Which to Choose?                                Photo Credits: CNN.com and CNN.com

The choices we have for president, while both incredibly unappetizing, are beginning to offer a more interesting choice. As a conservative Republican, I would normally favor the Republican nominee, but this time around I have had tremendous reservations about Trump. However, for a number of reasons, I have begun to warm to the idea of a Trump presidency. Make no mistake about it, I still have all the reservations I listed in the post The Anguish of a Conservative Voter. Nevertheless there are some very cogent reasons for a conservative to support Trump despite these concerns, which I would like to recommend to the #NeverTrump crowd I almost joined (and may still).

The Case Against Trump

The major accusation the #NeverTrump folks make is that Donald Trump is no conservative by any consideration. While I agree with this assessment, I have begun to wonder if it is because Trump is actually a closet progressive as many think, or if the cause of Trump’s non-conservative status is a little more basic. To bolster the argument Trump is a closet progressive, consider the collage of videos below taken from various recordings.

 

From these videos, how could it be possible not to agree that Trump is a progressive!

Yet during this campaign he has also said the exact opposite of many of the statements in the video, particularly concerning illegal immigration, taxation, foreign affairs, and health care. How could one account for all these 180 degree turnabouts on public policy? The most obvious explanation is he is just pandering to Republican, undecided, and low income voters.

However, there is another interpretation I now think more likely. Mr. Trump, as an investor and CEO of the Trump Organization, would necessarily not have a great deal of time to become deeply knowledgable about economics and political philosophy. At the same time he would have to deal with the quasi-crony capitalist system U.S. politicians (particularly Democrats!) have been erecting over the past half-century or so. In addition, like all the rest of us, Trump would also have been exposed to much media approbation for progressive policies.  Mr. Trump believes one of his greatest strengths is as a deal maker, so it would be only natural for him to curry favor with the progressive elites to obtain government favors. In fact, his own mind on political and economic philosophy might have been close to a tabula rasa. Accusing him of having a progressive ideology  presupposes he has an ideology in the first place, but to have an ideology one would have to possess knowledge supporting an interrelated set of ideas, a knowledge he has repeatedly shown he lacks.

One would think that not having a well-developed ideology would itself make him ineligible to hold office. I think that is normally true, but then considering his opponent, we do not have a very good, or even acceptable alternative.

The Alternative To Trump: Hillary Clinton

I find it mind-boggling that Hillary Clinton would even be considered for president, even by progressives. Despite FBI Director James Comey’s determination that Clinton should not be indicted for being grossly negligent in the handling of highly classified material, she has certainly committed a large number of felonies in allowing CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, TOP SECRET, and TOP SECRET/SAP documents to be placed in nonsecure servers, and then to be hacked by our country’s foreign opponents. Comey said that she indeed had committed those acts, but that he could not recommend seeking an indictment, because he doubted the constitutionality of the relevant statute, the Espionage Act of 1917 and to be more specific 18 U.S. Code § 793 subsection f. That statute requires absolutely no intent to violate the statute, only  gross negligence leading to the classified material’s potential compromise. Comey acknowledged this fact in his testimony before the House Oversight Committee on his decision. However, concerning this Comey stated there was a lot of concern in the 1917 Congress that enacted it in both the House and Senate

about whether that was going to violate the American tradition of requiring that before you are going to lock someone up, you prove they knew they were doing something wrong, So there was a lot of concern about it; the statute was passed. As best I can tell, the Department of Justice has used it once in the 99 years since, reflecting that same concern. I know from 30 years with the Department of Justice. they have grave concerns about whether it is appropriate to prosecute somebody for gross negligence, which is why they have done it once that I know of, in a case involving espionage.

This appears to be the fundamental reason Comey decided not to recommend that Justice seek an indictment. One would think it would be a very good thing to test his concerns in the U.S. Court system, given the fact the statute itself says otherwise.

However, as Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) brought out in the hearing, there is a truly excellent case that Clinton violated the statute with the intent to violate it. He first elicited answers from Comey to questions illustrating how thoroughly she had lied to the entire nation. He asked Comey to comment on the truthfulness of her various statements on her emails, which I show below.

