{"id":114844,"date":"2017-05-30T11:23:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-30T19:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=114844"},"modified":"2017-05-30T11:23:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-30T19:23:18","slug":"why-conservatives-still-attack-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=114844","title":{"rendered":"Why Conservatives Still Attack Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager writes today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.
\nWhile they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.
\nThat is why, after vigorously opposing Trump\u2019s candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president. With the Supreme Court and hundreds of additional federal judgeships in the balance; with the Democrats\u2019 relentless push toward European-style socialism \u2014 completely undoing the unique American value of limited government; the misuse of the government to suppress conservative speech; the continuing degradation of our universities and high schools; the weakening of the American military; and so much more, America, as envisioned by the Founders, would have been lost, perhaps irreversibly. The \u201cfundamental transformation\u201d that candidate Barack Obama promised in 2008 would have been completed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
\nTo my amazement, no anti-Trump conservative writer sees it that way. They all thought during the election, and still think, that while it would not have been a good thing if Hillary Clinton had won, it wouldn\u2019t have been a catastrophe either.
\nThat\u2019s it, in a nutshell. Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won. Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton.
\nIn other words, I believe that Donald Trump may have saved the country. And that, in my book, covers a lot of sins \u2014 foolish tweets, included.
\nThe Never-Trump conservative argument that Trump is not a conservative \u2013 one that I, too, made repeatedly during the Republican primaries \u2013 is not only no longer relevant, it is no longer true.
\nHad any Never-Trump conservative been told, say in the summer of 2015, that a Republican would win the 2016 election and, within his first few months in office, appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court; begin the process of replacing Obamacare; bomb Russia\u2019s ally, Assad, after he again used chemical weapons; appoint the most conservative cabinet in modern American history; begin undoing hysteria-based, economy-choking EPA regulations; label the Iranian regime \u201cevil\u201d in front of 50 Muslim heads of state; wear a yarmulke at the Western Wall; appoint a U.N. ambassador who regularly condemns the U.N. for its moral hypocrisy; restore the military budget; and work on lowering corporate tax rates, among other conservative achievements \u2014 that Never-Trump conservative would have been jumping for joy.
\nSo, why aren\u2019t anti-Trump conservatives jumping for joy?
\nI have come to believe that many conservatives possess what I once thought was a left-wing monopoly \u2014 a utopian streak. Trump is too far from their ideal leader to be able to support him.
\nThere is also a cultural divide. Anti-Trump conservatives are a very refined group of people. Trump doesn\u2019t talk like them. Moreover, the cultural milieu in which the vast majority of anti-Trump conservatives live and\/or work means that to support Trump is to render oneself contemptible at all elite dinner parties.
\nIn addition, anti-Trump conservatives see themselves as highly moral people (which they often are) who are duty-bound not to compromise themselves by strongly supporting Trump, whom they largely view as morally defective.
\nFinally, these people are only human: After investing so much energy in opposing Trump\u2019s election, and after predicting his nomination would lead to electoral disaster, it\u2019s hard to for them to admit they were wrong. To see him fulfill many of his conservative election promises, again in defiance of predictions, is a bitter pill. But if they hang on to their Never-Trumpism and the president falls on his face, they can say they were right all along.
\nThat means that only if he fails can their reputations be redeemed. And they, of course, know that.
\nBut there is another way.
\nThey can join the fight. They can accept an imperfect reality and acknowledge that we are in a civil war, and that Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters. But too many of them, some of the best minds of the conservative movement, are AWOL.
\nI beg them: Please report for duty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager writes today: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake. While they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114845,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114844\/revisions\/114845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}