To the Trumpoids: It is You Who Made This a Choice Between Trump and Clinton
This is an expanded version of a response to a comment on my MoS column item about Donald Trump. Like almost all pro-Trump comments it was couched in the form ‘So you think Hillary Clinton is better, then, do you? Are you a warmonger or what?’
Well, of course I am not a warmonger and I believe I may have been one of those included in Mrs Clinton’s long-ago denunciation of a supposed ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against the Clintons. I do not like or love the Clintons and have many criticisms of them. But this does not oblige me to like or support Mr Trump either.
Why cannot the defenders of Mr Trump avoid the 'Hillary is worse' argument? Is it because it is all they really have?
I have never said she was better. I would have an absolute objection to Mr Trump on the basis of the kind of person I think him to be, as a result of his own undisguised, unconcealed public behaviour and his unembarrassed, even boastful chosen statements.
As it is absolute, I would maintain it if he was standing against the Devil Himself.
And, as I should not have thought needed pointing out, it is not compulsory to vote for either candidate. Perhaps Mr Trump cannot be stopped, but at least American voters are free to be morally clean of the act of voting for him.
There are times when there is a stronger duty not to vote than to vote. This could be one of them .
And I am shocked at the willingness of American 'conservative' voters to fall so flaccidly, fawningly and sycophantically for Mr Trump's crude pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap propaganda skills, and his muscleman machismo, like one of those body-building advertisements from a 1950s comic. When a campaign is aimed at inadequates and weaklings, as this sort of thing always is, surely it is a sign of maturity to reject it?
By doing this it was they who eliminated all alternatives, to secure him the Republican nomination.
They did this while his unlovely personal characteristics have been on full display. There were other possibilities, by no means as bad as Hillary. They destroyed them all in the adulatory frenzy of Trumpoid worship.
They are the ones who have created the choice between him and Hillary, which I would blame nobody for turning away from.
Now they have the nerve to tell us that , by rejecting their idol, whom they have worked so hard to turn into the only alternative to Hillary, we must automatically become Hillary supporters. It is not so.
Even if it were, it was a choice they must have seen coming, which they actively worked for, which they have themselves created and can’t blame others for disliking.
I am also puzzled that people are so readily persuaded by Mr Trump’s adoption of some supposed ‘policies’, which they like. I might like some of them too, but I am not so easily bought, thank you. What if he has, in the manner of quite a few political figures in history, adopted them because voters like them, not because he does, or because he has any real interest in them or in implementing the?
I believe he has been consistent in his view of global trade, though it is hard to see how free he will be to do anything about this if he is elected. But all else seems to me to be adopted for the moment, in some cases quite deliberately to shock and distress one group, thus pleasing and wooing that group's enemies. There's a word for this, one associated with the Clintons as it happens, but I can't quite recall what it is.
In short, having chosen him as the Republican nominee, they now try to argue that anyone who didn't and doesn't agree with them is a Hillary supporter(implication : get with the programme, buster) .
This is the behaviour of people with totalitarian minds. Those who are not with us, they believe, are against us. When this combines with the (always worrying) belief that a majority decides all things, it scares me. It should scare you too.