Open Letter To William Kristol

To: Mr. William Kristol, Editor at Large, Weekly Standard

It is now the middle of February, the election is over 3 months behind us, and it has been almost one month since Donald Trump inaugurated as our 45th President. I have been perusing your Twitter TL since the election, and I think I have a good idea of what your general mood is. So I have a message for you. It's a simple message, which I heartily urge you to heed:

You need to shut up and go away.

There are two reasons for this. The first is the whole #Nevertrump thing, which I'll get to a bit later. More importantly, you need to shut up and go away because your policies suck and don't work. I'm referring to these policies, which you have been agitating in favor of for over 20 years:

1. open borders
2. comprehensive, multilateral trade agreements
3. a large military footprint overseas

Now, you may not want to admit this, but I think it's pretty obvious that all of these policies have been abject failures. Instead of bringing in naturally conservative voters, lax border enforcement has instead brought in, among the usual hordes of illegal immigrants, infiltrations of dangerous criminals who have murdered our citizens and increased the threat of terrorism, and who have no desire to assimilate to anything except welfare benefits. The big trade agreements that you claimed would bring national prosperity, instead benefitted only a few at the top of the heap, such as yourself, and condemned working class Americans in large swaths of the country to more or less permanent unemployment. Lastly, we've been expending money, material, and the lives of our young men and women overseas for the better part of two decades, with little to show for it. America isn't appreciably safer, nor is the world appreciably more peaceful than it was twenty years ago, and in many ways, it it is more hostile and more dangerous than ever before. And this despite the trillions of dollars we've spent and the hundreds of lives we've sacrificed.

So, in the face of these failures, you need to shut up and go away.

Now, getting back to #NeverTrump, this is where the butter has really slipped off your noodles. If you don't like Trump, fine. If you don't want to vote for him, fine. But Trump's a funny guy. I don't know exactly what it is about him, but he just drives some people absolutely bonkers. He recalls to mind the old-time radio superhero known as The Shadow, who had "the power to cloud men's minds." Well, Trump is like The Shadow on steroids. He not only has the power to cloud men's minds, but also to completely unhinge them.

I think not voting for Trump is a mistake, but a forgivable one. But what's not forgivable is what you and the rest of the #NeverTrump claque did, which was to drag an insignificant nobody out of Utah, whom no one had ever heard of before, and promote him like he was some kind of conservative dream candidate. Your idea was that we all should vote for instead of Donald Trump with the slim to none chance that the election would have to be adjudicated in the House of Representatives. And this was not a primary battle, it was all done after the primaries were over, and Trump had secured the nomination. What possible hope was there that this would succeed, that Republican voters would abandon their party's candidate and flock en masse to your #NeverTrump banner and this new candidate?

Did you honestly think this would happen? If you did, you're delusional. It's clear your Trump-hatred has truly driven you bonkers. Because the only possible outcome to your ill-conceived #NeverTrump campaign would be that Trump would be weakened significantly enough so that Hillary Clinton would be elected president.

And this all in the name of "conservative" values. Think about that for a moment. A corrupt socialist would be President today because you acted in the name of "conservative" values. How messed up is that? What kind of topsy-turvy, bizarro world do you live in where this makes sense? How unhinged to you have to be?

As I said, Donald Trump has the power to cloud men's minds.

But then it gets better. Because after Trump's election, this "great" conservative candidate of yours that you promoted like the second coming of Ronald Reagan has been attacking Trump *from the left*, using the left's talking points. Does that sound like a "great" conservative to you? Is hitting from the left what a "great" conservative does?

Aren't you completely embarrassed that you ever supported this guy?

You apparently have no idea how out-of-touch you and other conservative pundits sound. The caterwauling from you and Charles Krauthammer when Trump dared to utter the phrase "America first" in his inaugural address was both delusional and tone deaf. Delusional because nobody but a few pedants gives a rip about how Charles Lindbergh used that phrase 80 years ago, and tone deaf because you apparently have no clue how this plays to normal Americans who live outside the Beltway. As another conservative columnist has written:

[N]ormal Americans...kind of liked it when their president promised to put their interests ahead of greedy foreigners and domestic elitist snobs. Here’s the thing: when you find the idea of putting America first terrible, you necessarily put yourself at odds with actual Americans. They would kind of like to be the first priority of their president.

So instead of submitting the United States to some global world order, I think it's time we tried something different. In fact, I think that was one of the issues this election was about. And you either can not or do not seem to understand this.

So you and other "conservative" pundits are running around with their hair is on fire because Trump said the word "tariff". But do you know something? Your way hasn't worked. Your way sucks. I've always thought that tariffs were a bad idea, but I don't care any more. I'm willing to do what you and the rest of you #NeverTrump dead-enders are apparently unwilling to do, which is to give Trump a chance. Everything he's done so far, from his cabinet picks to his EOs, have filled me with confidence. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if a President Jeb Bush or a President Marco Rubio had done what Trump has done, you would be jumping up and down like a spastic puppy.

So I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Lastly, I think it's good that you're one of those who have publicly been driven bonkers by Donald Trump. Because now it's clear who you really are. Ultimately, you're committed not so much to conservative principles, but rather to a Beltway status quo that Trump is a huge threat to. Based on your actions over the past few months, I can see (and indeed, so can everybody else) that you wouldn't have cared all that much if it had been Hillary Clinton who won the election. Even if Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz had came out on top in the Republican primaries, and then went on to lose in the general election to Hillary Clinton, you would not have been greatly discomfited. Yes, you wouldn't have liked it, and yes, I'm sure that for at least the next four years, the Weekly Standard would be filled with articles and think pieces critical of Clinton and her policies, but they would all pretty much impotent to actually change anything.

So I think the election of President Trump has given us the chance, for the first time, to effect real change in national politics. And it's been instructive to see how you and the rest of the #NeverTump crowd are all weeping and wailing and digging in your heels, even now, even after most of the decisions Trump has made so far have been conservative. This tells me that you're part of the problem that electing Trump is supposed to solve. And it confirms to me that voting for Trump was the correct choice.

Yours, etc., etc.

posted by OregonMuse at 05:22 PM

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