Time is running short to sell me
I'm still not getting a compelling reason from anyone as to why I shouldn't write in a presidential candidate this fall
I can’t come up with an angle from which I haven’t examined our predicament. I stay up on the burn-it-all-down-vs.-save-the-Senate-to-serve-as-a-foil-to-a-President-Biden debate. (My inclination is to side with the latter argument. There is nothing to be said for giving a Democrat in 2020 carte blanche.) I admire the Lincoln Project’s hard-hitting TV ads, but its mission - to elect Joe Biden solely because Trump is so patently unfit - is a bridge too far for me. For one thing, I think that to argue that Biden represents a choice for decency and comity is to deny Biden’s behavioral track record of nastiness (which was added to recently when he took umbrage with a reporter’s question about whether he would take a cognitive test, bizarrely responding by asking the reporter if he was a junkie).
A lot of oxygen is given to the matter of how Biden increasingly comes across as - how to put this? - doddering. His speech is no longer just characterized by the gaffes for which he’s been famous for years. He’s now having difficulty completing sentences.
I really don’t care to focus much on this. I wouldn’t want it to obscure the policy-level intentions that he and his party harbor. Requiring insurers to cover transgender surgery, a $2 trillion “clean energy” push, making distinctions among farmers, ranchers and fishermen by race and ethnicity for purposes of justifying federal intrusion into those industries, pushing back on pro-life state laws that have been passed of late, a $15-an-hour national minimum wage - that’s what I want to put front and center.
A lot of hard-if-not-impossible-to-reverse damage would be done by a pushback-free President Biden. Identity politics and redistribution would drive everything. States, counties and municipalities would fade in importance.
It’s at this juncture that Trumpists, and more generally, voters who think that the Republican brand still has some some kind of mojo, argue that I have only one alternative: to actively support Donald Trump.
I’ve been down this road so many times that I could trot out a bullet-point list of examples of how full of hooey he is from any period throughout the last five years, or a comprehensive list covering the entire span. He saves me from such redundancy, however, by providing a fresh supply of substantiation on a daily basis.
Salena Zito’s now-well-known formulation that Trump supporters take him seriously but not literally would seem to be in need of updating. I’d wager that they are now in desperate self-convincing mode.
What’s to take seriously about a president who told Mike Wallace, nearly three weeks ago, that “we’re signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do?”
How are we to take seriously the chasm of reality that separates the Very Stable Genius’s February 26 pronouncement that the nation had fifteen cases of COVID-19 and was on its way to zero, and his remark in an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios (that was at least as cringe-inducing as the Wallace debacle) that “they are dying, that’s true, it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.”
Hardcore Trumpists still trot out their list of accomplishments - judicial appointments, pulling out of the JCPOA and the Paris climate accord, tax cuts, deregulation - because it’s true that conservatives find these laudable.
Two things: we’d have had them with any number of the other Republican candidates running in 2016, and they still don’t outweigh the other side of the ledger.
Not one thing has been done to reduce the debt and deficit. Trump won’t even hear of any changes to Medicare and Social Security to stem their growing unfunded liabilities.
It’s sometimes said that Trump has shed daylight on the true nature of the Chinese regime and set America - its government and its business sector - on a realistic course for engaging China. In reality, this has mostly played out as protectionist trade policy, and even that has not accomplished its goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs to the US in needle-moving numbers. Like he does with so many dictators, Trump has vacillated in his characterization of Xi, calling him a friend and then pivoting to tough-guy mode.
Thank goodness the whole silly episode with Kim Jong-Un is over with. A whole lot of taxpayer-bought jet fuel was expended to indulge Trump’s notion that he could usher in a new era of security and international harmony by logging some face time with the Writer of Beautiful Letters.
The American Greatness / TPUSA crowd and the Lincoln Project folks each think that the moment is urgent and that the fate of Western civilization hinges on every voter’s choice. Then there’s the Left, which deems it imperative to stomp any kind of self-identified conservative into the dust.
Me? At this point, my take is that since either of the two certain outcomes to this cycle’s presidential race is going to result in an even more damaged post-America, I feel no compulsion to exhort anybody to do anything.
Vote for whichever of these unfit loudmouths you’d like.
Or join me and write someone in. The eternal record book will show you weren't a party to the destruction of the great American experiment, and, if enough of us proceeded accordingly, it could send quite a message to those who think there’s some other off-ramp between here and the precipice.