Early in 2016, I asked myself, “What if this election comes down to nothing more than who voters determine to be the second worst presidential candidate in American history?”
Sadly, that is exactly the criteria that elected Donald Trump.
Polling results indicated that many Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump simply because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Almost three years later they are still holding their noses.
In nasal tones they continue to whine, “Well, we don’t agree with his tweets, or his style, or his lies, or his behavior, but at least he’s better than Hillary Clinton would have been.“
I find the GOP’s Hillary-Woulda-Been-Worse defense a frustratingly weak and outdated reason to tolerate Trump’s countless faults. Hillary Clinton was not elected president, nor is she likely ever to be so. Thanks to thousands of wary conservatives, Trump is president and is busily pulling out all the stops for a second term.
So now is the time for conservatives to unplug their noses and smell the awful truth about what Trump has done with their reluctant support since 2016.
As former truth-telling, deficit-reducing, free-trading, Constitution-adhering conservatives, you don’t have to support Trump out of party loyalty. He left the party of Honest Abe before he left the inaugural platform.
Donald Trump is only the “Chosen One” if a few thousand conservatives in each state hold their noses again and fail to send this ill-prepared, misinformed, favor-swapping autocrat to Mar-a-Lago for keeps next November.
Conservatives, liberals and all Americans deserve so much better in 2020 than the unquestionably least desirable candidate in American history.
John Pitt, Farmington