Many have been asking me, "If not Trump, then who?" This comments below are my response to someone who recently asked me that on Facebook. .
Well, I don't pretend to know the stuff I don't, but the stuff I do know raises a lot of questions and doubts about Trump. I do know that a lot of politics is theater that makes no sense to me whatsoever, but regarding who might possibly still be "good" among any of our politicians--I don't know. They all are culpable to some degree if they were in office following November 2020 and during the plandemic and said nothing.
Of those who were there, I think perhaps Rand Paul is one of them who is the closest there is to being one of the "good" ones. He was very late to the game with regard to discussing Fauci's gain of function research funding, but I think all of those people in D.C. are in a bubble, and I do give Rand Paul credit for finally starting to talk about that when no one else in D.C. was. And, unlike Trump, Rand Paul actually believes Fauci should be prosecuted. So that gives Paul another point from me.
Am I saying it should be Rand Paul? No. I think we need to stop thinking that we have to have a politician run for the job. Trump wasn't one when he went it, but he damn sure is now. If Trump were as smart as I once believed he was, he never would have just congratulated Ronna Romney-McDaniel on being reelected to the RNC. I don't congratulate her. I think she's a snake and I would have liked to have seen Trump say so rather than to congratulate her. But, then again, I also would have liked to see him say he would like to see Fauci prosecuted when he was asked. I guess I just think that the thing that WE should be doing is to create the DEMAND for someone other than Trump to step up and run. It’s really the smartest thing we could do—even those who are die-hard Trump supporters (which I once was), for it sends the message that we DO actually still value our votes.
It is because I value my vote that I have fought so hard to try to restore election integrity. I’ll be honest, I don’t think we are ever going to have election integrity restored. We don’t deserve to, to be honest. We sent the message following November 2020 that it wasn’t important enough to us to make damn sure that it never happened again. Most (including Trump) said we’d win again in 2022. But how? We spent two years digging up more proof, as if more were needed (it wasn’t), and we never secured our elections. The focus always should have been on securing the very next election following November 2020. Letting them do it to us again in the primary showed them that we were willing to accept it—at least for now. And then they did it again in the general election, and people acted shocked. They shouldn’t have. We made it clear in the primary that we still weren’t serious about it. We showed them that we don't really value our vote.
Apologies for seeming to get off on a tangent here regarding elections, but in any discussion of who it is I think we should be looking for as a candidate, I think it all factors in. I recognized soon after November 2020 that we didn’t just need to secure our elections, but that we also needed to ensure that the candidates that we were putting out there were worthy of our votes. Those who were there following the November 2020 election who handed our country over to tyrants (yes, all of them) were no longer worthy, in my esteem. What good would it be to secure our elections if we also weren’t going to demand better candidates than Don Bacon or Ben Sasse?
So, going back the question of who might be our candidate if not Trump, my answer to that is that we should do a much better job of valuing our vote. If we do not value our vote enough to send the message that our vote must be earned, then why should the candidates value our vote either? The message right now from many that there should be a coronation of Trump sends the message that Trump is “good enough” and that we aren’t even going to look and see if there might be someone better. I’ve never read “The Art of the Deal,” but I do know that we are negotiating poorly when it comes to who gets our vote. So even those who support Trump should want him to be the best candidate possible, and the way to ensure that we get the best candidate (of those who do step up to run) is to ensure that there is a stiff competition for our vote. Trump supporters should not fear that. If Trump is the best among them, he will prove that. And he will be made a better candidate in the process. But WE are the ones who must create the demand for the competition. We say that we are sick of politicians, and yet we are not sending a message to anyone outside of politics that there is room for them to jump in. We should be doing everything we can to ensure that whoever gets the job of being the candidate to represent conservatives is someone who was put through a thorough interview process.