Why I Became a Republican and Will NEVER Support Donald Trump for President

I was not born a Republican.  I chose to become one.

The number one influence on party affiliation is family. In particular, people tend to adopt the political party of their parents.  That factor has more influence on party affiliation than any other.

My mother is a Democrat.  My father was the quintessential "yellow dog Democrat." I remember sitting at the dinner table during which my father pontificated on politics..  He would always rail about how horrible Democratic elected officials were, people like then Indiana Senators Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke. He, no surprise, didn't like the Democratic candidate for president in 1972, Senator George McGovern. One day I asked him if he disliked Democrats so much, why he was not a Republican. I remember his response like it was yesterday: "The Republican Party is not for the working man."

My father passed away when I was 14 and did not live to see to see me become a Republican. It was in my late teens that I began to question the wisdom of my parents support of the Democratic Party.

During the late 1970s, as I was transforming from boy to adult man, the Republican Party at was also going through a transformation.  A conservative movement was gathering steam.  It was a movement based on the belief that Americans can create a better future if the federal government is limited to its constitutional functions and business owners are freed from the shackles of government regulation.  It placed an emphasis on the family unit as the critical building block of society.   It was aspirational but had as its foundation the ideas of intellectuals in the party, people like the late Congressman Jack Kemp, economist Milton Freedman, constitutional scholar Robert Bork, and the editor of the National Review William F. Buckley, Jr. There was no hating people because of their religious belief, their ethnic background or political positions.  Democrats were not reviled but rather viewed as last souls who were simply wrong on the issues. If ever questioned, conservative intellectuals of the day could provide a laundry list as to exactly why they were right and the liberals were wrong. All this was done without engaging in school yard name calling or demonizing the opponents as evil.

Of course, the ultimate triumph of the conservative movement was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan gave conservativism a face as well as one of the best communicators in political history.   I am proud to say that my very first presidential vote was for Reagan, a vote in the 1980 Indiana GOP primary. Of course, the Gipper went on to win in a landslide that November, an achievement accomplished while running unapologetically on the ideas deeply rooted in the conservative movement of which I had become a member.

Over the years, Republicans often fell short of the conservative ideals embodied in the conservative movement Reagan initially led. Sometimes too the ideas of that movement fell short as well.  The conservative idea of enterprise zones flopped.  Likewise, privatization mostly failed, chiefly due to political cronyism driving the process instead of market forces.  It doesn't take much to find other examples.

Nonetheless, the Republicans Party, post-Reagan, was extraordinarily successful at the ballot box.  Democrats were ousted from power in the Senate in 1980, after nearly 30 years of being in the majority. Fourteen years later, Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in 40 plus years. While the GOP's success stalled during the Clinton years, Republicans have enjoyed unprecedented success since Barack Obama's election in 2008.  By 2014, the GOP had a record number of governors and majorities in an unprecedented number of state legislative chambers. The Republicans also had a majority in the Senate and a majority the size of which hadn't been matched in 80 years in the U.S. House. The only thing the Republicans failed to win since 2004 is the White House. The GOP was poised to do exactly that in 2016, having the opportunity to run against an extraordinarily unpopular Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The victor would also tip the balance of the Supreme Court, having the opportunity to appoint as many as three new justices. 

But by 2016, things had changed. The aforementioned conservative intellectuals - Kemp, Freedman, Bork and Buckley - all had passed away long ago. So too had Ronald Reagan.   Those great minds which led the movement were replaced with television and radio talk show hosts. Detailed position papers on the issues were replaced with sound-bites and talking points. Those conservative media types told us it wasn't enough to think our liberal opponents were wrong on the issues, we also had to hate them.

Into this intellectual vacuum stepped Donald Trump, a life-long liberal running for the nomination of the conservative Republican party.  Spewing hate and vitriol from the podium, Trump echoed the talk show conservative media's denigration of political discourse by engaging in school yard name-calling. But that wasn't all. Trump mocked a reporter's disability, made a racist comment about a judge presiding over the fraud case against "Trump University," and praised brutal dictators. Indeed reporters in general became a Trump target.  Any truthful news report showing the New York businessman in a negative light, stories such as his sexist treatment of women, his failing to follow through with donations promised to charities, his repeated failure to pay vendors, employees and lenders what he owed them, were dismissed as just being examples of media bias. It didn't matter to Trumpites that the stories were true.

But it was not just the lack of substance, Trump attacked conservative values across the board.  He advocated that the federal government be more powerful and demonstrated through he recognized no constitutional limits on the power of the President.  He advocated the end to free trade.  Indeed, Trump's suggestion for a trade war would deal American consumers a huge blow and will undoubtedly trigger a recession if not a depression. Trump even attacked the First Amendment, suggesting that Americans have too much freedom to criticize public figures.  Of course, Trump had been for years filing SLAPP lawsuits to silence his own critics.

But intellectual consistency to Trump mattered not.  Trump reversed his position on taxes and the minimum wage.  He changed his position on banning Muslims from entering the country.  He reversed his position on Planned Parenthood a documented seven times. Throughout the campaign, Trump demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt he has absolutely no core political principles and will change his position at a whim and then deny his former position ever existed. 

Even Trump's claim of being a successful businessman is belied by four bankruptcies, numerous failed businesses, and a trail of unpaid bills.  Rather, examined more closely, Trump's entire career is one of being a con man, a grifter, the consummate huckster, a person always taking risks with other people's money, rarely his own.  If Trump would not have inherited $100 million from his father, he likely would have had a Kevin Trudeau type infomercial career, hustling the modern version of snake oil.  Not to insult Mr. Trudeau. Trudeau is plenty smart while Trump clearly is not.

This week, Trump was officially nominated by the GOP national convention being held in Cleveland.  I am told that now I must give up everything I have ever believed in as a card-carrying conservative Republican and the future of my party to support the election of a life-long liberal Democrat to the White House, someone who is a serial womanizer, someone who hates people based on their religion and/or ethnicity, someone so lacks even a modicum of talent and ability, or the temperament or maturity, needed for the job as President of the United States.  I am told that I need to put aside my concerns for the future of this country including the possibility of the initiation of nuclear war due to some petty Trump dispute with a foreign leader all because, well, Hillary will be worse. Forget the illogic of attacking Hillary Clinton's dishonesty and immorality with the most dishonest and immoral candidate we could find wearing a Republican jersey. I am told that we Republicans should all get behind Trump because it is his party now.

Wrong.  It is not Trump's party.  Those of us who toiled in the trenches for conservative causes were doing so long before Trump began pretending to be a Republican in order to run for the GOP nomination. We will be fighting for those causes long after Trump leaves the stage. It is our party, not Trump's. To support Trump would be a betrayal of the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the conservatives who fought the political battles over the past four decades.  I am not going to betray those conservative principles.

My Republican Party needs to be about limited government,  not unlimited executive power.  Republicans need to understand and respect the Constitution, not dismiss the document out of hand.  The Republican Party needs to welcome all people to the conservative cause, regardless of race, religion or ethnic background.  Trump fails to live up to the ideals of the Republican Party on every score.

Unlike people like George Will though, I will not walk away from my party because it is temporarily led by someone who makes a mockery of everything I believe Republicans should represent.  It is my party, the party I chose, after all. Come November 9th, the fight begins for the soul of the Republican Party. You will be able to find me on the front lines of that battle.