A respectful response to never-Trump Republicans

This piece isn’t for confirmed Democrats. They are not persuadable.

They’ll vote against Donald Trump and call him “Hitler” to boot, just as they did with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Never mind that Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the greatest rebranding coup of history, today it’s not the socialist Democrats but the capitalist Republicans that are deemed just like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

No, this piece is instead for my Republican friends who still refuse to support the party’s soon-to-be nominee in the presidential race against Joe Biden (or whomever). This piece is for the never-Trumpers.

I understand that Trump is a mixed bag. Aren’t we all? In one side of the bag, he pushed through potent tax cuts that produced the best (or is it the goodest?) economy in three generations. Contrary to the claim of the current White House occupant, inflation was not 9% but less than 2% at the close of Trump’s term and unemployment was at record lows.

He engineered the Abraham Accords in a major step toward peace in the Middle East. He kept Russia and China on the margins cowering in the dark while squeezing more money out of NATO countries for their own defense.

He nominated three solid conservative Supreme Court justices (one or two of whom could become great) and got all three confirmed. He supported the crash development of a COVID vaccine while staying skeptical of calls for shutting down schools and businesses.

In the other side of the bag, Trump had a tendency to talk before thinking. He was deliberately provocative. Perhaps the worst thing he did was something he didn’t do – he didn’t immediately call on the January 6 rioters to go home. He also unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College votes against his reelection.

It’s those two things that Democrats and their never-Trump allies point to as a “threat to democracy.”

Fine; but other Presidents have been mixed bags, as well. John F. Kennedy inspired millions and promised to put a man on the moon, but he also suffered the Bay of Pigs fiasco where he tried but failed to create a counterrevolution in an independent foreign country.

That attempted counterrevolution was not exactly democracy at work.  

Reagan won the Cold War but also tolerated and then covered up the Iran-Contra affair where his administration illegally sold arms to the Ayatollahs in Iran to generate cash for the rebels in Nicaragua.

Not very democratic.

Bill Clinton governed mostly from the center-left, effectively, but he also had Monica Lewinski (and she him).

OK, that one was probably democratic, though Hillary presumably didn’t get a vote.

George W rallied the nation after 9/11, but he also made false claims (though probably unknowingly) of weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion and regime change in Iraq, all while letting the administrative deep state grow unchecked.

That exploding deep state is the most antidemocratic phenomenon in American history.

Nixon masterfully played China off Russia to recalibrate the Cold War in a way that changed history for the better, but, alas, went along with a criminal coverup of a two-bit burglary of the Democrats at the Watergate Hotel.

Covering up a burglary? Not very democratic.

Joe Biden, on the positive side . . . well . . . I’ll get back to you on that. On the negative side, he produced near-runaway inflation with a series of mega-moola payouts to encourage people not to work.

He catastrophically surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving billions of dollars of weapons behind for the Taliban in a show of incompetence and weakness that likely encouraged the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas invasion of Israel – two of the bloodiest wars in those parts of the world since WWII.

He not only ignores Supreme Court rulings, but brags that he does so. He refuses to enforce the immigration laws, to the point that we have tens of millions of unscreened illegal aliens in the country. He vehemently opposes laws to prevent non-citizens from voting.

He, his influence-peddling family, and his White House courtiers have deliberately, fraudulently and venally concealed his mental and physical decline – at the expense of their party, their people, their country, and the world.

Talk about a threat to democracy.

I don’t see myself socializing with Donald Trump. He’s not my type. I don’t play golf. I do drink wine and whiskey. I tend to be respectful of women, and sometimes even men. I like to think my name-calling is more creative than “Little Marco” or “Crazy Bernie.”

But I do see Trump as my President. That vision takes very little imagination. After all, we saw it in real life just four years ago, though it seems longer ago than that.

It was before inflation took a bite out of everyone, before the epidemic of wokeness, before Cabinet members were chosen on the basis of skin color and bedroom habits, before America and her President were a laughing stock around the world.

It was before our democracy became frayed, torn and soiled under a load of incompetence and corruption.

Donald Trump could have taken his marbles and gone home to Mar-a-Lago three years ago to live ever after in his version of happiness. Instead, at age 78 but still going strong, he’s making another run at the office of presidency that he filled well for four years. In doing so, he’s been the target of the opprobrium of effete elites (See? I told you my name-calling was more creative!) and numerous unfair “lawfare” attacks from true threats to democracy.

I don’t believe Trump is doing this because he wants to be a dictator for the limited years left in his life, nor is he doing it to cash in on some small-time influence peddling scheme for himself or his family.

Rather, he’s doing it because he loves America and wants to serve – and to serve well, as he once mostly did. For that, I don’t love him. But I do admire him, I do respect him, and I do intend to vote for him.