I just don’t know where to begin here. Dennis Prager, a well-known conservative commentator whose articles run once in awhile on National Review Online, has produced another head-scratcher titled “A Defense of Evangelicals Who Support Trump.” Just what we need! Erick Erickson, a true Christian conservative, has already written a rebuttal in which he says, “Dennis Prager Is Just Wrong Here.” To which I say, “Yay, Erick!” I want to do a little more eviscerating on points not covered by Erickson. My main divergence of opinion with Erickson is his insistence that Christians didn’t need to dirty their hands in the last election by voting for either major-party candidate or indeed by voting at all, but that’s a topic I’ve covered more than thoroughly and so I won’t go into it here.First of all, Prager’s overall point, if I can boil it down fairly:
There is no limit to what can be excused in an officeholder, as long as he is an enemy of the Left. (Prager always capitalizes “left” and never defines it.)
He then goes on to re-hash some of the old, tired arguments that we’ve been bombarded with now for going on three years about Donald Trump, giving five main points. I want to give a brief rebuttal for each:
1. Jimmy Carter has been married once and, as far as we know, has been a faithful husband to his wife. Donald Trump has been married three times. Who would you vote for, Carter or Trump?
Talk about a slam dunk, Dennis! Faced with that choice, I’d vote for Carter. No question. Good grief! Can’t you come up with a better quandary for us NeverTrumpers? I am no fan of Jimmy Carter, Heaven only knows, but he was and is an honest, decent man. And on the subject of abortion, which so many AlwaysTrumpers used to justify their vote for a serial adulterer, Carter was pretty moderate. He was also a graduate of the US Naval Academy, the only President to be so, and so had some real chops in the area of foreign policy. I’m kind of flummoxed by this comparison.
2. Who has a finer character, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Prager says, with no explanation, “For the record, I believe his character is superior to hers.” In what possible way, Mr. Prager? Could you explain this inexplicable statement? Corrupt, greedy, power-hungry: all terms describing Hillary Clinton. All terms also describing Donald Trump, too, with no mitigating traits to put in the positive column. None.
3. This is what the article says—I just copied and pasted it:
“Whom should pro-choice voters support: a pro-life activist of fine character or a pro-choice activist of dubious character?” Someone got the terms switched here, obviously, but I’ll give Prager the benefit of the doubt and say that he means “whom should pro-life voters support: a pro-choice activist of fine character or a pro-life activist of dubious character?”
Again, the answer is obvious: you support the person of fine character, should there be such a person in the race. If I’d been able to vote in the Alabama Senate race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones, you’d better be sure that I’d have voted for Jones. Honestly! Who thinks it’s a good idea to have, as Jonah Goldberg says, “a constitutionally illiterate theocratic bigot who sexually preyed on teenagers” as your spokesperson on a moral issue? How are you going to make any progress that way?
4. Should you support a pro-Israel activist of dubious character or an anti-Israel activist of fine character?
A meaningless question, as Prager doesn’t define his terms concerning one’s stance on Israel. I have a feeling that Prager would consider any stance on Israel short of totally kicking out the Palestinians to be “anti-Israel,” and good people disagree on this issue, so it’s a wash.
5. Now for the really, really silly one:
“If they were to have cancer, would any of the Evangelicals’ critics choose an oncologist based on character? If not, why not?”
Um, seriously? We’re now comparing the treatment of cancer to the running of the country? There’s so much wrong with this statement that I don’t know where to begin. (It’s in the same category as the “God forgave David so we have to forgive Trump” baloney that was peddled during the election. Folks, it’s a wonder I have any hair left at all.)
But let me begin anyway. Let’s see, if I knew that an oncologist was dishonest in his medical dealings, perhaps falsifying his research results or some such, then of course I wouldn’t use him because he wouldn’t be trustworthy in his supposed area of expertise. There would, I hope, be a self-selecting process that had gone on before I even had the option of choosing him, and he’d have been de-licensed. I’d be focused narrowly on this doctor’s ability to treat my disease, because that’d be the only issue that would matter to me. What Prager is trying to do here is to set up a false choice (for which I’m sure there’s some fancy Latin term), “Would you use an oncologist who cheated on his wife?” or some such. On the one hand, an oncologist’s marital fidelity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with his ability to treat my cancer. There would be no way I’d even know about his personal life anyway, probably. But–and this is an important point to make here—if I knew somehow that he had a reputation for untrustworthiness in general, then, no, Mr. Prager, I almost certainly wouldn’t have him treat my cancer because I wouldn’t know whether or not he was telling me the truth about the chances of success for the treatment he was recommending.
And here is where Prager’s argument falls apart into the tiniest of little bitty pieces. Because he’s trying to say that we should choose our leaders for their abilities and stances and not for their character, but Trump’s abilities and stances are totally laughable, taken on their own terms. During the campaign, for instance (and this is one of many such instances), we were told time and time again that Donald Trump would be good for the country because he’d run it like he ran his businesses. But he was a colossal failure at running his businesses! He went bankrupt six times. He was known for cheating his business partners. So . . . if we’re supposed to just focus on what he can do and not what he’s like, we can’t choose him that way either.
I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. Anybody out there want to help me out? Am I missing something? Are Prager’s arguments as weak as they seem?
Here’s a link to Prager’s article:
“A Defense of Evangelicals Who Support Trump”
(Pay close attention to the quotations from Evangelical critics and see how much more compelling their arguments are than Prager’s.)
And a great article I’ve posted before from a sterling pro-life source, Kimberly Ross over at RedState. While she’s talking specifically about Roy Moore, her arguments are very much applicable generally, certainly to Donald Trump:
“Pro-Lifers Are Being Guilted into Supporting Roy Moore Even Though Morality Is Multi-Faceted”
Be sure also to read the Erick Erickson article linked to in the first paragraph of this post.