Stream: Politico Wants To Know If Trump Supporters Regret Their Choice
During the campaign for the Presidency, the group Scholars and Writers for America backed Donald Trump by issuing a public Statement of Unity. I was one of the signers. (At the time I signed I was with Cornell University; now I am not.)
The statement said things like this:
With Mrs. Clinton, we’d expect to see [as with Mr. Obama] an even greater slide towards an all-powerful presidency, and the judges she would appoint could be expected to bless the attendant threat to political liberty…
Crony capitalism, the silent killer of the American economy, would increasingly burden entrepreneurs with wasteful regulations that serve to transfer wealth from dispersed lower and middle-class Americans to the rich and well-connected.
Under Trump, we anticipated not a return to the sunny uplands of a truly liberal culture, but an arresting of the downward acceleration we had been experiencing and would have experienced with greater force had Mrs. Clinton wrapped her shaky fingers around the throat of Washington.
I believe every signer knew this was a choice of the lesser of two evils, with one evil being mostly benign and the other aggressively malignant.
Inquiring minds
Politico Magazine wondered if the signers of the statement still thought the same way. They emailed us asking:
As President Trump’s first year in office comes to a close, Politico Magazine is reaching out to the Scholars and Writers for America who signed the statement of unity in support of Trump during his candidacy. As a group, you represented a small slice of academia that publicly endorsed the ideas Trump campaigned for, and we would love to gather your thoughts on how well he has represented those ideas in his time in office so far…
Your answers to these two questions will attributed to you by name.
1. Do you still stand by your statement of support for Donald Trump? If so, why? If not, when and why did you change your mind?
2. What has been President Trump’s greatest achievement so far in office? His greatest failure?
Unchanged mind
Here is what I am saying to Politico.
Darn tootin’ I stand behind, and even hold up, the Statement of Unity. Because the election was a choice, we always have to keep in mind the counterfactual: what would it be like if Hillary had won?
There is no prediction in that Statement that need be reconsidered. We predicted Trump would “appoint judges in the mold of Justice Scalia”, and so far he has.
If Hillary had won, she would have had to choose the most pitiable candidate belonging to one of our culture’s favorite victim groups. You can almost hear the slogan: “We haven’t had a Buddhist gender-dysphoric immigrant on the bench yet!” Of course, we can wonder if such a candidate would have had sufficient funds to donate to the Clinton Foundation to propel his (her? its?) nomination.
Home runs
I’m split between what I think has been his greatest victory. Here are my choices.
One, Mr. Trump showed us what the media really is. They have exposed themselves, and are still exposing themselves, to be mendacious propagandizing lying shifty biased gibbering hyper-sensitive unstable floggers of fake news. That includes Politico. (Did any of your reporters weep after the election, or participate in any of the cry-ins since?)
[…]
Click here to know whether you should love, hate, or be indifferent to Trump.
The link to Stream goes to “v” and my browser says there is no such place and it cannot be found (I am using a Mac, so it could be a conspiracy). I assume anti-Trumpists have hacked your site and are backtracing me at the moment—GOTTA RUN!!!
You can’t support Trump & his fascism, AND, be a Christian (not possible)… but cling blindly to your delusions & your cult all you wish. Try reading Jesus’ words, not what you want him to say.
I think he forgot to hold “ctrl” for the third link.
Briggs —
You either can’t be serious or are rationalizing your previous views.
“Your original ‘statement of unity’ praised Trump’s potential in five issue areas. On a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best), how well do you think Trump has performed as president on each count?
1. Upholding constitutional governance (4)
2. Fighting corruption in government (5)
3. Stimulating the economy (5)
4. Defending religious liberty (4)
5. Promoting charter and parochial schools (3)”
Just looking at number one above, what evidence leads you to a four? Are you as loose with “constitutional” as most folks?
Go back more than a century and the British economist / logician, William Stanley Jevon’s, recognized “constitutional” as a question-begging epithet in his book on elementary logic.
Please define what it means to you (i.e. defend your of views as if your were talking to someone alive during the Washington administration).
Sheri:
The first link and the ‘ellipsis’ link both work
As Kyle said Briggs was cut and pasting and hit the ‘v’ without holding
Every time I call my old neighbor we ask each other if we regret our Trump vote referring to the incredible “Trump endorsement” video made by Michael Moore.
The counterfactual argument inevitably wins out. Trump could be the “worst” president since Jimmy Carter and we’d be Okay with that over HRC.
I’d give him a 5 on the Constitution question. Sending DACA back to Congress is the best example. Congress is responsible for setting immigration law, not Presidential executive orders.
You should start betting on how long it will take for Trump to be impeach and sent to jail, unless he is pardoned by Pence or Ryan since Pence could also be impeached.
Speaking as a non-Trump conservative, I think Trump has done slightly better than I expected. I was worried that he might have imitated Nixon and thrown symbolic red meat to the conservative base while governing on the left, but he hasn’t.
I still do not regret voting for Trump and if given the opportunity in 2020, will again.
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