There are many great arguments for making Donald Trump the Republican nominee. Here are just a few that have occurred to me over the past few months. Enjoy.
Donald Trump is one of the greatest Republicans of all time. He was a Democrat during the George W. Bush administration and wanted Bush to be impeached, loved Nancy Pelosi and was surprised she didn’t do more to get rid of him, and remained a registered Democrat until 2009. But he’s a great Republican—just like Reagan!
He is also a great Christian. We know this because he thinks the Bible is a great book. Nevermind that he’s shown no evidence of knowing anything about anything in it (that’s “private,” he says). No person who has made a big political point of being a huge Christian should ever be asked to think of a favorite Bible verse (or even one), because Jesus made it clear that when people ask us to give reason for our faith, we should tell them it’s none of their business. Extra points for insulting them on top of it.
And it’s great that when asked if he prefers the Old or the New Testament, he says, “both,” because that is certainly not the kind of answer that a con man would give when asked a question he has no answer for whatsoever. We know he loves the Bible because he has a special room where he keeps the ones people send him. And he must be a Christian because he goes to church on Christmas and Easter to have “my little cracker” and wine, and because he’s “never” asked God to forgive him. Sounds like a Christian to me!
But speaking of insults, Donald Trump will be a great candidate for the Republican Party, because he clearly has the temperament to be president. I can’t count the number of times American foreign policy was well served by presidents who called foreign leaders names, and there is certainly no better yardstick for whom we should give foreign aid to than whether they are “terrific” or “terrible.” It’s about time we stopped trying to use diplomacy when dealing with foreign cultures and stupid people who don’t even know English just because they don’t live here.
I suppose we all realize that in 2012, the Republican Party made a big mistake running Mitt Romney. After all, he was tainted by having created a health plan in Massachusetts that could be spun by the media as “Obamacare-lite”, had way too much money to beat the Democrats at their income inequality argument, was perceived as having “flip-flopped” on issues like abortion and gun laws, and did missionary work in France instead of going to Vietnam. So, this time, let’s avoid all those pitfalls.
Instead, let’s run someone who favored single-payer (and who voiced admiration for the systems in Canada and Scotland in the first debate, last month). Let’s correct our foolishness in running an out-of-touch millionaire with a billionaire that grew up in a 23-room house. Clearly the problem was that our rich man wasn’t rich enough. Let’s line up to stand behind a guy who is newly-minted as a pro-life candidate, is on record favoring a ban on “assault weapons”, and deferred his way through the Vietnam War.
Certainly Trump should be the favored candidate for the Tea Party, since the original meaning is “Taxed Enough Already”, and Trump is already on record favoring a wealth tax and doing something not quite solidified yet that would make hedge fund guys pay more, or differently, or something.
Speaking of clarity, there’s not much of that in our candidate. No, sir. Our guy talks straight, if in a rather meandering, unstructured, word-salad kind of way—like that guy on the subway you gradually realize is a little nutty. But don’t worry about that. We know he will do things and get them done, because he says he will. He has the same ability to make things happen as Obama has, with his magic pen and phone.
Donald Trump makes a lot of promises, some of which he simply cannot keep without becoming the same kind of imperial tyrant that we’re trying to shake free of over the next fourteen months. But, no matter, political promises are made to be broken. Or, maybe the promises will be kept and the Constitution will be broken. We’ll see.
Another great reason to run Trump as our candidate is that we don’t have any choice—unless we want (hiss!) Jeb(!). Just like the only alternative to signing on to the President’s miserable Iran deal is certain thermonuclear war, the Republicans have no other candidates in the race that could be any good as general election candidates. It’s not like we have a neurosurgeon, or a Rhodes Scholar, any good governors, Senators, or former Senators, or military guys, or—gosh, if only we had the wide field of candidates the Democrats have, maybe we would be thinking beyond Trump. But we don’t. All Trump twitterers and Facebook fans have assured me there is only Trump and no-Trump—and no-Trump is just establishment-speak for Bush.
So let’s just stop pretending that we have any choices here. It’s Trump–or the end of the world.
And speaking of the end of the world, you’ll love it–it’s gonna be terrific. That’s what the Bible says, anyway.
Image: Courtesy of Gage Skidmore at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/
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