Tom Nichols is a never-Trump conservative who teaches at the U.S Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School.
He just wrote a very powerful polemical piece urging people to dump Trump in 2020.
Here is how he starts:
"I don’t care if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal. She could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her."
He is making the point here that we should not decide who to vote for in 2020 based on policy, but rather we should decide who to vote for based on basic loyalty to the United States and basic intellectual competence to deal with complex issues.
He drives the point home with these lines:
"I don’t care if Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is clearly influenced by a hostile foreign government or that Marianne Williamson is a weird, anti-science guru. They could …
Wait. I do care about that. It’s the reason they won’t get my vote next year, and why the president won’t either."
This is similar to the argument I was trying to make in my 2016 book "Top 25 Reasons to Dump Trump." It was hard for me to talk to people who wanted to focus on policy or on comparing Trump to other candidates or previous presidents. My point was that Trump was uniquely unqualified to be president - we should have rejected him so fast there would have been no time to discuss policy. We should have rejected him based on his adoration for foreign dictators, his continuous stream of false statements, and his obvious aversion to logical thinking, all of which were clearly evident during the 2016 campaign.
This is also why I don't think arguments about how good or bad the country is doing right now make much sense. If you were on a plane where a mentally ill person seized the controls and somehow managed to bring the plane in for a landing you wouldn't say, "Well, he did OK, I would fly with him again." You would say, "Wow. Thank God we didn't all die. Now let's get a competent pilot into that seat before the next leg of our trip."
Nichols continues his op-ed like this:
"Compulsive lying, fantastic and easily refuted claims, base insults and bizarre public meltdowns, however, are indeed signs of serious emotional problems. Trump has never been a reasonable man, but for two years, he has gotten worse. He literally cannot tell the truth from a lie...."
There is more good writing and good thinking in Nichols's essay so I hope I everyone will read it. For those who don't, I think this passage sums up his main theme:
"… I am willing to live with whoever wins the Democratic primary process. I will likely hate the nominee’s policies, but at least I will not be concerned that he or she is incapable of understanding “the nuclear” or “the cyber.” I will feel like I have a shot at trying to convince my elected representatives that they should listen to the policy preferences of normal human beings instead of two old men wearing shirts that say they’d “rather be a Russian than a Democrat,” or a woman in a shirt indicating that she is willing to have the president grab her genitalia."
Amen.
Let's get rid of this president that no past president in 240 years would have entrusted with a cabinet post and get a NORMAL American president.
~j~W~g~
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/15/2020-democrat-will-get-my-vote-never-trump-ex-republican-column/2013614001/