Never-Trumpers, I hear you. Donald Trump is indeed boorish, undisciplined, often loud and obnoxious, and not too many years ago he was even a Democrat. Yikes. He says some very stupid things. His insults to Ben Carson and Marco Rubio and branding Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” were totally despicable. More fundamentally, no conservative would ever find him a dream candidate. Oh, and he has no clue about the nuclear triad. All true.
Like most of you, I am a Ted Cruz partisan and during the entire primary season I wrote weekly columns at Townhall and the Daily Caller in his support. In a Daily Caller piece I called Trump “The White Obama.” Now that Cruz is out of the race, I continue to stand on his firm conservative values, as do you. You say your conservative conscience and your moral principles won’t allow you to vote for a man of such low character as Trump.
But I cannot join you on your lofty moral peak. My conservative conscience dictates a very different course of action than yours. This is my over-arching moral priority: to do my damnest to save the greatest, fairest, most generous nation on earth from the vicious predations of the Democrat jackals who would destroy it. The only way to do that is to vote for Trump.
Trump is far more conservative than Never-Trumpsters may know or like to admit. In actual fact many of his positions and certainly his conservative instincts are similar to those of Ted Cruz -- lowering taxes, shredding business-strangling regulations, ramping up domestic oil and gas exploration, staunching illegal immigration, repealing the disaster of Obamacare and killing the abominable Iran deal – all align with Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton is on the opposite side of each and every one of these conservative imperatives.
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Despite detractors for whom he will never be conservative enough, Trump’s recent list of possible Supreme Court nominees has drawn wide praise from the rightest of the high-forehead right. And none of them are his liberal judge sister. He’s also backed down from what many predicted would be an arrogant power struggle with House Speaker Paul Ryan over who would chair the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. All of this is evidence that the huuge Trump personality so many have labeled authoritarian, irascible and even demogogic is capable of modulation. It could be he is taking the calm, wise advice of his ally and former rival Dr. Ben Carson.
Trump added to his conservative bona fides by naming Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to head his national security team. It’s unlikely Sessions would risk his reputation as an outspoken conservative member of the Senate Armed Services, Judiciary and Budget Committees by joining the cause of an unworthy candidate.
According to the Washington Times, Sen. Sessions was "a tea partyer before the tea party was cool because of his unflinching and vocal conservative views on most fiscal and social issues." Sessions’ experience as the Chairman of the important Strategic Forces Subcommittee will serve Trump well. Responsibility for nuclear and strategic forces, intelligence programs, space programs, and ballistic missile defense all fall under this subcommittee and Sen. Sessions’ purview.
About Sessions the Conservative Review adds, “Sessions is an unwavering social conservative and has been a staunch advocate for the death penalty, Second Amendment rights, the Defense of Marriage Act, and religious liberty.” As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he has led the conservative opposition against providing government benefits to illegal immigrants, and also headed the fight against Obama’s liberal Supreme Court nominees such as Sotomayor and Kagan. In addition he’s often faced ire from fellow Republicans as a strong leader for reduced government spending and welfare reform.
Sen. Sessions’ decades of rankling the D.C. establishment by standing firm for “extremist” conservative principles should impress Never-Trumpers as solid gold. But they are so very stubborn.
Other members of Trump’s national security team are also standouts, such as Dr. Walid Phares, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., and well-known terrorism and Middle East scholar and expert who often appears on Fox News to explain terrorist developments. He also decries Barack Obama’s foreign policy blunders in calling Islam the religion of peace, never acknowledging that it’s radical Islamic terrorism we’re fighting. Phares was born in Lebanon, has written several books about the Middle East and terrorism, and was also an advisor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.
It’s time for Never-Trumpers to quit insisting their vast political savvy and supernatural clairvoyance tells them Trump will be the worst president ever. They should instead pay attention to Trump’s rightward moves and give him some credit for them. If we don’t stop the Democrats Hillary Clinton will appoint radical Marxist Supreme Court justices eager to legislate new laws that erase what’s left of our nation’s cultural and religious values. Teen girls being forced to shower with teen boys who think they’re girls is just the beginning of what they have planned for us.
The real danger isn’t Trump. The real danger is the woman who lied to the bereaved families of the Benghazi heroes, telling them they were not killed by Islamic terrorists, even as their coffins were being unloaded behind her. Whatever Trump’s failings, they cannot compare to those of Hillary Clinton, whose crimes were committed against the very nation she pretended to serve, and wants now to lead.
My conservative conscience will not allow me to sit this election out or to vote for a third-party candidate bound to lose as all of them do, even Teddy Roosevelt when he ran again as a “Progressive” after his presidential terms had ended. I cannot be an accidental co-conspirator to the further Obamatization of America via a President Clinton. We will not survive any more “fundamental change.”
Please, Never-Trumpers, don’t let your noble allegiance to your conservative principles result in electing the very liberals and socialists who are committed to eviscerating them. To quote Rush Limbaugh, “We must stop the Democrat Party in its tracks.”
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1
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