As contentious as this primary election season has been on the left, I certainly do not envy the GOP. While Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her lovable rival Bernie Sanders advocate for progressive policies and keep things relatively clean, the GOP faces the looming specter of a Trump nomination, a nomination many in the Republican party don’t seem to want and increasingly can do little to prevent.
I mean, when there’s talk of setting up a new Republican superPAC strategy AFTER Super Tuesday? You know it’s bad. Poor Paul Ryan, is a thought I actually had this week. For the first time in my life, I feel just terrible for Lindsey Graham. These are Republican leaders whose politics I basically hold in contempt, but it must indeed be upsetting to have a profoundly naive, profoundly sure of himself would-be dictator running for your political party’s top nomination.
Super Tuesday winners:
Democratic race: Hillary Clinton
Republican race: Hillary Clinton
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 2, 2016
One interesting outcome of GOP leaders’ dissatisfaction with Trump is full of delicious irony: At least one top conservative has said he’d vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and advisor to Marco Rubio’s campaign, Max Boot. From an interview at Vox:
“I’m literally losing sleep over Donald Trump,” Boot told me over the phone. “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.”
He’s hoping that he’s not alone — even if it means splitting the party over a Trump nomination.
“I would hope that the party would fracture,” he says, “if the nominee were a fascist demagogue like Donald Trump.”
Boot’s reaction speaks to just how anxious Republican elites are about Donald Trump — and how much of a threat he poses to the ideas that have been central to their worldview for decades, particularly on foreign policy.
Boot continues:
ZB: Is Trump really that bad, from the point of view of a conservative foreign policy thinker?
MB: I think that American power has diminished under Obama. But if Trump were to become president, we would look back on the Obama presidency as a golden age.
If you take seriously Donald Trump’s crackpot proposals, if they were implemented, it would leave America impoverished and isolated. He would actually be far more dangerous than that: He has plainly shown that he does not have either the intellect or the character to be commander in chief.
I’m frankly terrified at the notion that somebody as bigoted and ignorant as Donald Trump could possibly wind up in command of the most powerful military force in the world.
Donald Trump does not have a serious foreign policy thought in his head. He has no ideas, he only has impulses — and those impulses change every 30 seconds.
He loves dictators. He praises Putin, he loved the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he praises Kim Jong-Un. He said Saddam Hussein was great because he killed terrorists, which is a hell of a way to characterize the hundreds of thousands of victims Saddam Hussein claimed.
This is a fascinatingly weird potential outcome if Trump wins the nomination. And it runs directly counter to a narrative that I’ve seen a lot of anti-Hillary critiques fall back on—the “people hate Hillary, only Bernie can defeat Trump” line, which I won’t bother including in full here, since it’ll certainly appear in the comments below, with fun links to US Uncut.
So anyway, if you’re losing sleep over the sheer terror a Trump presidency presents, you’re not alone. So is one of Marco Rubio’s advisors.
I was just thinking I would vote for Putin over Trump. I’ll settle with Clinton/Sanders.
Lol! More like some Democrats and many independents hate Hillary enough to vote for Trump. The only way you avoid President Trump is by electing President Sanders.
Jarhead – I haven’t been following this issue. But was the “damage to National Security by her compromising classified material via her personal email server” a result of her being forced to release all the emails? Seems like releasing is what would actually compromise national security, as opposed to a theoretical compromise in which her private server wasn’t secure. I’m asking honestly.
Thanks for the explanation. Can you prove this: “The damage was as a result of the classified material being (undoubtedly) compromised”? I read a synopsis of this situation on the Washington Post and according to them it’s not undoubtedly compromised. Your whole statement hinges on this.
Jarhead – Thanks for the detailed response. Yesterday the NY Times reported that the security logs show no evidence of a hack (which obviously doesn’t conclusively mean it wasn’t hacked). It also states that there were some “secret” (22) and “top secret” (65) emails, but no classified ones (well, none that were marked as classified at the time). Part of your argument is that she is responsible for the emails that people send to her. Given that her server doesn’t contain troves of classified emails, it seems (to me) safe to assume that she intended for this server to be for non-classified materials. I don’t know how much her intentions matter in this investigation, though.
CNN reports that she “didn’t use a State Department email account.” So this is her only email. So what makes you say, “since it took a number of people working in collusion to link her private server email and her DOS email systems.” What link? Pagliano set up this server in spring 2009, which is shortly after she became secretary of state. So at that time, they may not have transferred any emails from a DOS server (which she never seemed to use) to her private one. There may not have been anything to transfer.
It seems that Pagliano already testified on this issue to the House Benghazi Committee back in August (and he was granted immunity at that time, as well). Just like yesterday’s news, everyone at the time assumed this was a bad sign for Clinton.
I agree that this is complex!
Thanks, man. I definitely feel like I understand this issue better.
Come May, let’s see what the investigation finds!
I believe a Clinton nomination will have a similar impact on democrats, but to a smaller degree. I’ve never had anything but far left views my whole life & voted as such. In the last few years though, I have become so dissatisfied with our government that I view more of just the status quo as the worst thing that could happen. I don’t think I’m the only one. I’d rather this nation wake themselves up after 4-8 years of a Trump disaster, than more of the same old bought & paid for shit for years to come.
I believe a Clinton nomination will have a similar impact on Democrats, but to a smaller degree. I’ve never had anything but far left views my whole life & have voted as such. In the last few years though, I have become so dissatisfied with our government, that I view more of just the status quo as the worst thing that could happen. I don’t think I’m the only one. I’d rather this nation wake themselves up after 4-8 years of a Trump disaster, than more of the same old bought & paid for shit for years to come.
Sorry for the double post.