Though I’m not a delegate to the Republican National Convention, the following letter to the presumptive nominee says what I imagine many party faithful, deeply concerned about both the party and the country, might wish to say to Donald Trump.
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Dear Mr. Trump,
I am writing to explain why I will not be voting for you on the first ballot in Cleveland next week.
I don’t mind telling you, I was not happy about your candidacy. Throughout the primary, it was clear that you held the Republican party in little affection, and it was distressing to watch you trample on the values we hold dear. We honor our servicemen, but you criticized Senator John McCain, saying you preferred “soldiers who weren’t captured.” We stand against tyranny, but you praised dictator after dictator. We believe our economic policies have the power to raise up all Americans, but your campaign painted a picture of a zero sum game. You played on fears, pitting one group against the other, and fed a stereotype so many of us, through word and deed, have tried to refute.
Nevertheless, on May 4 you had won enough primary contests to become the Republican party’s presumptive nominee, and I felt bound to support you. Conventions are not coronations. But nor are primaries casual opinion polls. I was prepared to defer to the voters, no matter my preference.
I want to be clear on this point, as I sense some confusion on your part: My deference was not to you, but to my fellow Republicans who voted for you.
However, you also entered into an agreement on May 4. As the Republican presidential candidate, you became the face of our party, a role that confers considerable responsibilities. It was incumbent upon you, to the best of your abilities, to unify the party, and then to run a credible and effective campaign that reached beyond to attract additional voters. How you performed in this role would have a profound effect not just on the outcome of the presidential race, but on down-ballot races as well.
No presidential candidate is perfect, but all before have made an earnest effort—until you. You have, sir, failed on every count. You scarcely seem to be trying.
Rather than unifying the party, your behavior and comments suggest a “get behind me, or else” attitude. This was on florid display in your recent meeting with Senate Republicans. What was intended as a fence-mending exercise went awry the moment one of our senators raised concerns about your campaign. You threatened to make sure he lost his bid for reelection this year. (As it happens, he’s not even up for reelection this year). You derided another Republican senator, not even present, calling him “a loser.”
As to running an effective campaign, on May 29 you tweeted: “my campaign has perhaps more cash than any campaign in the history of politics- b/c I stand 100% behind everything we do.” A June 21 story on CNN had the following headline: “Clinton burying Trump, $42 million to $1.3 million.”
Either you knew or were informed by your staff that you’d better throw the party a bone, so you announced you would forgive the $50 million loan you’d made to the campaign, and your fundraising was better in June. But your June figures were just half what Romney raised in June of 2012.
Overall, you’ve raised $89.5 million to Clinton’s $288 million. You have not informed us how much cash you have on hand, and as of this writing you have not provided the FEC with paperwork regarding the $50 million loan guarantee.
Between June 8 and July 6, Hillary Clinton had run 20,000 TV ads. You’d run none. “I don’t even know why I need so much money,” you said recently. “You know, I go around, I make speeches. I talk to reporters. I don’t even need commercials, if you want to know the truth. Why do I need these commercials?”
What evidence supports this highly experimental, unprecedented approach? Your supporters point to your remarkable powers of persuasion. Yes, you were devilishly persuasive in the primary against sixteen opponents. But you have one opponent now, and her funding advantage will enable her to buy persuasion. The Clinton campaign can test messages, use the findings to design persuasive and targeted ads, and blanket key markets with them.
We are also meant to find comfort in your ability to attract media attention. However, simple logic suggests that the comments that made you newsworthy and attractive to a plurality of primary voters will be anathema to the broader electorate. The weapons you wielded in the primary could easily cause self-inflicted wounds in the general. You yourself seemed to acknowledge this in late April when you told the Wall Street Journal, “The campaign is evolving and transitioning, and so am I… I’ll be more effective and more disciplined.”
Since that time, you have been ineffective and undisciplined, lurching from one disastrous gaffe to another. To name just a few: the “Mexican” judge in the Trump University case; bizarre conspiracy theories (e.g., Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination, and a truly reprehensible comment about American soldiers looting in Iraq); veterans’ charities not receiving your promised donations, leading to additional stories calling into question your previous philanthropic claims. (Who knows what’s true? You won’t release your tax returns.) You tweeted that Scotland was elated about Brexit (Scotland voted against) and that if Antonin Scalia had been alive, the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion would have been different (it was a 5–3 decision).
“Look at my African American over there!” you said at a rally. “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” you tweeted on Cinco de Mayo. You recently pointed at a plane flying over your rally and said, “That could be a Mexican plane up they’re. They’re getting ready to attack.” Last week you tweeted an image that came from a white nationalist’s website. It had what looked like a Star of David on it. It might have been accidental, but when white nationalists are among your most devoted and vocal supporters, it is incumbent upon you to distance yourself from such controversies. Fair or unfair, these are the forces of political gravity candidates must deal with, and while your existing admirers thrill at your refusal to “cave,” your keeping that story alive was colossally unhelpful to the wider goal: attracting new voters.
The biggest example of campaign malpractice is in the many missed opportunities to distinguish yourself from Clinton and the Democrats. In the wake of the terrorist attack on an Orlando nightclub, you wrote a ham-handed self-promoting tweet, then went on to insinuate that Obama was sympathetic to ISIS. After Clinton was excoriated by head of FBI for her mishandling of classified information, you inexplicably returned to the Star of David tweet issue and to praising Saddam Hussein for killing terrorists.
So how is this low-budget, small-organization, earned media-oriented experiment going? Your Real Clear Politics “unfavorability rating” average was over 60 percent on May 4. It remains there today. Clinton’s is high, too, but in 42 head to head polls since May 4, you have been in the lead in only 5. Your voters are enthusiastic, but you need a whole lot more of them, and we see no evidence you are willing or able to attract them. And the Clinton campaign has only just begun on what will be a brutal advertising assault.
According to polls, any of the other top Republican candidates would be beating Clinton. You are the only Republican, it seems, who cannot. Yet you ask – nay, insist – the party get behind you?
Yes, Republican leaders and elected officials enabled you. Some extracted promises from, but none dare hold you accountable when you break them. Others are infected by your take-no-prisoners style. “It will be a bad place for Jeff Flake to be in two years,” said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “When Senator Flake needs something for Arizona, he ain’t gonna get it… Presidents can play hardball, and can punish the people who didn’t want to stand up there with them.”
Others relented and endorsed you without even bothering to insist you do your part. I suppose they knew it was fruitless to expect you to serve the party humbly, to be more disciplined or apologize in order to move on from a bad story, to try a little diplomacy when you’re running for the job of the nation’s chief diplomat. They know your style. Never apologize. Never admit fault. Never give an inch.
Thus it sadly falls to delegates to give you a little home truth: The Republican party is not your party, Mr. Trump. We are not a mouse under your paw.
You entered into an implicit agreement with us, and you have failed to uphold your end of the bargain. We recognize your ardent supporters will disagree. But with all due respect to them, while we were prepared on May 4 to defer to their judgment, your behavior since then relieves us of any sense of obligation to you.
You recently winked at speculation that you don’t actually want to be president, and you might even step down if you win. Why not step aside now? Your victory in the Republican primary was an impressive accomplishment, one for the history books. Is that not enough?
But if you refuse, as I suspect you will, I can no longer in good conscience support you.
And I am not alone.
Virginia Hume is a writer, editor and former Republican spokeswoman.
