and ethics here: If someone believes a public official should have been found guilty of impeachable offenses requiring a lifetime ban from office, then of course one shouldn’t support the official for office. And if that logic holds once, it certainly holds doubly for two separate occasions of a disqualifying offense. “Disqualifying” means, yes, “disqualifying.”…. [The full column is here.]
