Ben Shapiro:
Another week, another Donald-being-Donald moment.
For many years in baseball, Indians, Red Sox, and Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez became a running joke in the fan community. That wasn’t because he couldn’t hit — he was a tremendous hitter. It’s because Ramirez was a kook. He’d throw to the wrong base, then shrug awkwardly. He’d take a stroll into the Green Monster, then fail to reemerge even as the game continued. He’d steal second base, then get confused and wander back toward first base before being thrown out.
These moments became known as “Manny being Manny” moments: If you want the good, they came along with some of the bad.
Donald Trump is the same way. Every few days, Trump does something so inexplicable, so morally and politically reprehensible, that conservatives end up stunned. The difference between Trump and Ramirez: Ramirez’s job was to hit a baseball; Trump’s job is to not have these moments. Imagine if Ramirez had batted .190. It would have been difficult to laugh off “Manny being Manny.” Trump doesn’t even bat .190. He’s the 2013 Dan Uggla of politics.
And yet Trump keeps having these Donald-being-Donald moments, and we’re supposed to just keep laughing them off. The latest: This week, Trump attacked a Gold Star family by saying, of the mother of a slain soldier, “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say” — presumably thanks to her religion. He also attacked not one but two fire marshals and said that Vladimir Putin had not invaded Ukraine. Trump simply can’t stop himself.
Which leaves Republicans in an awkward position. After the respective party conventions, Trump is the only viable electoral alternative to Democratic lying harridan Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt major-party nominee in modern American history. And yet Trump is so wildly unpalatable as a presidential candidate by any normal conservative or rational standard that many conservatives find themselves unable to vote for him.
These conservatives are now under heavy pressure to pull the lever for Trump. There are two main arguments advanced by Trump voters: first, that Trump will be better than Hillary Clinton; second, that anyone who refuses to vote for Trump bears moral responsibility for Hillary Clinton’s subsequent presidency.
Both of these arguments fall short.
The first argument seems deceptively simple: There are two candidates, and Trump will not be as awful a president as Hillary.
There is some truth to this. We know Hillary will be a terrible, hard-core ideological leftist; there is probably a 75 percent chance that Trump would govern less badly than Hillary. There is also a 25 percent chance that Trump would do something so catastrophically awful that he seriously harmed the country in ways Hillary wouldn’t dream of. His trade policy alone could cast America back into recession; his foreign policy is a shambles. Any talk of him listening to advisers must be based on conjecture — so far, Trump hasn’t just been a bull in a china shop, he’s been a tank in a glass factory.
Any attempts to rein in Trump have failed miserably. His supposed commitment to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Justice Scalia means little or nothing — he knows nothing about the Constitution, what he does know isn’t so, and he’s not going to stake political capital on a losing fight against a Democratic filibuster. He’d probably make his first pick somebody palatable to conservatives, get shot down by Democrats, and then come back with a stealth candidate who turns out to be a David Souter or an Anthony Kennedy or a Sandra Day O’Connor. Trump is a man who says openly he wouldn’t mind much losing the Republican Senate majority — a rather disquieting sentiment for those who believe he’s going to be strong on justices.
This is a matter, as Ted Cruz put it, of individual conscience.
I’ve met people who actually voted for someone simply because he was more ”photogenic,” or ”handsome.”
I’ve also met people who were told a lie that electing Obama would mean, at minimum, $100,000 for them as individuals, so they voted for Obama.
People can and do vote for whomsoever they please, for whatever reason the choose.
If conservatives can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump, so be it.
It isn’t as if this wasn’t predicted by attentive observers on either side of the nation’s political divide. I still can’t entirely understand how so many people disregarded the warning signs that were there long before Donald Trump was nominated.
I’m definitely left of center. That said, it doesn’t please me that the GOP appears to be self-destructing. For the U.S. two-party system to work well, it requires two credible parties to voice opposing views and to present rational opposing argument. That both do so is what provides a reasonable midpoint balance. I think we might be in real danger of losing one of the balancing weights.
(I thought maybe the RCP average was skewed because Rasmussen, which generally has Trump in the lead, was missing. Nope. He’s also behind now in the latest (August 4) Rasmussen survey.)