Coming Up Trump

Followers of this blog will have noticed, and probably understand why, I feel silent on the current US presiential race about the time it became a lead pipe cinch that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee.

Trump was not my first choice. Nor second, nor third, nor fifth, nor seventh.

Nvertheless, I can see no good in the current drive to launch a third party campaign. Republican voters have already had a wide range of candidates to choose from. It was the best crop of candidates in my lifetime. Nevertheless, they chose Trump. There is just not another figure out there in the wings who is going to do better against him than they did.

Ergo, all the candidacy would do, if it did anything, is to throw the election to Clinton and the Democrats. If that's what you want to accomplish, why not just vote for her and have done with it?

The choice, like it or not, is between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Now, let's assume they are equally bad. If so, my vote still goes to Trump. If you are stuck with rascals, there is still something to be sai for throwing the current rascals out, and replacing them with a new batch of rascals. It takes time for any new batch of rascals to get familiar with the levers of power; and rascality in two different directions can sometimes cancel out.

But we cannot know that they are equally bad. Clinton has a track record. We know she would be awful. Trump has no track record. We cannot know the same of him. Given the choice between a leap in the dark and leap to certain death, make mine darkness.

And we can all do the math. Unless he is prepared to stage some kind of coup, Trump, like any president, will be very much constrained by Congress. In his case, whether that is a Democratic congress or a Republican congress, there will be huge areas of disagreement. This might, almost regardless of the actual disagreements, be a more desirable situation than the norm. Even here, the rascals will be using much energy fighting each other, instead of working together in silence to pick constituent pockets bare. At least we'll have a better chance of seeing and hearing what is going on.

The suspicion among the public for some time has been that the guys in Washington are chummier with one another, regardless of party, than they are with the electorate. The situation is similar to that in Canada during and after the Charlottetown Accord.

A logrolling elite divided against itself cannot stand.