One of our guest contributors, Chris Jennewein, editor and publisher of Times of San Diego, recently gave us “10 Reasons Why [We] Shouldn’t Vote for Donald Trump.”
They were all pretty good reasons, which I took the liberty to summarize as follows:
[Trump] is an overconfident, bigoted, draft-dodging, poor example of a man – especially for children – who has voiced few, if any, actual policies, displayed utter ignorance about government, plays loose with facts and shows pathetic inconsistency except when it comes to his business failures and bad friends.
I don’t know what Jennewein’s political affiliation is, but I thought his reasoning on this issue is right on the mark.
But now let us hear it from a Republican who, beginning with Ronald Reagan, has voted “in every presidential election since [he] first became eligible to vote in 1980.” A man who “worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and in the White House for George W. Bush as a speechwriter and adviser” and who has also “worked for Republican presidential campaigns, although not this time around.”
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tells us “Why [he] will never vote for Donald Trump.”
In a piece at the New York Times, Wehner writes that there are many reasons why he would not vote for Trump if he is nominated, “starting with the fact that he would be the most unqualified president in American history.”
In addition, Wehner highlights:
— Trump’s ignorance on basic matters of national interest. For example his displayed ignorance on the Nuclear Triad, on “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” and Trump’s lack of desire to familiarize himself with such issues.
— “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,” which Wehner calls “nativistic pipe dreams and public relations stunts.”
But even more disqualifying, Wehner says, is Trump’s temperament. “He is erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled.” He has a “streak of crudity and cruelty…” The latter so clearly apparent by how Trump physically mocked a Times journalist with a disability, how he ridiculed Senator John McCain for being a P.O.W., how he degraded Fox News’ Megyn Kelly by making reference to “’blood coming out of her wherever” and by comparing Ben Carson to a child molester.
Wehner cites several more reasons why Trump should not be nominated, including his “legendary narcissism,” his “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness,” and also because “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.”
While Wehner is certainly not complimentary of Hillary Clinton, he adds:
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
Wehner concludes with the following warning:
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.
Read more of this well-grounded Republican rationale here.
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