What Now?

Now that Donald Trump has sealed up the Republican nomination and Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, what is a free market Constitutionalist to do?  

I don't know.  I just don't know.  I am suffering with the worst case of political cognitive dissonance of my adult life.

Do you cast your lot with Donald Trump (How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Trump), or, as conservative/libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke just declared, go with Hillary, rationalizing that she is "the second worst thing that could happen to our country."

Do you go with the woman with a rat's nest of conflict of interests, currently under F.B.I. investigation for her atrocious email server scandal, who shamelessly panders to interest groups, and who, while simultaneously claiming to be the vanguard of women's rights, enabled her husband to prey on several women?  Or do you go with bombastic iconoclast, the real estate and reality television guy, who has shown an ability to shake up the status quo at a time the status quo badly needs to be shaken?  And  shaken vigorously.

In my January 16 post, I spun out the reasons I thought Trump could take all the marbles and those turned out to be accurate.   Whatever he is doing appears to be working as he dismantled the entire Republican field one by one.  His ham-fisted crude bluntness, for instance, demolished the young conservative darling, Marco Rubio and he rattled him so badly that Rubio could do little more than repeat scripted talking points.  His "Make America Great Again" theme has great appeal and is in stark contrast to the current administration that has spent more time apologizing for America and talking about a borderless world than the virtues of America.  He is not afraid to take on hard issues ---a broken immigration policy, Islamic terror, political correctness that has gone way beyond common sense.   And, unlike Mitt Romney, he hits back... hard.   He has a number of appealing attributes, and potential (and I mean potential because he has never led in government) leadership capabilities.

We know Hillary all too well.  One of her major deficits is that we have Clinton fatigue.  The Clinton M.O. is well known-- play in the grey area, obfuscate, delay, distract, spin.  These are skills the family has perfected over decades of public life. We know her track record. Whitewater, Travelgate, Hillarycare, Benghazi, Russian reset, Assad the "reformer," and leading from behind in Libya.  Worst of all, she squandered a formidable lead to a community organizer with no executive experience and lost the nomination in 2008.

With all that baggage, it seems like jumping on the Trump Train would not be all that difficult.  Many have--- Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, the folks at Fox, and even Larry Kudlow is pretty open to him.

I'm with Paul Ryan.   I'm not ready yet.  And I don't know if I will ever be.

There are a host of things about him that trouble me deeply. 

He is NOT an advocate of free market principles.  He is open to a $15 minimum wage.  He is fine with more tax increases (without talking about how we are going to put government on a diet).  His recent suggestion that America's creditors might take a discount is nothing short of ludicrous.  Worst of all is his policy toward China.  I agree that a tougher negotiating stance is appropriate but he seems not to have heard of Smoot Hawley.  He may, in fact, be more progressive than Obama on health care.  Yes, it is true that while Trump is promising jobs, Bernie Sanders is promising "free stuff," but there is no evidence that suggests that a massive trade war will do the trick.

On foreign policy matters, it gets worse.  He really lost me with his assertion that "Bush lied." While "putting America first," rebuilding America's military that Obama gutted and regaining American sovereignty have great appeal after the Obama years, his suggestions that we withdraw from NATO or permit or encourage Japan and South Korea to arm themselves with nuclear weapons is simply nuts.   His proposed policy of completely ceding the Middle East to Russia makes no sense. His man crush on Vladimir Putin is perplexing.   In international affairs, we need to lead, and advocate the American virtues of individual liberty, democracy and free markets.  Trump is correct to say that P.C. is a big impediment to these principles.  He is utterly wrong in advocating American isolationism in these matters.   America needs to lead and the world needs America to lead.

In the final analysis, I cannot vote for Hillary under any condition. Conservatives P.J. O'Rourke and Jonathan Hoenig have cast their lot with her.  I simply cannot.   She is unprincipled and continues to advocate the growth of a welfare state that has no more room to grow (expanding Obamacare subsidies to illegals).

Neither of the candidates are addressing the core issues that need to be addressed: tax reform, entitlement reform, and regulatory reform (the out-of-control regulatory state that continues to suck the oxygen out of the economy), and their relation to economic growth and vitality.   

Finally, there is the Constitution.  Progressives continue to erode the structure and rights guaranteed under the Constitution.  In particular, they continue to chip away at the 1st Amendment (offensive speech, freedom of religion), and the 2nd (Hillary is focused on gun control).   I have been particularly harsh on Obama (the Constitutional law lecturer) for his "pen and phone" approach to governance.   Rather than do the hard work of hammering out a deal and compromise with Congress, he has attempted to exert his will through the executive and the judicial branches on major policy issues.  Whatever the vicissitudes of the electorate, it is vital that the next president respect the structure of the Constitution, and demonstrate and articulate a fidelity to our founding document that Obama did not. Unfortunately, I do not at present see Trump as the leader that will take us back to our core values and our core document.  So far, I see the opposite.  I see someone that is more likely to "game the system" just as Obama has done to achieve his ends.

Perhaps he will evolve now that he has sewn up the nomination, but I have not yet bought a ticket on the Trump Train.