I don’t want to identify with anything Pat Buchanan does or says or thinks…he is a nasty anti-Semite and the worst of old guard conservatives…. Read Andy McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, and Bruce Thornton for the cream of the crop of those who choose Trump for the right reasons…..rsk
A few days ago David Limbaugh, a widely-syndicated Republican commentator (and Rush’s less fiery younger brother) posted a commentary intended to deescalate the tensions between Trump’s supporters and the “never-Trumpers.” Limbaugh defines himself as a “reluctant Trumper,” who decided to support the Donald as the lesser of two evils after his preferred candidate Ted Cruz stumbled in the primaries. Limbaugh does not hide his dislike for Trump’s free-wheeling rhetoric and believes that the GOP nominee’s critics on the right may be fully justified in doubting his “genuine commitment to conservative policies.”
Despite these doubts, Limbaugh endorses Trump for reasons that one also hears from Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Larry Elder, and yours truly. Trump has “many incentives to implement our [conservative] policies,” while Hillary Clinton has absolutely none. He is also, not incidentally, bestowing on the Republican Party a large working class constituency; and even among racial minorities, he is doing at least as well, and in the case of prospective black voters, better than his GOP centrist predecessors, Mitt Romney and John McCain. Moreover, it is hard not to see Trump’s focusing on the problems of illegals and sanctuary cities as anything other than a “conservative” issue. That remains the case even if most of his primary competitors and certainly the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal might wish those issues had never been brought into the primaries.
Although Limbaugh dutifully provides the reasons that someone claiming to be on the right should vote for Trump, he still can’t resist extolling the never-Trumpers. (Although they’re not my buddies, they may be his.) These supposedly principled conservatives deeply believe that “the best chance of saving the nation in the long run is to avoid elevating Trump to president and leader of the party because he could forever destroy conservatism and the Republican brand.” Although Limbaugh concedes that some establishment Republicans may be found among these noble idealists, most of the never-Trumpers “shared our frustration” about where the party was headed in the hands of unprincipled operators. Limbaugh closes his remarks with this statement: “I respect the never-Trumpers and will not presume to judge them as abandoning the nation’s best interests.”
It is of course possible to be so principled that one refuses to settle for politicians who don’t entirely live up to one’s ideals. About ten years ago I addressed a club named for the great conservative Republican of an earlier era Robert A. Taft. During my interaction with members I found that some of them would only vote for a leader who patterned himself on the organization’s namesake. Although I continue to refer to myself as a “Taft Republican,” I thought some of the young people I spoke with held unrealistically high expectations.
But in the case of the never-Trumpers, I would never make this criticism. Here we are dealing mostly with GOP shills who four years ago were drooling on cue over Mitt Romney and who four years earlier were gilding the lily for John McCain. What exactly were the high “conservative” principles that these candidates of the never-Trumpers articulated that Trump has failed to express? Indeed Trump has raised social issues that Romney and McCain, who were hailed as “conservatives” refused to even touch on the campaign trail. Unlike them, he has promised to appoint “conservatives” to federal judgeships and to protect the religious liberty of devout Christians, who have been beaten from pillar to post by Obama and who are not likely to be treated any better under a Clinton presidency.