Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear: I Will Never Vote For Donald Trump
As you’re now aware, Donald Trump won seven states on Super Tuesday; Ted Cruz won three; Marco Rubio won only one, and John Kasich and Ben Carson won some pocket lint and a bag of marbles. That gives Trump 316 delegates, 226 for Cruz, 106 for Rubio, 25 for Kasich, and -1,009 for Carson.
Two brief thoughts on where we go from here:
1. Many people have asked me what I’ll do if — as is incredibly likely at this point — Trump tragically wins the nomination. Will I coalesce around the nominee and support “my” party, they wonder?
The answer is no. Also hell no. Also how dare you even ask me that?
I have spent months calling Trump what he is: a conman, a tyrant, a pathological liar, a flamboyant despot, a fraudster, a big government liberal, progressive in a very poorly fitting and unconvincing conservative costume, a Planned Parenthood apologist, an unrepentant philanderer, a crook, a creep, a fascist with a spray tan, a reality TV Mussolini, a Caligula with bad hair, etc.
How could I possibly vote for a guy who I’ve just described this way? How could I possibly unite around this man when I’ve spent months correctly observing the fact that he’s a scam artist who lies about everything,including his opposition to illegal immigration? It would be nonsensical. It would negate everything I’ve said about him and make me as big a fraud as Trump himself.
So let me make this clear: I will never vote for Donald Trump. Not even if he’s running against Hillary Clinton. Not even if he pays me a million dollars. Not even if he puts a gun to my head (I wouldn’t expect that to happen until he runs for reelection). I will never vote for Donald Trump. Let the whole country go to the polls and say “yes” to tyranny. I will not take part in it. I wash my hands of it. I disavow it. I will not be a willing participant in the decay of our Republic.
Remember, there are no reluctant votes or hesitant votes or compromising votes or votes with asterisks next to them. There are only votes. And if you vote for an authoritarian megalomaniac, your vote is as affirmative and enthusiastic as everyone else’s. You might as well put on one of those dumb red hats and weep tears of joy while you enter the ballot box like all of the other Trumplings, because your vote counts just the same as theirs.
I have found no reason to believe that Trump would be better than Hillary Clinton. They are practically the same, which is why they’ve been such close friends for so long. They are both reflexive liars. They are both clinical narcissists. They are both power hungry lunatics. They are both ruthless pragmatists who care only about increasing their own authority, not advancing any idea or ideology. They both adopt the ideology that suits them for the moment, and drop it just as quickly.
In the general election, Hillary will run a little right, now that she’s not competing against Karl Marx, and Trump will run even further left, and in the White House they will govern almost exactly the same. There are those who think Trump will, at the very least, nominate conservative justices, but I can’t fathom how they’ve come to that conclusion. Trump will nominate whatever judge can be approved, as will Hillary. Again, neither of them give the slightest crap about conservatism or liberalism. They just want to rule, that’s all. The end.
Besides, Trump is campaigning as a liberal in a Republican primary, do you really think he’s going to fight to put Antonin Scalia 2.0 on the court? Please. This is the guy who can’t stop himself from praising Planned Parenthood. He did it again yesterday entirely unprompted. He’s not a conservative constitutionalist and he’s hardly pretending to be one. If he won’t pretend in a GOP primary while trying to win votes in the Evangelical south, do you really think he’ll pretend when he’s sitting in the Oval Office having won the presidency by praising abortionists and calling for universal health care? Stop it. Don’t be silly.
In any event, even if Trump somehow accidentally nominated an acceptable Supreme Court justice, that wouldn’t be enough to override the fact that he’s an oppressive dictator intoxicated by the smell of his own fumes. President Barack Obama has expanded executive powers beyond the worst and most feverish nightmares of our Founding Fathers. Trump or Clinton will complete the process and turn the president into something most closely resembling an Egyptian Pharaoh. Trump has already promised to unilaterally censor the press. Will the Supreme Court even matter when King Tut is in charge?
A supporter cheers for Donald Trump at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Ga., on Monday. (AP/Andrew Harnik)
I will never vote for Trump. I’ll vote third party or I won’t vote at all or I’ll move my family to the rain forest and we’ll subsist on grubs and wild berries for the rest of our days. Any of these options would be preferable to voting Trump. I will never vote for Trump. Period.
