Looking at Trump from Outside the Bubbleby Mark Pulliam
Everyone seems to be sharing their reflections on the election of Donald Trump as President (for example, here, here, and here), prompting me to weigh in with some of my own. As a contributing editor to this site, I sometimes feel like an outsider. I am not, and never have been, an academic. I am just a retired lawyer who fled the “coastal urban area†where I lived for many years to return to the heartland—“fly-over country.†The practice of law—my career for 30 years—grounded me in a practical, not a theoretical, world. I regard myself not as a scholar, but as a reasonably well-informed Everyman [1].
I now reside in a “red†state, where the principal surprise on November 8 was that Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was “only†nine percentage points, compared to Mitt Romney’s 16 point cushion over President Obama in 2012. In Texas, that qualifies as a close call! Not all Texas Republicans wholeheartedly supported Trump; some felt that he was not conservative enough, or were still nursing hurt feelings over Sen. Ted Cruz’ defeat in the GOP primaries. Some were confident Trump would lose, and others—motivated by high principle—didn’t care, casting a vote for Evan McMullin or Gary Johnson. (Already, the question is “Who?â€)
While I agreed with Trump on many issues, I didn’t start out as a Trump supporter. Nevertheless, I backed him without reservation when he clinched the nomination by winning Indiana’s primary. Politics is a team sport, in which unity and loyalty are essential to success (as is popularity with the grassroots). As a lifelong conservative who has never voted for a Democrat in a contested partisan election, I didn’t understand the angst over Trump (and still don’t). He was the Republican nominee. The alternative—Hillary Clinton—was unimaginable. As I explained in a post for the American Spectator in May, the Never Trump option seemed absurd to me (and still does). I cancelled my subscription to the Weekly Standard and boycotted National Review in protest of their relentless (and often hysterical) opposition to Trump.
MUCH more at link:
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/12/12/looking-at-trump-from-outside-the-bubble/
