It was almost as if Donald Trump wanted to give Republican voters one last look at what they would be getting if they chose to nominate him as the head of their party—as if he wanted to show officeholders who would endorse him exactly what they’d have to explain and rationalize over the next six months, wanted to remind conservatives that he doesn’t share their worldview and is willing to advance the policies of the radical left if it’ll help him win, and wanted to make clear to his boosters in the media that they really would have to defend statements so absurd that the only proper response is laughter.
It’d be one more week of crazy before Trump completed his conquest of the conservative party.
The week began with the news that a New York judge had allowed a lawsuit alleging fraud against Trump University to proceed to trial. The same day, a California judge cleared the way for a similar lawsuit to go ahead there, setting the first hearing on July 18—the first day of the Republican convention. It continued with Trump announcing, after his five-state northeast sweep, that he intended to campaign for president on a “message” borrowed, in part, from Bernie Sanders, the nation’s leading socialist. As the campaign moved to Indiana, Trump touted the endorsement of “tough guy” boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted in 1992 of a rape in Indianapolis and whom Trump had defended at the time. Next Trump declared a core economic principle of his adopted party was no longer operative: “You can throw free trade out the window.”
And then, on the day he was expected to clinch the Republican nomination, Trump gave voice to the kind of conspiracy theory you might expect to hear from a disheveled drunk mumbling through the train station.
In a telephone interview on Fox & Friends, Trump cited a baseless story in the National Enquirer to suggest that Rafael Cruz, the father of his chief rival, had worked with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. There is zero evidence to support the accusation. Pressed repeatedly to substantiate his calumny, Trump could not, but nonetheless defended his behavior, yielding headlines like this one from ABC News: “Trump Defends Linking Cruz’s Father to JFK Assassin.”
Ted Cruz immediately held an impromptu press conference to reject Trump’s claims and denounce his slander. The cable networks covered it live, and his comments generated a flood of news stories. Rafael Cruz also denied the tabloid report. And yet Trump, with the casual dishonesty that has come to characterize his campaign, as it does his life, said hours later: “I don’t think anybody denied it.”
It was a week of quintessential Trump: reminders of past cons, recycled leftism, stunning misogyny, populist pandering, conspiracy mongering, and, like a cherry on top of this sundae of insanity, an easily disprovable lie.
This wasn’t a bad week for Trump. It was a typical week for Trump.
And now he will be the Republican party’s nominee for president. Reince Priebus, the party’s chairman, called for Republicans to unite around Trump and rally to his cause. One by one they fell in line—the unprincipled sellouts, the rising stars, the veteran officeholders, the would-be nominees. Jon Huntsman and Rick Scott. Nikki Haley and Brian Sandoval. Rob Portman and Kelly Ayotte. Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal.
Some of these people had previously warned in the starkest terms about Trump—with Rubio calling him “erratic” and a “lunatic” and Jindal suggesting he’s “dangerous” and a “hothead” who should be kept away from the nuclear codes.
This wasn’t overheated campaign rhetoric. It was the truth. It is the truth. And that’s what is remarkable about many of the Republicans lining up to support Trump: They are choosing to support a man they recognize as unfit for the office.
Representative Peter King of New York described Trump as “a guy with no knowledge of what’s going on.” He then told the New York Times that he would support Trump for president and was open to campaigning for him.
We are watching as the Republican party moves from an imperfect vehicle for advancing conservative ideas to a hollow institution devoted to little more than winning elections for the sake of winning elections. That’s the prerogative of Republican leaders and is plainly the preference of a vocal minority of Republican voters, but it’s not the only option.
Some Republicans have indicated a willingness to support Hillary Clinton. We are not among them. Clinton is a longtime progressive campaigning to serve the third term of Barack Obama. Obama’s expansion of government at home has been a disaster and Clinton promises to expand it further. His administration has empowered enemies, abandoned allies, and abdicated America’s leadership role in the world; Clinton led these efforts in Obama’s first term and defends them to this day.
Beyond that, Clinton is a creature of corruption, whose dishonesty defines her. There are too many lies to catalogue in one editorial—or one magazine, for that matter—but think of just a few she’s told since launching her campaign: that she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House; that she set up her private email server for mere “convenience”; that she neither sent nor received anything classified; that everything she did was in accordance with government rules; that Sidney Blumenthal was never an adviser of any kind.
And then there is her most morally offensive lie. Clinton looked Charles Woods in the eye and lied about his son’s death. We spoke to him shortly before Clinton’s appearance before the Benghazi Select Committee last fall. He pulled a black leather datebook so that he could read her words as he recorded them immediately after she spoke them on September 15, 2012—four days after his son, Ty Woods, was killed in the attack on U.S. facilities in Libya. “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son,” he read aloud. Then he looked up. “I remember those words: ‘who was responsible for the death of your son.’ She was blaming him and blaming the movie.” There is little reason to doubt Woods’s account. Relatives of others killed in the attacks have said Clinton told them the same thing, and Clinton’s story was consistent with the Obama administration’s public account at the time. But at that hearing the world learned that before Clinton blamed the film in her conversation with Woods and other relatives of the fallen, she had told the truth to others. “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Clinton told Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil on September 12, 2012, according to a State Department memo that transcribed important parts of their conversation. “It was a planned attack—not a protest.”
Woods was stunned. “That was two days before she told me that they would get the filmmaker,” he said to us after the hearing. A local New Hampshire newspaper columnist confronted Clinton late last year. “Somebody is lying. Who is it?” Clinton replied: “Not me, that’s all I can tell you.” A lie on top of a lie to cover up a lie.
What kind of a person casually accuses family members of those killed serving their country of lying just to promote her career and advance her political interests? The kind of person who doesn’t belong anywhere near the White House.
If nothing changes, this will be the choice presented to Americans in November. An ignorant, unstable conspiracy theorist with no core principles versus an inveterate liar dedicated to ever-expanding government. Clinton and Trump are the least popular major-party candidates in the history of polling. Hillary Clinton is viewed “very unfavorably” by 37 percent of Americans; Trump is viewed “very unfavorably” by a staggering 53 percent.
Senator Ben Sasse, a newly elected Republican from Nebraska, is one of only a few elected conservatives to demonstrate any political courage. In an open letter to Americans “who think both leading presidential candidates are dishonest and have little chance of leading America forward,” Sasse argued against defeatism and complacency.
“There are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these two ‘leaders.’ With Clinton and Trump, the fix is in. Heads, they win; tails, you lose. Why are we confined to these two terrible options? This is America. If both choices stink, we reject them and go bigger. That’s what we do. Remember: our Founders didn’t want entrenched political parties. So why should we accept this terrible choice?”
Yes, why?
