Some of my very favorite conservative thinkers have been associated with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, and I myself spent two very memorable weeks at the Hoover when I was eighteen.
Victor Davis Hanson — a farmer, a prolific historian, and a political commentator with a Stanford Ph.D. in classics (!) who is now associated with Stanford’s Hoover Institution — is one of my favorite writers, so I’m happy to comply:
I understand that many good people, solid conservatives, are coming to the reluctant conclusion that, in a presidential battle between the repulsive Donald Trump and the repellent Hillary Clinton — with a nod to Dr. Hanson, in a choice between Scylla and Charybdis — they must support Mr. Trump.
I reject Trumpism altogether, but I grasp the dilemma, and I don’t fault those who think they must back the lesser of two evils (as they judge Mr. Trump to be, with more confidence than I can muster).
But Dr. Hanson raises an interesting hypothetical: “What happens to conservative resistance,” Hanson asks, “if by August he has reinvented himself into a more sober Trump and announced that if elected he’d like to appoint Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, John Bolton as secretary of state, Larry Arnn as secretary of education, and General Jack Keane as secretary of defense?”
That might be one thing that would lead me to reconsider my refusal to vote for Donald Trump: I could hold my nose and, through Mr. Trump, vote for other people.
Maybe.
Donald Trump is so thoroughly and utterly distasteful to me that I would still have to think long and hard about the idea.
There. That’s some of my reaction to Victor Davis Hanson’s essay.
Posted from Terricciola, Italy
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