Super Tuesday has come and gone and I am ecstatic in the results. As regular readers know, I am a Cruz supporter, and Cruz supporters all know the frustration of hearing time and again that he can’t win. Repeatedly. Every. Five. Minutes. It doesn’t matter how well he does, all we hear was how Rubio is our only hope of defeating Trump, and Cruz could not win nor could he beat Hillary. Really? Based on? Yeah, nothing. It’s kind of laughable to think that Rubio was supposed to be our saving grace when he’s not even going to win his home state. That’s kind of telling.
Anyways, things changed radically right before Super Tuesday. So radically we have Cruz and Trump being less than one hundred delegates apart and Lindsey Graham suggesting that Republicans might just have to support Ted Cruz. What the what?! So what happened?! A few things occurred which seemed to big impact.
First, Rubio started employing Trump gutter tactics. His numbers were already not adding up, but then he chose to take the low ground to boot. Fence sitters who were hoping he was the “moral guy who could win” vs. Cruz, who was supposedly the “moral guy who couldn’t win.” They started looking a bit more at the numbers, and people I had been having discussions with began to see the reality that Rubio really couldn’t beat Trump and Cruz could.
Next, another little gem fell into our laps. Now, I’m sure I’d disagree with John Oliver on quite a few things, and I so hate the crass factor he employs, but he is entertaining, smart, and the Americans who need to be entertained to keep their minds working really paid attention. If you haven’t seen it (because you, say, gave up social media for Lent), you should watch and share, but please see the crass warning and don’t watch with little ears around.
That was twenty minutes of a full-throated take down. (Thanks to Thomas from Michigan for flagging that one and giving me a nice description which I will keep stealing.) It was entertaining enough to keep the country engaged. After about ten different articles (including mine) on why Trump was hardly worthy of anyone’s vote, much less than any Christian’s vote, I saw this video posted EVERYWHERE, because, well, it was better! It connected! Again, I hardly think John Oliver shares my political views or religious values, but he engages in the comedy of “Captain Obvious” and makes fun of things that should make us all say, “Duh!” It’s kind of like making fun of Kanye West. It sooooo obvious.
One other thing that appeared shortly before the John Oliver take-down was #NeverTrump. Personally, I liked #DumpTrump, but I’m a convert now mainly because it’s forced the establishment to look at reality. Hillary is going to be president if they don’t do something smart instead of their preference. This hashtag trended on Twitter along with #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain (if you didn’t have time to watch the Oliver video, you won’t get that one) from Friday night through Super Tuesday. There was a small attempt at #AlwaysTrump, but that died after a day. Could it be that users of that hashtag realized that it made Trump sound like a monarch (Napoleon, maybe) or a cult leader? Of course, I might be thinking that because thousands of memes were tweeted and posted on Facebook with the “signs of a cult.”
MILLIONS of tweets went out in the span of four days, the hashtag “revolt,” as it started being called, was picked up by the media (because that’s what happens when you can get things trending on Twitter or Facebook), and it became a huge chink in Trump’s armor. Those hashtags, as well as thousands upon thousands of links to the Oliver video, were attached to a whole lot of news stories that had previously been swept under the rug and ignored by, well, almost everyone. No longer was he the “Teflon Don.” People actually saw that he had some serious flaws other than just being loud and obnoxious. He wasn’t just a bully who was going to change things in Washington, he was a really immoral megalomaniac.
Let’s talk about the #NeverTrump hashtag itself. When everyone started using it, I’m reasonably sure that many of us thought it was more like #NeverTrumpInThePrimaryWhenWeHaveBetterCandidatesButWe’llHoldOurNoseAndVoteForHimIfHeIsTheNominee. That said, it’s spurned a bunch of articles on why people really and truly are going #NeverTrump.
When #NeverTrump is discussed, you see two things. One side says, “Well, you don’t mean NEVER Trump, because if he’s our nominee and you don’t vote for him, you’d be voting for Hillary, which would be infinitely worse!” Or, “I am never voting for Trump, because he isn’t the lesser of two evils. He’s the same evil.” I have to say that I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought at first, because, simply, Cruz should be the nominee, and I’m going to fight like heck to make sure that’s so. That said, after reading a bunch of articles on both sides of that coin, I’ve found myself in the #NeverTrump camp if for some awful reason it comes down to Dumb and Dumber.
So, why would I ever allow Hillary to win?!?!?!?! Well, first of all, I live in California. My vote hasn’t counted in a long time, so it makes it hugely easier to do so. But why would I encourage anyone else in a state with a fighting chance? WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE THAT TRUMP WILL DO ANYTHING GOOD. In fact, we have decades to the contrary, and what he said in 2015/16 is not going to erase that. Now, I’m going to hear from a bunch of you saying, “We KNOW Hillary is going to do bad things, but we know Trump will do some good!” and the first example I will be given is that Trump said he’s going to appoint a Scalia-like replacement to the Supreme Court. My response to these and any other examples is going to be, “Really? We know he will follow through because why? Because he always does what he says? Because he’s such a moral guy? Because he says he’s pro-life?“ I am no longer going to roll the dice and hope this is true. I WILL NO LONGER PLAY THE GAME, PERIOD, if Trump is the nominee. Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, and that should have been proven by the Obama presidency. If I honestly felt he was the lesser of the two evils, I’d vote for him in a heartbeat. I just think most of America has been taken when it comes to that.
Let’s just look at the “non-negotiables.” Do I really believe that someone who was pro-abortion and thought that partial birth abortion should be anything other than banned until about five seconds ago, someone who just made fun of a person with a handicap (Trump claims he didn’t know him, but the reporter says they are on a first name basis), is really going to use life as a litmus test for a Supreme Court nominee? Heck, he barely cares about living human beings. Good luck with that. Also, please note, nobody is asking him the important questions. How about abortion in cases of rape and incest? In cases of birth defects? He always talks of his friends’ child who was almost aborted, but he’s terrific. What if he’s not so “perfect?” Hmmmmm???? He’s getting a pass, and everyone thinks he’s against this, simply because he said he’s pro-life.
How about “gay marriage?” He doesn’t have one thing on his platform page that even discusses it. You know he doesn’t give a darn about that. He’s NEVER going to appoint justices to overturn that. For the life of me, I cannot believe why Christians are acting on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with this one. You know this is why Tony Perkins is going Cruz and not Trump, don’t you?
Euthanasia? NEVER UTTERED THE WORDS. Not a priority.
Stem cells? Last I heard, he was undecided!
Please, please give me some kind of proof that he’s the “lesser of the two evils.” I just have no data to show me this is true. I mean, if you look at the non-negotiables, Bill Clinton might have been considered the lesser of the evils between Hillary and Trump and he was kind of a disaster.
So, if Trump ends up as the nominee, I encourage you to stop playing the game. Republicans, Conservatives (or whatever you label yourself), we are going to continue to get Trumps. They will be unstoppable. I’ll let you in on a little secret. This isn’t the long game of monopoly. It’s roulette.
One Mad Mom 