People sometimes ask why conservatives like me seem to criticize Donald Trump more than we do Hillary Clinton. I think it’s because we expected Hillary to be a corrupt leftist and she is. She would be terrible for the country. What more is there to say?
But we expected so much more from the Republicans this year, and in fact were desperate for a conservative to be nominated in order to start undoing the damage caused by Barack Obama and his progressive crew. We believed that conservative principles implemented by people of character were vital for the well-being of America. And with a selection of so many good candidates in the primaries, we felt confident that good things were coming.
Instead we got Donald Trump, an amoral flim-flam man who has never been a conservative (and in fact has been a longtime funder of Democrats like Hillary). Trump, in our view, hijacked the party, destroying many good people in the process. We fear that Trump will destroy the party of Lincoln, too, even if he somehow wins the presidency, for which he is manifestly unfit.
What’s really shocking to us is how many in our party abandoned their conservative principles for the bullying and vulgarity of Trump. We thought such ignorance was mainly a Democrat problem. (Chagrined, we discovered how wrong we were.) We suddenly felt like strangers in our own party.
So please forgive us if we seem a bit unfair to Donald (who, by the way, never met a cheap shot he didn’t like). We’re going to be cranky for a while yet.
