Republicans make it halfway to a principled stand when they say they cannot support their own party’s presidential nominee because he is, by some distance, the least-qualified nominee from either party in modern history. David French does not get them the rest of the way. Never Trump Republicans like Bill Kristol, and whoever else would rally behind French’s potential third-party candidacy, do not take the presidency as seriously as they claim to: If they did, they’d admit that they find Hillary Clinton to be a better choice than Donald Trump.
No disrespect to David French. He’s an Iraq War veteran who was awarded the Bronze Star. He graduated from Harvard Law School and now is “an attorney (concentrating his practice in constitutional law and the law of armed conflict),” according to his He has a National Review biography because he is a staff writer for the magazine.
However your mileage may vary on his work, it’s an impressive résumé and the sort of bio from which one might launch a political career. So for which state senate or congressional race is Kristol trying to recruit French? He’s recruiting French for the presidency, you say? That’s ridiculous. Kristol’s principled case against supporting Trump because he is unsuited for the presidency falls apart when, in scrambling for an alternative, he reached for one of his pals on the nearest conservative-magazine masthead. And you are not qualified to be president if your consideration involved Bill Kristol asking a few months before the election, “Dude, what about you?”
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