-By Warner Todd Huston
The 2016 election is finally over and GOP nominee Donald J. Trump pulled an amazing win out of the neatly wrapped up Clinton win as arranged by the pundits and the pollsters — and even some in the GOP establishment and “conservative” intelligentsia. And now the #NeverTrumprs and establishment Republicans are braying that we all now need to “work together” to move the nation forward. But don’t be fooled into canceling the coming Republican Civil War. Don’t capitulate to the very people who were pulling for Hillary. This war NEEDS to be fought.
The calls to “come together” are being heard all across Republicanland, of course. Take House Speaker Paul Ryan who on the day after the election gushed about the “enormous political feat” Trump achieved and sonorously noting that we have to “work to heal the division” in both party and country.
Ryan isn’t alone. The call to “work together” is the most common theme from all corners on the day after Election Day.
Another one calling for an end to any internal reckoning is PJ Media’s Roger Simon — who is a very good writer whom I like. In a Wednesday morning piece, Simon insisted straight out, “Trump Wins — Time to End the Republican Civil War.”
Here is Roger’s main hope:
So rather than pursue mutual assured destruction on our side, for winners to rub it in or losers to gripe — you can be sure the Democrats will have plenty of the same in store for us (imagine what Obama himself might try to pull, or the ever-corrupt Mr. Podesta) — I suggest we declare a ceasefire in the Republican civil war, effective now.
Simon contends — and with some sense — that we need to come together to make Washington work. I admire his sentiment.
Sadly, Simon is mistaken.
Unfortunately, his idea, here, is a mistake because it assumes that both sides will endeavor to come toward the middle between Trump’s most ardent and upset voters and the GOP establishment that worked as hard as it could to defeat Trump and give the White House to Hillary Clinton.
Simon seems to imagine it will be all heart, unicorns and rainbows if we cancel the looming civil war and “work together.”
While the GOP establishment will certainly bray for that cease fire and pretend they want to reach across the divide to work with the right-leaning, torch-carrying Trump mobs, in truth they have absolutely no desire whatever to work with “us” — by “us” I mean all those standing on the outside looking in on the liberal GOP establishment.
No, rather than offering a cease fire so the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells can stab us in the back at the first opportunity, it is time to ramp up the civil war to destroy them before they lay waste to the opportunity to reverse the left’s damage that Trump just won. It isn’t time to coddle these people. It’s time to defeat them.
You see, the GOP establishment won’t come to the middle of this gulf, offer their hand in friendship, roll up their sleeves, and kindly ask, “what can we do together.”
What they will do instead is smile condescendingly, slap us across the face while telling us we “don’t know how Washington works,” and that we should just shut up and let our betters do all the work of governing because, you know, they know better. Of course, the “work” they want to do is to continue capitulating to everything the left wants. In truth, the only enemy the GOP establishment sees is us, not the left.
These people need to be rooted out and mercilessly eliminated, not “worked with.”
But there is a second group that needs to be quashed, too. Along with the GOP establishment, the #NeverTrump “conservatives” and Edwin McMuffin supporters need to be utterly ruined and driven from the field of battle. As my former boss Andrew Breitbart was so fond of saying, it needs to be #WAR.
To be sure, the #NeverTrumpers are just as bad as the liberal GOP establishment that is happy to be the junior partners to the Democrat Party.
Listen, I get it: Trump is not a conservative It is just that simple. But continuing to oppose him even after he had fairly won the GOP nomination was self-defeating for conservatives–no matter if Trump was to win OR lose.
First of all, if Trump did not lose any rank-and-file, center right voters and if he lost the election these voter would not have blamed Trump. They would have blamed the #NeverTrumpers who so loudly opposed him. They would have said that the constant anti-Trump drumbeat by these conservatives helped depress the vote for Trump and he lost because of it. As it is they will blame them for the vote remaining so close.
But even though Trump won, the virulent hatred unleashed by the #NeverTrumpers so distanced them from normal, everyday voters who are not steeped in conservative ideology that the conservative intelligentsia just lost every chance to reach out and convince “normal people” that conservatism is the right way to go.
Because of their bad judgement, conservatives have lost the ear of the voters for a lifetime.
Worse, now that he won, there is no reason for anyone to even listen to conservatives who thought they were standing on their precious principles by so hatefully attacking Trump. Many of these anti-Trumpers were so vitriolic that voters will 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.
Additionally, conservatives lost last night because they were seen as joining the very establishment party powermongers (Ryan, Romney, Kristol, McConnell, et al) that they just spent the last 10 years claiming are the problem in D.C.
Lastly, they appear to be no better than the un-democratic, power mad, jerks in Washington 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 pre and post primaries 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. Talk about showing their arrogance in the face of the winning coalition of fly-over country voters!
With this effort to topple Trump even after his primary win, anti-Trump conservatives were looking America in the eye and saying “to heck with 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. 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.
So, the only way to re-build this country and begin to reverse the damage done by the Obama/Hillary Democrats is to totally destroy these people. They cannot be trusted. Your GOP establishment/Weekly Standard/National Review/#NeverTrump groups need to be smashed like bugs. Now is not the time to go complacent. We won. Let’s consolidate our power, not give it away without a fight.
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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 Constitution.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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