If my Republican Party was doing to a former Democrat president what the Democrats and leftist Deep State are doing to Donald Trump, would I switch to the Independent Party in protest?
The instinctual answer is yes. I’d know that what’s being perpetrated against Trump is so gratuitous, so politically-motivated, so outside the bounds of the precepts of our constitutional republic, that if the tables were turned I’d be embarrassed to be a member of a party so destructive to the nation. Not to mention hypocritical—evidence mounts that Joe Biden may be thoroughly corrupt.
But it’s not that easy to say I’d jump ship if the Republicans were as bad as the Democrats. In a landscape of intractable division, the notion of right and wrong can be subsumed by a strong desire to slay the adversarial beast. In quest of power and the vanquishment of our political opponents, there’s the temptation to overlook ethics, morality, and even law to precipitate them “getting what’s coming to them.” It’s obvious now that that the Democratic Party seeks untrammeled power and, characterizing Trump as so heinous any move against him is justified, will stop at nothing to thwart his 2024 candidacy.
Whether we accept on good faith an opposite party’s allegations and actions against our candidate often depends on easily-blurred and inconclusive factors like the nature and severity of the allegations, the credibility of the evidence, and how strongly we ultimately come to believe—or dismiss—what the other guy is saying our candidate did.
Recall Republican claims in 2008 that Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen. Democrats went after Romney’s “binders full of women.” An election-eve revelation about a 1976 drunk driving arrest of presidential candidate George W. Bush in 2000 was not enough to keep him from office. In 2004, alleged anti-American sentiments were extrapolated from Sen. John Kerry’s comments about his Vietnam service (the “Swift Boating”) in an attempt to undermine his patriotism. The pillorying of Hillary Clinton over her “at this point what difference does it make” comment at a hearing about the 9/11/12 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was used repeatedly as a bludgeon against her in the run-up to 2016.
But what’s going on with Trump is unprecedented. Never before has the power of the federal government been collectively orchestrated in the name of stopping a presidential candidacy.
I have in the past considered leaving the Republican Party and going Independent as a means of protest. It was never about a sense that the party was being grossly unfair in process and persecution of Democrats and, as the left so often charges against MAGA, “endangering democracy.” It was always about the GOP disappointing me. But if the Republican Party had gone after Obama—as bad as he was—the way the Dems are going after Trump, it would’ve embarrassed me.
Two issues in the last 30 years have given me pause about my loyal voting record in the GOP: intransigence on the southern border prior to Trump’s term in office, and, the weakness and ambiguity of many in the Republican Party about what’s being perpetrated against their frontrunner.