Conservatives do not owe their vote to anyone. But more important, my vote simply isn’t that important. The argument that if you don’t vote Trump, you’re electing Hillary is logically flawed: If I don’t vote for Hillary, am I electing Trump? It also ignores the fact that each individual vote counts in America for nearly nothing. If you’re a conservative living in California, as I am, it actually does count for nothing.
And yet those of us who won’t vote for Trump keep hearing that constant refrain: your vote means everything. Today, once again, Trump trotted out that tortured logic to attack Senator Ted Cruz, who committed the grave sin of not explicitly endorsing Trump while doing everything short of giving such an endorsement at the Republican National Convention.
What Trump supporters really mean when they say that failure to vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary is that anything we do that doesn’t help Trump harms him. In other words, we are only morally decent if we turn into full-scale Trump defenders. It’s no longer sufficient to call things as we see them — we must become Trumpkins. If we point out that Trump’s attack on the Kahn family is both stupid and morally debased, that puts us in league with Hillary. If we state that Trump ought to spend less time cozying up to Vladimir Putin and more time standing up to him, that means that we’re Clinton-philes.
This is the danger. And it’s becoming reality right now.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member