-By Warner Todd Huston
Listen, I get it: Trump is not a conservative It is just that simple. But continuing to oppose him even after he has fairly won the GOP nomination is self-defeating for conservatives–no matter if Trump wins OR loses. Here’s why.
First of all, if Trump loses few-rank-and-file, center right voters will blame Trump. They will in part blame those conservatives who so loudly opposed him. They will say that the constant anti-Trump drumbeat by conservatives helped depress the vote for Trump and he lost because of it.
This will distance normal, everyday voters who are not steeped in conservative ideology even farther away from the reach of conservatives hoping to educate voters toward a better way of thinking.
If Hillary wins, these voters whose candidate was beaten by one of the most corrupt Democrats ever to trod the halls of Congress will see no reason at all to listen to a single word conservatives say. Conservatives will have lost the ear of the voters for a lifetime.
Conservatives look like the bad guys in a losing Trump scenario.
Worse, even in a Trump wins scenario conservatives lose because many of them were so anti-Trump, voters will still wonder why they should listen to the group who opposed their winning guy. Any complaint these conservatives make of a President Trump’s policies will be scoffed at as sour grapes from losers who have no legitimacy.
Secondly, conservatives lose because they are joining the very establishment party powermongers (Ryan, Romney, Kristol, McConnell, et al) that they just spent the last 10 years claiming is the problem in D.C.
Thirdly, they will appear to be no better than the un-democratic, power mad, jerks in D.C. who look at the vast number of voters in “fly over country” as the rabble who aren’t smart enough to know what’s good for them.
After all, these conservatives just spent the last two months insisting there was a way to eliminate Trump as the party nominee no matter what the voters wanted–and more primary voters wanted Trump than wanted any of the last few GOP nominees.
Anti-Trump conservatives were looking America in the eye and saying “F**k your votes, we are engineering a coup because we are smarter than you.”
Not a winning message, guys.
Believe me–if I can steal a Trump line–you are all correct that Trump is not a conservative. Yes, again, I agree. But by handling it all the way you did, you have simply destroyed your credibility and put a crimp in your ability to get the conservative message out. And since conservatism is already a minority opinion in the U.S. today (because you damn conservatives abandoned our educational field to the far left–but that is another article) you’ve just made it even harder to get people to cross over and join you.
Yep. Nice going, folks.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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