Donald Trump Butt out or Run in 24

Northeast Tennesseans speak about Donald Trump

Dear Donald Trump – Butt Out

Dear former President Trump,

Let’s not beat around the bush.  Please butt out.  For at least the 2^nd straight election, your interference has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m a conservative who (almost always) votes Republican for lack of a better alternative, so I’m at least open to hearing you out.  But last night is confirmation and proof positive of what conservatives have been saying since 2016: You are toxic to the conservative cause.  Hatred of you drives committed leftists to the polls.  Concern and distaste for you convinces those in the middle to vote against you and your minions, because they can’t be sure that you aren’t as crazy as your opponents claim. 

Even many of us on the right, myself included, voted for you reluctantly.  In the end, it adds up to a victory for the left.

In Georgia 2 years ago, you gave control of the Senate – and thus to the lunatic left, to which the Democratic Party has surrendered – by your insane behavior in the runoff.  Had you simply gone in and said, “Fellow Republicans and MAGA supporters, the fate of the country is in your hands. Do the right thing, go to the polls and vote for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler”, and said nothing more, the history of the last 2 years would be significantly different – and better.  Don’t even think about trying to deflect blame.  That belongs to you.

Your election denialism, still ongoing, violates all norms of American political practice.  Sure, you got where you did by violating norms, but it long ago occurred to most sane people that, this time, you finally went way too far.  How sad it has not occurred to you.  January 6^th, for which you bear responsibility if not criminal liability, provided all the ammunition your opponents need or will ever need to prove that you are just what they say you are – a power-mad demagogue interested in himself and nothing else.

Your feuds with members of your own party are further demonstration of that.  Whatever happened to Reagan’s 11^th Commandment:  Thou shalt speak no ill of another Republican?  Who in his right mind spouts off racist insults about the wife of the senior member of the party (Elaine Chao, wife of Mitch McConnell)?  “Ron de Sanctimonious”?  Red meat for the lunatics among your followers, no doubt, but for the rest of us, proof of your unseriousness and unfitness for any position of leadership, much less the presidency.

After 2 years of incompetency and failure under Joe Biden, Republicans should have cleaned up last night.  The polls certainly pointed that way (not that anyone puts much faith in polls anymore).  Red wave, no, red tsunami!  My own prediction turned out to be wildly optimistic.  There is no wave; instead, it’s a red trickle.  Marginal gains, yes.  Decisive victory, absolutely not.

Only yesterday – quite literally yesterday – giddy right-wingers were almost wetting their pants over the reckoning to come in the Democratic Party, with the party’s sensible leadership finally finding the courage to tell the crazy left to get lost, or mirabile dictu!, the party falling to pieces in mutual recrimination.  Umm…that ain’t going to happen.  It turns out that candidate quality really does matter, and the candidates you endorsed, based on nothing more than their taking a knee to you, did poorly.  Need there be any more proof than what happened in purplish Pennsylvania, where your hand-picked candidate couldn’t beat a man of the lunatic left, who had been severely disabled by a stroke, and lied about it?  Apparently, being a lightweight TV-celebrity carpetbagger with no discernible convictions and no relevant experience can’t be overcome by your endorsement.  Who woulda thought?  Instead, the reckoning will come mostly on the right and from within the Republican Party. 

And the bottom line on that reckoning, Mr. Trump, should be that the snake oil you are peddling isn’t selling.  That “the people” don’t mind a candidate who steps up to the line, and maybe even steps on the line, but not over the line.  That elections in this country, which are run by decent folk at the state and local level, which are not and cannot be perfect but are about as good as humanly possible, are either won or lost, but not stolen.  That trade wars aren’t “easy to win” and actually hurt the people you purport to help.  That isolation isn’t a rational response to a wicked world with which we shouldn’t engage, but sticking one’s head in the sand.  That allies are hard to make and even harder to keep when one gratuitously insults them.  That the American people with whom we disagree are still good and decent, rather than evil enemies who must be “owned” if not destroyed.  That they don’t want and will not tolerate a would-be hero on a white horse to save us from ourselves, but instead want a sensible leader and competent administrator with a touch of humility, who helps us build a better nation, and then protects it from enemies foreign and domestic, and does it without unseemly melodrama and gag-inducing foolishness.

In short, Mr. Trump, in words far better than I could ever express it, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.  Do the right thing and step aside, for the good of your country.

Of course, I don’t expect that you will pay any more attention to me than you will to anyone else.  But perhaps those you have deluded, those you have misled to political disappointment if not disaster, will.  One may hope.

Kenneth D. Gough © 2022

November 9, 2022 Ken Gough