On 07/04/2018 05:37 PM, Ryan Merrill wrote:
Quite frankly, I have to question someone's morality if they still
support Trump and his policies. I personally know a lot of republicans
who do not support him anymore.
From the Washington Post today
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-left-the-republican-party-now-i-want-democrats-to-take-over/2018/07/03/54a4007a-7e38-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html?utm_term=.ed833a3c8781
I left the Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/max-boot/>
by Max Boot <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/max-boot/> Columnist
July 4 at 9:52 AM
<mailto:writetob...@gmail.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27I%20left%20the%20Republican%20Party.%20Now%20I%20want%20Democrats%20to%20take%20over.%27>
“Should I stay or should I go now?” That question
<https://genius.com/The-clash-should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-lyrics>,
posed by the eminent political philosophers known as the Clash, is one
that confronts any Republican with a glimmer of conscience. You used to
belong to a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s
a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe. If you’re part of
that fringe, what should you do?
Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/today-i-renounce-my-membership-longtime-gop-strategist-steve-schmidt-announces-hes-leaving-his-party/2018/06/20/5918d7ee-747d-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.1c19b1f784a0>,
who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, is the latest Republican to say “no
more.” Recently he issued an anguished Twitter post: “29 years and nine
months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican
Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the
dignity of human life,” he wrote
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/today-i-renounce-my-membership-longtime-gop-strategist-steve-schmidt-announces-hes-leaving-his-party/2018/06/20/5918d7ee-747d-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.c127e7591b69>.
“Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the
party of Trump.”
Schmidt follows in the illustrious footsteps of Post columnist George F.
Will
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vote-against-the-gop-this-november/2018/06/22/a6378306-7575-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.ee621c5f0c6c>,
former senator Gordon Humphrey
<https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/gordon-humphrey-trump-manafort/2016/07/19/id/739406/>,
former representative (and Post columnist) Joe Scarborough
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/12/joexit-why-scarboroughs-departure-from-the-republican-party-is-significant/?utm_term=.c8f44ec56489>,
Reagan and Bush (both) aide Peter Wehner
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/opinion/sunday/wehner-evangelical-republicans.html>,
and other Republicans who have left the party. I’m with them. After a
lifetime as a Republican, I re-registered as an independent on the day
after Donald Trump’s election.
Explaining my decision, I noted
<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gop-future-roundtable-20161113-story.html>
that Trumpkins “want to transform the GOP into a European-style
nationalist party that opposes cuts in entitlement programs, believes in
deportation of undocumented immigrants, white identity politics,
protectionism and isolationism backed by hyper-macho threats to bomb the
living daylights out of anyone who messes with us.” I still hoped then
that traditional conservatives might eventually prevail, but, I wrote,
“I can no longer support a party that doesn’t know what it stands for —
and that in fact may stand for positions that I find repugnant.”
I am more convinced than ever that I made the right decision. The
transformation I feared has taken place. Just look at the reaction to
President Trump’s barbarous policy of taking children away from their
parents as punishment for the misdemeanor offense of illegally entering
the country. While two-thirds of Americans disapproved of this
state-sanctioned child abuse, forcing the president to back down, a
majority of Republicans approved
<https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/18/politics/immigration-trump-approval/index.html>.
If Trump announced he were going to spit-roast immigrant kids and eat
them on national TV (apologies to Jonathan Swift
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm>), most
Republicans probably would approve of that, too. The entire Republican
platform can now be reduced to three words: whatever Trump says.
And yet there are still principled #NeverTrump conservatives such as Tom
Nichols and Bill Kristol who are staying in the party. And they have a
good case to make. Kristol, for one, balks “at giving up the Republican
party to the forces of nativism, vulgar populism, and authoritarianism.”
As he notes
<https://www.weeklystandard.com/william-kristol/still-a-republican>, “It
would be bad for the country if one of our two major parties went in
this direction.”
No one anticipated Trump’s takeover. It’s possible, these Republicans
argue, that we might be equally surprised by his downfall. Imagine what
would happen if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found clear
evidence of criminality or if Trump’s trade wars tanked the economy. I’m
not saying that’s likely to happen, but if it does, it might — just
might — shake the 88 percent GOP support
<https://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx>
that Trump currently enjoys. That, in turn, could open the way for a
credible primary challenge that wouldn’t deny him the nomination but
that — like Gene McCarthy in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Pat
Buchanan in 1992 — could help to defeat him in the general election and
wrest the party from his grasp.
Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of
the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the
child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing
to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves
and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are
head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by
pretending that nothing has changed.
They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of
Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen
Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting
Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The
current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still
cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in
November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant
conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of
political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free
trade and the appeasement of dictators.
That is why I join Will
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vote-against-the-gop-this-november/2018/06/22/a6378306-7575-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.e170aeca8c81>
and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans,
in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like
postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before
it can be rebuilt.
Max Boot <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/max-boot/> Max Boot, a
Post columnist, is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national
security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global
affairs analyst for CNN. He is the author of the forthcoming “The
Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right."
--
Steve Palincsar
Alexandria, Virginia
USA
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