We seem to be at a point in the election season where, to quote George Orwell, “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” So to restate the obvious: Choosing Donald Trump as the Republican party’s nominee would be a mistake. He lacks the character to be a trustworthy president and the convictions to be a conservative one. He’s a confidence man who said, a day after winning the New Hampshire primary, “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m capable of changing to anything I want to change to.” To invest in this man the accumulated capital and the future aspirations of what is, despite everything, a great political party, the party that carries with it the cause of constitutional government at home and American leadership abroad, would be a grave error.
We’ve been saying this for a while. Are we merely a vox clamantis in deserto? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Perhaps. But as a vox clamantis in a democracy, we’d prefer to find ourselves in accord with a majority of the Republican party and the American people.
Whether we shall be in such accord is very much in question. On February 1, the confidence man gained the support of almost a quarter of the caucus-goers in Iowa. On February 9, he won the votes of just over a third of the Republican primary voters in New Hampshire. The good news is that most Republicans in the first two states resisted the allure of Donald Trump. The bad news is that placing second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire makes Trump the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, with the most votes and delegates so far.
Trump can be beaten. Will he be? His opponents have focused more criticism on each other than on him, and some will continue along this path as they move on to South Carolina. Last year’s overconfidence in the political class that Trump would naturally fade (and we plead guilty to this misjudgment) has mutated among some into a kind of fatalism that Trump can’t be stopped.
This in turn provides an excuse for accommodation to and appeasement of him. Power attracts. Winning works. People like to be on the winning side. Politicians yearn to be on the winning side. Lobbyists make a living by being on the winning side. Donors feel satisfaction from being on the winning side. Pundits want to show they “get it” by embracing the winning side. As Trump himself understands, no one wants to be a “loser.”
Well, we stand unapologetically with the New Hampshire losers. They’re not perfect. Ted Cruz could appear more appealing and Marco Rubio more intimidating. John Kasich could seem less of a mushy moderate and Jeb Bush less of a blast from the past. But none is an embarrassment. We hope one or more of them defeats Trump in South Carolina and beyond. We hope for this not so we can be on the winning side, but because we’re convinced that resisting the blandishments of Donald Trump is right for the party and the country.
It would be easy to blame the nominating process for the situation in which we find ourselves. That process certainly isn’t perfect. In describing the original plan for the election of the president in Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton remarked that
Well, today’s nominating process may not live up to Hamilton’s vision. But finding fault with the process does no good at this point. Whatever modifications of the nominating process are desirable should be on the agenda for the future. And whatever contingencies of this year’s race that have made it harder than it should be to stop Trump provide no excuse for not doing what we can, now, to stop him.
After all, it’s not every day that we’re given the opportunity to rise above the normal jousting of personal ambitions and partisan politics. It’s not every day that we can do something to carry on the work of the Founders. Denying the Republican nomination for the presidency to a man with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity” would be a modest but not negligible contribution to vindicating what Federalist 39 calls “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”
