[Vision2020] Why This Republican Insider Will Not Vote for Trump

[Nicholas Gier]

Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump
Peter Wehner <http://www.nytimes.com/column/peter-wehner> JAN. 14, 2016 *The
New York Times*

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.
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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.
Peter Wehner
American politics and conservative thought.

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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.

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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.
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Recent Comments
carlos decourcy Just now

politics, its word group, is a destructive prefix which manifests itself as
yetanother clown getting out of the cramped VW of life to enter...
Bob Hanle Just now

What's truly scary is that Trump has garnered all this support with no
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Equally frightening to the future of the country is the possibility that Mr
Wehner will sit out the election. If too many voters take that...

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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.
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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, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,
served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing
opinion writer.

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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