SOWELL
Only Trump could elect Clinton
Thomas Sowell BY THOMAS SOWELL
FIRST POSTED: THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2016 07:51 PM EDT | UPDATED: THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2016 08:12 PM EDT
It is hard to imagine any other Republican candidate who could rescue a thoroughly discredited Hillary Clinton from a devastating defeat in this year’s presidential election.
Now, 50 prominent Republicans with foreign policy and national security experience have taken the unprecedented step of collectively announcing they cannot vote for Donald Trump because they believe he would be “the most reckless president in American history.”
Why? Not only because he has demonstrated repeatedly that “he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests” but because “Trump has shown no interest in educating himself.”
Indeed, Trump has shown little interest in anything besides Trump.
His response to these criticisms has been predictable. Trump has not even tried to answer the charges or assure the American people on something as important as the survival of the nation.
Instead, there is the standard Trump tactic of launching unsubstantiated charges against his critics.
Even if all his charges were true, there are innumerable examples of Trump’s own words and deeds to make people worry about what he would do in the White House.
The only argument for voting for Trump is Clinton.
For both candidates, the danger is not simply that we might have one bad administration to live through.
The far greater danger is that either one can create an irretrievable catastrophe.
Clinton in the White House will nominate candidates for the Supreme Court who will destroy both the First Amendment right to free speech and the Second Amendment right to armed self-protection.
That will undoubtedly be just the beginning of the dismantling of the Constitution.
Clinton has already announced her desire to have a Supreme Court decision — “Citizens United versus FEC”— overturned because it said both corporations and labor unions have a right to free speech.
If the government can make free speech illegal, there is virtually nothing it cannot do.
Clinton has a long record of concealing her misdeeds, going back to her husband’s administration in Washington, and in Arkansas before that.
Why not vote for Trump then, since he has no known agenda for undermining constitutional freedoms?
There are few things worse than being deprived of our basic constitutional rights.
But one of those things is being deprived of life itself by the reckless decisions of a volatile, ill-informed, immature and self-absorbed president in a nuclear age.
Too many of Trump’s words and actions thus far make him a candidate for the title of the oldest man who has never grown up.
How did we get into the predicament where our choices for president are narrowed to a candidate who inspires distrust versus a candidate who inspires disgust — where both are dangerous?
The Democrats had few, and less promising, candidates at the outset.
The Republicans had a number of candidates with substantial achievements.
Republicans opened this game with the stronger hand.
But they played that hand into what looks like a defeat in November — not only for Trump but for other Republican candidates tainted by the immature and repellent behavior of the man at the top of the ticket.
One key misstep by the Republican establishment was agreeing to so-called “debates” in which a stage full of candidates has time for only short and superficial sound bites.
Trump was, and is, the king of superficial sound bites.
Will the Republican establishment learn anything from all this?
Very unlikely. Smug elites seldom learn.
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
