Back in May, when Trump won the Indiana primary, I felt like such a dope. I was actually waiting for someone to tell me what we were going to do. Just days earlier, we’d all stood on the platform together, refusing to get on the Trump Train.
“Never!” we cried. The conductor was crazy, the destination too uncertain. The price was far too high. Then the train belched out another of its horrible, noxious clouds, and when the smoke cleared, only a handful of us remained, and almost everyone had climbed aboard. I felt like Rick in Casablanca, “standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look on my face, because my insides had just been kicked out.”
As far as I was concerned, the primary voters could be forgiven their choice. They’d been seduced by a master manipulator. But elected officials and other Republican leaders who know what the job of president entails, who know how unsuited Trump was and how he would stain us, I thought they’d join in the effort to find an alternative. It would be hard, but what other choice was there?
Nope.
Sure, some were horrified, at least for a while. They cringed at every awful thing Trump did and said. “He’ll change,” they said.
When he didn’t, it was “At least he’s a Republican” or “I’m worried about the courts.” The rationale for supporting Trump grew smaller and smaller until it was a tiny thing his supporters cupped protectively in their hands, as if they knew how fragile it was. If you dared ask to examine it, they hissed at you.
Meanwhile, Trump behaved like the victor who had earned the spoils. Not an altogether surprising attitude, of course, since the GOP had always been his adversary. He ran against the Republicans; he just did it within their primary. To this day, he’s never happier or more animated than when punishing some Republican who has not sufficiently submitted to his will.
In return, he has disgraced the party in every conceivable way. The groping. The lies. The reversing himself on key issues. The lack of discipline. The petty battles with private citizens that exposed his ridiculous ego, at once outsized and pathetically delicate. The rules for thee but not for me. The one-way loyalty. The expressions of affection for murderous dictators. The corrupting influence, which has likely ruined the careers of several prominent Republicans. We have no evidence he would do what we wish, and he’s shown us what happens if we dare oppose him.
More than once over this awful year, the memory of a long-ago conversation has come to mind. It was with a Republican friend, back in the 1990s, during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As was our custom, we were grumbling about Bill Clinton.
My friend mentioned this scene from the film Broadcast News. Aaron (Albert Brooks) tries to persuade Jane (Holly Hunter) not to fall for their new colleague Tom, a dim but telegenic anchorman played by William Hurt. Tom represents everything they despise, everything they see going wrong in their business.
“Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the devil,” Aaron says. Jane objects, but he persists.
“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail… He will be attractive! He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation…He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing… he will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they’re important. Just a tiny little bit.”
My friend and I shook our heads. It sounded so much like Bill Clinton. Clinton had lowered all our standards in many ways and diminished the office he held. We’d watched people abandon long-held principles to defend him. It was sad.
But as a purely political matter? He was their devil.
Well, we got our own devil, and ugh…he’s so obvious. The Democrats got a Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, and we got a buffoon with a Dickensian name who started his campaign on an escalator that never stopped descending; a brash, divisive know-nothing who didn’t lower our standards bit by little bit, but rather took them off the cliff.
Which brings me to Eric Metaxas’s piece Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, in which he argues that Christians should vote for Trump. I understand what those who climbed aboard the Trump Train in May were thinking, even if I didn’t agree. An independent bid seemed impossible. A convention play would have been dramatic and divisive. (Like this isn’t?) It was distressing to watch the mockery of people who worked earnestly for an alternative. But I’m just a writer, half-in and half-out of politics. It wasn’t up to me, and the party made a worldly decision.
But Metaxas doesn’t take a worldly view. We should relinquish our principles, our decency, our integrity, our values, and our desire to expand the party’s reach, because the next four years are just so important. We need not worry about long-term consequences of being stained by a man who has shown us again and again who he is. We don’t need to trust our experience with Trump. Just have faith, because it’s all about the next four years.
God would never want us to seek a third option, no matter how far-fetched. He wouldn’t suggest we wake up and turn toward a good man, who also happens to be running. Turns out God is an old-style politico. “Those independent bids never work. Gotta suck it up,” He says, maybe in a Boston or Chicago accent. The only option God sees is supporting the political equivalent of putting something in the microwave just to see what happens.
Sorry, but that’s not what God tells me. God tells me that sometimes you have to walk away. If the fight asks too much of you, and victory might ask still more, then you accept defeat. God tells me there can even be grace in that. And that having relinquished evil on your own side, you are better positioned to fight it on the other.
Of course, we do have one final shot. It would take us doing what we should have done in May. I live in Maryland, and I’m writing in Evan McMullin for president.
What if we all did? With God, all things are possible.
Virginia Hume is a writer, editor and former Republican spokeswoman.