2. Donald Trump has hogged most of the delegates, most of the states, and most of our national supply of spray tan up until this point. He’s won conservative Christian states, moderate states, and liberal states. He’s won southern states and northern states. He’s won in the east and in the west. It’s nice that Cruz took Alaska and Texas and Oklahoma and Iowa from him, but let’s not be delusional about this. Donald Trump is dominating. He’s dominating so much that the other candidates are forced to claim a victory just because Donald Trump hasn’t beaten them in every state.
That means there are only two ways to stop him at this point: a consolidated field or a brokered convention.
Let’s look at the first option first. Trump will not be beat in delegates as long as this remains a five man race, or even a four man race, or even a three man race. While the anti-Trump vote is fractured and split, Trump will continue cruising along as he’s been doing. There is nothing — not a single shred of evidence — to suggest that Trump will suddenly stop winning states when there are still multiple competitors in the field.
People are going to have to drop out. Personally, I don’t care who. I would obviously nominate a sentient bucket of raw sewage over Donald Trump, so at this point I am not playing favorites among the Trump alternatives. Objectively speaking, Kasich and Carson are not worth discussing as options. Kasich can only win Ohio and Carson can only win a participation trophy in the Jones County Middle School science fair if he submits his baking soda volcano in time.
Rubio finally picked up Minnesota, but that gave him a measly record of 1-15, which makes him slightly less competitive than the Jacksonville Jaguars. Speaking of Florida, his home state, Rubio is currentlylosing to Trump in the polls by double digits. In other words, he hasn’t won much so far, and the future isn’t looking terribly bright.
As for Cruz, he’s won four times Rubio’s total, yet still less than half of what Trump has tallied. He seems to have a better case for staying in the race, but I’m not sure where he goes from here. Cruz has not been competitive in more liberal states, which doesn’t bode well as the race moves north and west. Today, Cruz stealing a win in Alaska and Oklahoma seems like a huge victory, but if someone had told me in July that Super Tuesday would come and go with Cruz losing almost every southern state, I wouldn’t have considered him a viable candidate. Cruz will struggle mightily in more centrist and left-leaning states, so he needed to dominate down south. He didn’t. It’s that simple.
So who should drop out? I don’t know. Like I said, I’m being objective, and objectively you could make a strong case against either of them, but I’m not sure you can make a terribly compelling case for any of them except Trump. That’s just the reality of the situation and we may as well face it. All I know is that if the plan is to try and beat Trump in delegates, one of them needs to go, and they need to go now. Maybe they should arm wrestle for it.
The second option is a brokered convention. In this strategy, Trump is simply denied a majority of delegates, and then we go to the convention where all of the delegates and mucky-mucks meet in a dark, smokey room and figure out a way to strip the ball from Trump right before he crosses the goal line. If this is the game plan, Rubio and Cruz should both stay in the race to split the vote and deny Trump a 50 percent plus one lead in delegates.
If Trump becomes the nominee, the GOP will be over and the conservative movement will be decimated.
I would personally be in favor of blocking a Trump nomination through a brokered convention. I would be in favor of blocking a Trump nomination through whatever legal means necessary. Yes, his fans would blow a gasket and start feverishly eating Rice Krispies Treats and tweeting their plans to start a civil war, and yes Trump would almost certainly run third party at that point, but whatever. If he becomes the nominee, the Republican Party will be over and the conservative movement — or what’s left of it — will be decimated. When faced with that prospect, the nuclear option may be the only option.
But I don’t see that happening. Republicans lacked the courage to aggressively oppose Trump for months, and even now the opposition is largely tepid, so I doubt they’d have the gumption to go to those lengths to prevent his candidacy. I don’t foresee Trump being denied the nomination at a brokered convention, and I don’t foresee him losing the delegate count outright. I think they will kiss Trump’s ring like Chris Christie and then stand aside.
I wish I had better news for you, but I’m living out here in Realityville and it’s about time the rest of the conservatives in this country join me.
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