I’m as dismayed as most conservative out there I suspect. Waking up beneath a clock with Trumps smirk on its face, dripping from a branch. Then peeking out a hanging window to watch sharks in grass and elephants on surf. Surreal times indeed.
Now what to do.
I wasn’t a Trump guy. There were indeed candidates who I wholeheartedly, steadfastly refused to vote for– Bush comes to mind. But Trump wasn’t one of those. I never really was able to pick out exactly where he stood on any issue or policy, really. But he’s going to be it. The chess piece to thwart the evil queen.
Now what?
I’m not sure what to make of all this yet. I’m hopeful that he can win, at least I think I am anyway. But then you hear what he says. The government needs to do this and do that and do the other thing, great airports, bigger military, we can’t let company’s leave. On and on. The guy sounds like a Big Government guy who does not understand or acknowledge the limitations placed on the government by the constitution. That’s the scary thing.
So, at least he’s our Big Government guy. I can hear the Trump fans say.
This reminds me of an apocryphal quote attributed to Irvine Kristol that went something like, “There are two kinds of Republicans, anti-Democrat Republicans and anti-State republicans.” I prefer the latter myself. But we appear to have the former.
Better than Hillary. She’ll be Big Government for the other side. And that’s true. I do not believe for one moment that Hillary is guided by any other principle than her own self enrichment and her legacy. And right now she sees that legacy as one where she continues Obama’s dumpster fire polices of meager economic numbers and jobs growth, suffocating regulations which chokes every company that doesn’t pay into the Big Government machine, bloated government bureaucracies arrogant and untethered from the belief that they are to serve the citizenry and not the other way around, and wasteful mis-allocation of funds and resources to further a delusional, ignorant, and arrogant agenda. Our country is in big trouble and sure, Hellfire Hillary will make it worse. I truly believe that. But I’m also convinced that Trump is a complete wild card.
I cannot with a straight face predict with even a modicum of accuracy what he will do. Build a Wall? I can hear him say, “That was figurative wall. Like I can build a wall over the Rio Grande, come on!”. High taxes on trade, he could plausibly respond, “Trade wars are no way to go. There are no winners with a trade war. Everyone loses. We do not want that, so we’ll do something fair.” Where the fair is, well, more of the same.
And when he says “You’ve got to negotiate”, he never offers what the non-negotiables are. Of course there must be negotiations. But there also must be, at least to a principled person, items that are non-negotiable. The Supreme Court nominee must be a textual orginalist for example is a non-negotiable position for this conservative.
And I’m not saying negotiating is bad. My point here is that I have nothing empirical, no evidence to hang a prediction on from his past behavior. It’s all talk and plenty of contradictions.
But there is one thing. One thing that tilts in hoping for a Trump win in November. The Supreme Court pick. Now, sure, I just spent a paragraph stating how one cannot predict what Trump will do. That’s indeed true. And he may pick a living constitutional blighter as his Supreme Court nominee. Again, he may. But that’s the point he may. MAY! We know Hillary will pick a nominee whose judgement rests on caprice and political whim. We know she will do that. So I guess I am slightly in favor of hoping for a Trump presidency. That he may nominate someone for the Supreme Court that is a textual originalist.
And that may be enough.
A Surpreme Court pick by clutch and hope? Yes. But it also may be enough to swing and pull for Trump that he may be the truly less damaging candidate than Hillary. I know Hillary is for bureaucracy and graft and payoffs. I know that her allegiance lies with the one who stuffs her purse with the large wad of cash. So we know what we get with Hillary.
With Trump, no one. And I mean no one, even Trump himself, can say with certainty what he will do on one issue to the next. Sure hey may steer into disastrous terrain mottled with land mines poking through the turf. But it’s also accurate to say, he may steer us into a lush green field with fully blossomed prosperity and opportunity. No one can say. So that’s it then.
I guess that’s it. One on hand, you have a certainty of looming corruption, graft and policy making to placate the connected parties and their interests which are certainly contrary to conservative and constitutional interests. Or you have a person that may follow down that path or veer off into more prosperous times. For all the elections I’ve voted in, the banal cliché always rang out, but this time it does indeed seem true. The lesser of two evils is the one who might accidentally or unintentionally plow off the road and stumble into the right thing. That would be Trump.