1. She had said she had never sent or received classified email at her unclassified servers. FALSE.
2. She said there were no documents sent from her email marked classified. FALSE.
3. She said there was no classified material, either sent or received, on her private server. FALSE
4. Clinton said  she had used only one device to access her emails. Comey said she had used multiple devices over the four year period.
5. Clinton said all work-related emails had been returned to the State Department. Comey said they had found thousands of work-related emails that had not been returned.
6. Clinton said neither she nor anyone else deleted any work-related emails from her servers. Comey said the FBI had found traces of such deleted emails  either in devices or in reclaimed long-term memory (what he called computer “slack space”).
7. She said her lawyers had read every email in her system and were overly-inclusive in sending emails back to the State Department. Comey said the lawyers had not read the emails.

Having asked these questions Gowdy then asked what was the role of false exculpatory statements like these in a trial. Comey admitted they could be used as evidence of consciousness of guilt and of intent. The suggestion was made by Gowdy that there were indeed reasons for prosecuting based on her intent.

There is also very real concern that the reason she wanted to hide her emails from the public was because she wanted to hide her activities as Secretary of State in receiving offers for or accepting quid pro quo bribes, paid into the Clinton Foundation by foreigners for services rendered by the Secretary of State.  For more detail on these concerns, click here. So why has her indictment not been sought by the Justice Department?

And we have not even addressed the lack of wisdom of her progressive policies yet! What little she has said about economic policy has indicated she would essentially continue Obama’s policies, except with even higher taxes on everyone, including corporations. As I discussed in  Economic Plans of Trump, Sanders, and Clinton Are Fantasies, and in Hillary Clinton’s Proposed Destruction of the Economy, the Obama/Clinton economic policies would be incredibly destructive.

A Reconsideration

One skill Trump has that just might save him is the ability to recognize when he does not know much about something and the willingness to hire the best people to advise him and relieve his ignorance. One area in which he has recognized his ignorance has been economics, and he has indicated the general direction he would take the economy with the quality of the economic advisors he has appointed. These include:

• David Malpass, assistant Treasury Secretary under President Reagan and deputy assistant Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.
• Stephan Moore, founder of the Club for Growth, and a previous chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation and now a Heritage Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow.
• Peter Navarro, a trade expert and professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine. Click here for Navarro’s characterization of Trump’s economic program in a CNN Money post.
• Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, an oil and natural gas producer.
• Tom Barrack, founder of Colony Capital, a private equity firm. He also has government experience as deputy undersecretary of the Interior Department under President Reagan.
• Stephen Calk, founder of Federal Savings Bank and national Bancorp Holdings, which concentrates on increasing home ownership by veterans.
• Dan Dimicco, former CEO of Nucor Corp, a large steel producer. He also wrote a book on reviving U.S. manufacturing entitled American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us To Greatness,
• Howard Lorber, CEO of Vector Group, a company involved with real estate and consumer products industries.

Already, these advisors have begun to moderate Trump’s addressing of economic policy. Recently I heard an exchange between Stephan Moore and Stuart Varney on the Fox Business Channel show Varney and Company. Varney was asking Moore about how destructive Trump’s trade program might be with his anti-free trade attitudes. Moore responded by pointing out we have not heard Trump talk about tariffs for the past several months, although there were some parts of the TPP trade agreement Trump would like to see renegotiated. Perhaps these advisors might also influence Trump to see the wisdom in cutting entitlement spending. If that were done, my major disagreements with Trump on economic policy would be greatly reduced.

Most of all we would have to hope that a Republican Congress under House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), assuming that a Republican Congress is reelected, would hold a President Trump to conservative programs.  Since Trump would not be able to get anything significant done without the cooperation of Congress, he would have a tremendous incentive to get along. He could do no better than to sign on to most of if not all of Paul Ryan’s A Better Way program, which is a massive, detailed plan to turn the federal government around into a conservative direction.

At one time I was contemplating voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson for president, especially if a Johnson candidacy could so split the electoral map that the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. But the possibility of a Clinton presidency scares the hell out of me. The destructiveness of her proposed economic programs would leave the American economy in smoldering ruins. Also her vaunted foreign policy experience gives very little confidence. Finally, the next President of the United States will almost certainly have multiple chances to appoint Supreme Court Justices, and seal the Supreme Court’s nature, progressive or conservative, for the next several decades. We simply can not risk electing a criminal for the highest office in the federal government.

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