There are honorable Never Trump Republicans who object to the current president but without abandoning their own principles.
And then there’s the Lincoln Project. This group is neither honorable nor Republican. Its idea of opposing Trump is to scorch the earth not just against the president, but against numerous Republican Senate candidates as well. That’s not principle — it’s a temper tantrum.
Like most temper tantrums, it is both counterproductive and destructive.
The McClatchy news organization reports that the Lincoln Project is among the purportedly Republican or conservative groups or individuals working hard to flip the Senate from Republican control to a Democratic majority. It is spending more than six figures per race for advertising against incumbent Republicans Martha McSally in Arizona, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
“The only way to make sure that Trumpism doesn’t continue to rule the Republican Party for years to come,” said Lincoln Project’s Jennifer Horn, a former New Hampshire Republican state chairwoman, “is to make sure that we defeat not only the president but those people who have enabled him.”
And former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois is leading a similar effort that will work to defeat Republican Senate candidates in battleground states across the country.
In a word, these efforts are asinine.
Granted, most Republican senators and most GOP challengers have acted like Trump’s lackeys. Most have lacked both courage and conviction and, yes, “enabled” his abuses of form and function. Still, the world doesn’t begin and end with Trump. The billionaire bully will not be here forever, and he may well not even be in the Oval Office beyond January. Either way, a Democratic Senate would be terrible in the view of any conservative. It would block initiatives or judicial appointments almost all Republicans dearly desire or, with a Democratic president and House, it would push and implement policies completely anathema to everything Republicans believe — everything most Lincoln Project members claim to stand for.
This is especially dangerous because the Democratic Party has moved so far to the extreme left compared to where it was even five, let alone 25 years ago. All Republicans should be scared by the very idea that career-liberal Joe Biden, he of the pathetically low lifetime rating of 12.67 from the American Conservative Union, now represents the “moderate” wing of the Democratic Party.
A Democratic Senate would be hellbent on eliminating the filibuster, meaning that with a Democratic president it could ram through all of the elements of the left-wing dreamscape that, to use Biden’s own word, would “transform” the United States forever into a nation we no longer recognize.
Even as weak and wobbly as most Republican senators are in the face of Trump’s bullying, most of them would block leftist initiatives passed by a Pelosi-led House on behalf of a President Biden. A Republican Senate majority could be all that stands athwart an ever-greater governmental takeover of the healthcare system, huge tax hikes, a regimented codification of “woke” speech codes, massive new regulatory efforts, and radical abortion on demand.
The anti-Trump Republicans trying to hand Senate control to the Democrats aren’t just cutting off their own noses to spite their faces; they are cutting out the hearts of millions of conservative Americans just to spite Trump’s own spitefulness.
These efforts are not of political philosophy but of pique. They are selfish, short-sighted, and vindictive. They massively deserve to fail.
