The modern political impulse to insult not just enemies but erstwhile allies, too, now has infected the Never Trump ranks. The impulse, wherein Never Trumpers adopt one of former President Donald Trump’s discreditable behaviors, is extremely counterproductive.
Trump has made a self-harming habit of continuing to insult Republican adversaries and their supporters after they have dropped out of the race (Nikki Haley) or even endorsed Trump (Ron DeSantis). Social media is full of critics justifiably saying such behavior will make it hard for Trump ever to attract those supporters of Haley, DeSantis, or others in this fall’s general election.
Now, numerous leading Never Trumpers, not content merely with conservative voters refusing to vote for Trump, insist that if those voters do anything other than openly support President Joe Biden, they are ethically deficient. Rather than merely recognizing variations in philosophies, political analyses, or prudential judgments, the leaders impugn the very characters of those who aren’t 100% on board with Biden. The insults are wrong on substance and tactically inane.
The most egregious entry in this intra-Never Trump cannibalism came Wednesday from conservative columnist Mona Charen, for decades one of the most thoughtful, astute, and gracious writers on the Right. Granted, columnists don’t always write their own headlines, but this was a doozy: “A Third Party is the Coward’s Way Out.” In the column, Charen was taking exception to a column by John Lehman, secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan and a wonderfully stalwart citizen. Charen was aggrieved that while Lehman wrote that he could never vote for Trump, he would be looking for a “third-party candidate to support” instead of embracing Biden. Yet rather than merely explain why she thought Lehman is wasting his time with a third party, a case Charen argued quite cogently, even though I disagree with her, she concluded by calling Lehman a “feckless lightweight.”
Set aside the patently obvious reality that nobody with Lehman’s resume or bearing is either feckless or a lightweight. What, pray tell, does the nasty insult accomplish?
Likewise, it was several weeks ago that former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, a legitimate Tea Party conservative from Illinois who is outspokenly anti-Trump, repeatedly used variations of the word “coward” to describe fellow right-leaners who won’t vote for either Trump or Biden. Walsh is usually a good-natured fellow, so when I protested, he invited me on his podcast for an hour of notably free and fair-minded discussion. I didn’t expect Walsh to end up agreeing with me on the wisdom of an independent candidacy, but at least I thought he would recognize that differing perspectives, not lack of character, could be involved. Alas, Walsh has continued to post that bad motives provide the only possible explanation for refusing to support Biden.
These are just two examples. Many pro-Biden Never Trumpers seem obsessed not just with saying that Never-either-Trump-or-Biden folks aren’t just naive or honestly mistaken in judgment, but weak, conniving, or otherwise contemptible.
Nowhere do they even credit the possibility that someone who believes Trump is a menace to our constitutional system could also believe that a second term of Biden and president-in-waiting Kamala Harris could be an equal menace in different ways. Nor do they consider that even if they, from their perches of supposed wisdom, think an independent presidential candidacy is pointless, that it is possible to disagree with them honestly. They cite current polls as if polls are prescriptive rather than only temporarily descriptive. Yet somehow, I don’t seem to remember the presidencies of Ross Perot, John Kerry, or Mitt Romney that early election-year polling strongly predicted in 1992, 2004, and 2012, much less Ted Kennedy’s victory over both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan that was such a sure thing 13 months before the 1980 election.
The problem with the unwarranted vitriol isn’t merely one of intramural hurt feelings among a minority slice of the political firmament. Outside of their East Coast-to-Chicago axis, do the “you must vote Biden” avatars have any clue how many voters will never cast a ballot for Biden and Harris but are choosing between a reluctant vote for Trump and either a no-vote, a write-in, or a third-party selection? In Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, all swing states, there are (combined) probably hundreds of thousands. If you both insult them and tell them they have only a “binary choice,” one of the most pernicious myths in American politics, then you are pushing them back into Trump’s arms.
My next column will explain why President Harris would be a threat to the constitutional order. Separately, I will write again about why a strong independent candidacy would be a good thing. I continue to believe that if either Gen. James Mattis or the late Sen. Tom Coburn had jumped into the 2016 campaign by mid-spring — each came close to doing so, and Coburn even had an announcement speech drafted — either of them might have done as well as Perot and vaulted to competitive status. (Perot’s significant lead in 1992 unraveled not because of systemic biases against independent candidacies but because he started acting bonkers.)
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Meanwhile, I will continue to write that Trump is a festering danger to the American republic.
Surely one can honorably hold those heterodox convictions without forfeiting nine years of outspoken Never Trumpism. If the Never Trump island is too much of an exclusive little conclave to accept such sincerely well motivated but marginal disagreements, its inhabitants will find themselves irrelevant and lonely castaways indeed.