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question everything

(47,264 posts)
Sat Oct 31, 2020, 11:10 PM Oct 2020

At Least Never Trumpers Stood and Fought - Tom Nichols, the Atlantic [View all]

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I was a founding member of the band of Republican defectors known as the Never Trumpers, and one way or another, “the times I have lived in”—the movement to protect American democracy from Donald Trump and to stop his reelection—will come to an end in November. I am not confidently predicting victory. I am too scarred by the horrific outcome of the 2016 election to count any chickens, no matter how alive and clucking they might seem. But win or lose, our goal will become something else. When my friends—including the few I have left among the conservatives—ask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure.

What I do know is that, regardless of what any one of us does individually, two aspects of the Never Trump movement will outlast Trump. First, we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. We stood and fought. Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trump’s moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom. Our current alliances with our liberal friends may not be a permanent realignment. But I don’t believe that those of us who opposed Trump will declare that bygones are bygones with conservatives who supported him and go back to partisanship as usual.

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Early in 2016, I said (in a conservative magazine, The Federalist, that has since fallen to the Trumpist fever) that I would take Hillary Clinton over Trump. As a lifelong conservative choosing “Crooked Hillary” over the “Swamp Drainer,” I received a short burst of interest, especially from talk radio. Then, that summer, I wrote a piece on how I became a Never Trumper for The New York Times Magazine... I am a professor. But because I teach at a military institution, I am a Defense Department employee and I am therefore bound by the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their positions for political purposes. Breitbart claimed I was breaking that law. (This is where I am duty-bound to remind you that I do not speak in any way for the U.S. government or any of its agencies.) As it turned out, even before the Breitbart story dropped, my employer had already determined that I had not violated any laws or regulations.

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So I went on the offensive, writing and speaking out even more. If Trump’s minions were determined to curtail my constitutional rights, I was more determined to exercise them. I became intimately familiar with the Hatch Act and its provisions—and I obeyed it far more scrupulously than anyone in the Trump White House—but that did not stop the regular waves of emails and phone calls over the next four years, usually spurred by some Trump-supporting website or talk-show host, demanding that I be fired. Over time, my critics moved on to various other charges, including that I was personally unfit to associate with officers of the U.S. military, that I was an agent of the “deep state,” and even that I was a Russian asset and therefore a security risk.

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The experience of fighting taught the Never Trumpers how much the president had poisoned the Republican Party and long ago exposed the character of many of our former comrades. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will. This is why, when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them.

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And what if Trump wins? If that happens, America will become a different country, and we will all enter the first iteration of an American dictatorship. At a minimum, I will join with other civil libertarians to limit the speed and depth with which the president will take us into authoritarianism. The fight will be a rearguard action, and we will likely lose. But I didn’t run the first time Trump was elected, and I won’t run if it happens again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/my-never-trump-elegy/616917/

Tom Nichols is the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.

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