By David French
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Those of us who’ve pledged that we will never, ever vote
for Donald Trump always get the same response: “You’d put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office instead?” Clinton’s name is
spoken like an epithet, as if it’s unthinkable that any conservative would take
any single action that could facilitate her election. I will not, under any
circumstances, vote for Clinton, but I also do not believe that Trump would
make a better president. Not because Clinton isn’t as bad as you think, but
because Trump is worse than you imagine.
There’s no real difference in character between the two.
They lie as easily as they breathe: habitually, transparently, shamelessly.
Hillary lies like a lawyer, always parsing her words to provide a legal escape
route. Trump lies like a thug, contradicting himself with each successive
breath and daring anyone to call him on it. They both seek to destroy their
political opponents, and they’d probably both wield the levers of power to do
so and to reward their friends. In other words, they’re both fundamentally
corrupt.
We know what we’ll get from Clinton when it comes to
foreign policy. She’s an internationalist interventionist with more muscular
instincts than Barack Obama and less resolve than George W. Bush. She voted for
the Iraq invasion but then went wobbly as the war dragged on. She backed the
surge in Afghanistan, advocated intervention in Libya, and was famously more
skeptical of the Arab Spring than Obama. Her “reset” with Russia was a
disaster, but she’ll broadly back American allies, maintain our stewardship of
NATO, and keep our other international commitments.
Trump’s foreign policy, insofar as he has a coherent foreign policy, is by
contrast an entire casserole of crazy. At various points in the campaign, he’s
promised that he’d order the military to commit war crimes by torturing
terrorists and killing their families; he’s called our core alliances in
question; he’s pledged to remain neutral in the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians; and he’s switched anti-ISIS strategies so many times that no one
has the slightest clue what he’d do. This is a man who has on multiple
occasions endorsed a “bomb them all and take their oil” strategy for fixing the
war-torn Middle East. He’d alienate every Muslim ally America has, including
the Kurds, and he’s still completely mystified by the most basic defense
concepts. The entire world would be less secure with his finger on the button.
On trade, Clinton will almost certainly be superior to
Trump. Trump pledges to “win” through punitive tariffs that would increase the
price of consumer goods and trigger trade wars, but he gives little indication
that he understands the economics of trade, the reality of the American
economy, or even the truth about American manufacturing. (It is not, in fact,
disappearing.) Clinton, by contrast, would probably maintain the trade-policy
status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any
status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American
families.
The Clinton and Trump tax plans are both miserable.
Clinton offers the standard Democratic package of tax increases for the rich
and vastly increased spending, while Trump’s tax cuts would blast a hole in the
budget, adding as much debt as Obama did — without the burden of a historic
recession. Clinton’s plan would probably slow economic growth, but would be
closer to revenue-neutral. Trump’s plan would spur more growth but would also
increase the national debt by up to $10 trillion. Pick your poison.
But what about the areas where Trump fans argue that he’d
clearly be better than Clinton? On abortion, immigration, and judges, we know
what she’d do — protect Planned Parenthood, try to enact a path to citizenship,
and appoint the standard-issue leftist legal technocrats to the bench.
How much better would Trump be? It’s impossible to know
if his recent pro-life conversion is genuine, but it can’t be a good sign that
he still refuses to denounce Planned Parenthood, consistently using Democratic
talking points to praise the nation’s largest abortion provider. On immigration
— aside from that big, beautiful wall, which is a pipe dream at best — he’s all
over the place. And his corporate record indicates that he’s exactly the kind
of “jobs Americans won’t do” legal-immigration and touchback-amnesty advocate
who would be all too willing to open the door so wide that no one would have to
scale the wall.
As for judges, the indications are similarly ominous. He
praises his far-left sister and promises to nominate men and women whom
everyone will like. But not everyone likes true conservatives. In reality,
he’ll probably nominate friends and cronies — people who’ve said nice things
about him. The best-case scenario is that he’ll delegate lower-court judicial
nominations to home-state senators, simply adopting their recommendations. He’d
probably be better than Hillary, but not by much.
He’d also probably be better than Hillary on the Second
Amendment. There is at least a chance that he’d nominate a Supreme Court
justice who wouldn’t vote for the repeal of the individual right to keep and
bear arms, and it’s doubtful that he’d initiate any meaningful gun-control
measures. But who knows what he might negotiate in the heat of the moment? Any
position he takes — most definitely including all of the “conservative” stances
he’s adopted since launching his campaign — could be discarded at a moment’s
notice if it became politically inconvenient. It’s impossible to know what he
actually believes, if he actually believes anything.
But virtually everything we do know about Trump is
negative. He lies. He traffics in far-left conspiracy theories. He incites
violence. He surrounds himself with thugs, cronies, and fools. He’s ignorant of
the most basic realities of national security, foreign policy, and global
economics. He has a decades-long record of corruption and a decades-long record
of liberalism. In arguing that he’s better than Clinton, his supporters now ask
us to trust his current “conservative” incarnation and disregard that record.
We don’t really know how he’ll handle immigration, trade, ISIS, abortion, or
judges. But trust him. He’ll do better.
Yes, Trump has praised single-payer health care during
this election, but trust him. He’ll do better than Obamacare. Yes, Trump has
advocated touchback amnesty and increased legal immigration, but trust him.
He’ll protect American workers. Yes, Trump has supported abortion-on-demand and
gun control, but trust him. He’s changed. Yes, Trump has written large checks
to leftist politicians, but trust him. He’ll fight them as president. Yes, his
campaign team lives in the gutter, but trust him. He’ll appoint good people.
Hillary Clinton is the most beatable likely Democratic
nominee since John Kerry, and the GOP is poised to nominate the one man least
likely to beat her, and the one man who would be just as bad in the White
House. I don’t vote for despicable people. I don’t vote for leftists. And I
will never, ever, vote for Donald Trump. He’s no better than she is.
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