The thought has occurred to me that I should probably explain what I am hoping will happen as a result of the disastrous 2016 election. I’ve posted article after article lambasting the Trump presidency, but to what end? What’s the point?
So I’d come to some conclusions, and today I ran across an article by Tom Nichols that says exactly what I think. So he must be right, right? He was one of the very, very few NeverTrump Republicans who was willing to say before the election that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton. I remember reading that article in The Federalist and feeling my jaw just drop. Yes! A voice of reason! Someone willing to say the unthinkable! The unsayable!So let me give you a representative quotation from his latest (and you need to be sure to read the entire article), and then I’ll tack on some of my own thoughts:
But for now, I really am a Republican In Name Only, because I actively want to see the Republicans defeated — soundly — in 2018 (and in 2020, if the president is not primaried out of his seat). Where I was once unaffiliated but quietly cheering on conservatives, I am now a member of a party I want to see cast into the political wilderness for a few years — or longer, if that’s what it takes to break the fever. . . .
Of course, no one should underestimate the ability of the Democrats to screw up an election, and it’s possible that the midterms and the 2020 election will end up breaking for Trump’s GOP. If that happens, the Republican Party has no future. I and many others, including younger people, will leave, and the GOP will become largely a regional party, confined to islands of older white voters in the South, the Rust Belt and the mountain states who will be gone in 30 years and who will take the GOP with them.
At that point, some other party — not a “third way” but a new conservative party — will have to take the GOP’s place. That process will take decades, and I will not live to see it. And so I’d prefer to revive the GOP after it is forced back into the minority, when we can have a real fight within the party about what it stands for and who it should support by reforming the Republican National Committee, the primary process and the platform.
Nichols is one of a very, very few conservatives who are now saying, implicitly or explicitly, that if you care about the Republican Party you need to grit your teeth and vote for Democrats in 2018. (They’re the same small group who said in 2016 “Save the Republican Party—Vote for Hillary Clinton.” We all know how successful that was.) A Democratic takeover of Congress in 2018 is the only way I can see that we’re going to get Donald Trump out of the White House before 2020. I have said that I was now going to be a third-party voter, but I hadn’t really thought through what I was going to do in 2018. I may end up following his advice, but I’d have a very hard time voting against Mike Coffman, our US Representative. I may do some picking and choosing. In the larger view, though, it is essential that the Democrats take the House.
Because here’s what I hope and pray will happen (and I do mean “pray” very literally): That the Democrats flip the House. This will set up the impeachment process, with only a simple majority needed to pass each article. At this point, Trump’s family and advisers will surely urge him to resign. This is what happened with Nixon. The country wouldn’t have to go through the impeachment process, which would tear us apart even more than has already happened. Perhaps Donald Trump, his family and the few close associates he would have left could all retire to a Caribbean island and live out the rest of their days drinking mai-tais (or, in the case of the President himself, Diet Coke). That’s a pretty idealistic idea on my part, I know. In reality, what would happen is that Trump TV would finally get off the ground instead of remaining mothballed as it has been since the Trump victory.
Mike Pence would then be President (unless he is also targeted for impeachment, but I don’t think that would happen). Let me be perfectly clear here: I have less than no respect for Mr. Pence, who has enabled and excused and praised Donald Trump in the teeth of irrefutable evidence of corruption. His groveling and sycophantic speech at that infamous Cabinet meeting (watch it below, if you dare) sounds like something straight out of the Politburo. But he’d be able to get us through the next two years. I would hope at that point that he’d step aside, knowing that he was irretrievably tainted by his praise of Trump. I doubt that he’d do that, though. Maybe he could be successfully primaried. For now, though, the important thing is to banish Donald Trump in a Constitutional, open and peaceful way, and to do so as soon as possible. We have so far escaped some terrible calamity resulting from his occupying the Presidency, but we can’t count on that continuing to be so.
So there it is: my plan for the future. No ifs, ands or buts. How about it? Anybody with me?
And a bonus video from George Will: