How can any serious conservative support Trump?

Apart from that Trump obviously has no qualifications or experience to be president, and has the opposite of all personality traits one would like to see in a president, trump is also so full of crap it's ridiculous. how can any serious conservative support this guy?

• used to support assault weapons ban but now he doesnt
• has donated plenty of money to hillary and other democrats many times but now he runs against democrats
• used to be in favour of same sex marriage but now he isn't
• used to support obamacare but now he doesn't
• said the war in afghanistan was a mistake but now said it was necessary
• used to be pro choice but now he's pro life
• employed foreign workers and now talks about protecting american jobs
• wanted to take in refugees but then changed his mind
• said bush didn't lie about iraq and then said he did lie
• talks about corrupt business-politics relationships, has such relations himself

This are issues conservatives supposedly care about. His views conveniently changed as he was running for the republican nomination... He's indeed playing on people's fantasies, a tactic which he praised in his own book, art of the deal. As was said regarding the failure of trump university: victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimisers until they realise they have been fleeced. Guys, atleast consider the possibility that you are being fooled here. Given the above, we can say that Trump either doesn't know what he is talking about, or that he's just saying whatever he thinks will get him votes, or a combination of both. And you people criticised romney for being a flip-flopper! Quite frankly, this is just ridiculous. Just look at all the excuses you will come up with to defend him, because you so desperately want to believe that Trump is for real. it seems people have just been waiting for someone to come along to tell them what they want to hear, true or not. Trump is not the saviour of conservative america, but a false prophet, an opportunistic populist.

 

They hate Obama who they claimed has no qualifications and they're going to express that hatred by electing a man who has no qualifications.

 

I support him because he is changing the Republican Party.

 

Ideology is overrated and part of what is wrong with the nation. Ideologues are so stuck on their beliefs they sometimes ignore common sense. This belief that if we follow a certain set of rules everything will turn out ok is causing more problems than solving anything.

 

So elect a freaking centrist then! not some bloody populist demagogue. when has a populist ever solved a problem?

 

this for me. we need to change it from a neoconservative party to one that supports populist nationalism.

 

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I do not believe that just because someone tells the truth about the stupid Iraq invasion should disqualify him from being a good conservative.

For me there is something more important than ideology and political party and that is country. The Iraq war that president Cheney and his Boy little w got us into has hurt our country very badly and both president Cheney and Boy are to be taken to task for that insanity.

 

Who do you support?

 

Serious conservatives can, dogmatic one-dimensional conservative ideologues probably can't. "Purist" conservatives are absolutely unelectable in the US, that's just not where the country is. Serious conservatives realize that Trump is not one of them but he is on their side, is electable and pragmatic and will steer the country in their direction.

PS people also know that politicians forget their promises the moment they are elected. The government and debt grow exponentially under Conservative/Republican administrations, poverty, the gap between the rich and the rest grow just as fast under Liberal/Democratic presidents. What do they have to lose by giving Trump a chance?

 

Trump is a business man more than a conservative and he is not a DC player. At this point in America's history he may be just what we need

 

kasich, the only adult on the GOP debate stage, and the only candidate in the whole race, republican and democrat, who is not bat(*)(*)(*)(*) crazy.

 

He's a good choice.

 

How can I, a "serious conservative" support Trump?

First, I recognize that Trump is a flawed candidate. I'm not trying to sugar coat that. But this is how I view it:


Trump might win; no other Republican can: For Conservatives, it’s over. I’ve noted multiple times that the demographic time bomb has gone off and all things being equal, Republicans won’t win another Presidential race. Donald Trump is the rare bolt of lightning that might actually flip that script. He’s bringing new voters into the primaries and has a good chance of doing that during the general election. He also has a platform that has cross party appeal. Would I like to have a more standard conservative to vote for? Sure, but we’ve already crossed the Rubicon on the ability of such a candidate to actually win a general election. It’s not a choice between Trump and Cruz, it’s a choice between Trump and Hillary.

If I ever want to see what a Presidency by someone who owes absolutely nothing to donors, this is my only chance. Given the freak out of GOPe, it’s obvious that many in the Republican establishment would much prefer a Hillary to a Trump. With Hillary, you get the same old same old, but with Trump, he owes no one in the establishment anything. It’s a totally unprecedented state of affairs in the political world; a President who actually owes nothing to the donor class. Imagine, ambassadors and other appointees selected because of qualifications instead of donations? We’ve never had anything like that, and are unlikely to have that again in my lifetime. So just once I would like to see how that would work in real life instead of fantasy.

Economic Nationalism. When Trump declared his candidacy, his political platform blew me away. He actually had a platform that was popular, and was untouched by any of the other multiple candidates; no amnesty and protecting jobs from bad trade deals. It seems a program ripe for cherry picking by one of the other candidates, yet no one did, because, as I predicted, there were no donors who were going to fund such a campaign.

No Amnesty, no how. I’m done voting for amnesty supporting Republicans. Sorry Rubio, but I’m not giving you another chance to betray me. Ted Cruz might not betray me on amnesty but he also would never be President. If through some miracle he were to get the nomination, he would go down in Goldwater like flames in the general election. But Trump bet his campaign on immigration, so I think he means it. I want the wall, and I don’t care if it has a giant T on it. The Cucks won’t build it, but Trump might.

I’m sure a Trump vote will be a hard vote to swallow for many conservatives, but think about this: Over the past few decades,what have conservatives actually conserved?

 

The conservative brand/ideology is so tarnished that cons will take anything that smells electable. Plain & Simple.

The only parameter in hoping that "one of theirs" gets into the white house is that there is no official (D) next to their name, as we're talking about a guy who called the Iraq war a lie, defended planned parenthood, says the wealthy enjoy too many tax breaks/should pay more, ridicules special interests stronghold in Washington, is pro-choice, likes amnesty & finds major features of the ACA attractive while supporting an individual mandate.

Perhaps the voter pool is realizing that the mascot should change from an Elephant to a RINO.

 

Thanks for proving me right.

 

Completely agree except on the issue of Trump being a common sense choice.

His appeal is partly due to giving overly simple solutions (I'll just Do It!) to complex problems. Thats a textbook populist technique, because so few have the time or interest to look at the other side of the issue. A simple answer is comforting. Simple answers appeal to people because they seem very much like common sense, despite the fact that they are usually complete BS, or at the very best "putting a confident face on the problem".

If Trump becomes president I assume he will not go through with any of his promises (That is his MO). Its the only reason he doesn't bother me too much.

 

That's your blog? cool, I had no idea you had a blog.

the honesty and lack of comments on me being swedish is appriciated, I will reply in kind.

I agree with you that Cruz would probably not win. But I don't think Trump can win either. Trump may have won over most of the republicans, but he has done so at the expense of losing all votes from moderate conservatives, independents and democrats. Trump is quite simply too much to the right to be electable. I think Trump would hand the victory to hillary, since she'd gain all the centrist votes by virtue of, well, being more centrist. I believe there is a large group of centrists that are vital to winning, and trump just can't reach thse people. In my view, Trump can never win, so he's not even an alternative, no matter how much you want him to be. You have to choose among those which truly are electable, and those are just rubio and kasich, and among those i find kasich the best one. The choice is between a moderate republican or hillary. You might not like a moderate, but that is still better than a democrat.

Trump however is probably just as corrupt as hillary, but he's just been on the other side this whole time. But he's stil been involved in the same corruption. How is voting for the corrupt businessman any better than voting for the corrupt politician? not much of a difference.

I, along with most economist, hold the view that free trade is beneficial to all parties. the USA has problems, but tariffs isn't the answer to them. The important causes for the problems in the USA are internal, not external. it is things like high taxes and regulations which is responsible. Starting trade wars with everyone, as as trump wants, will only make things worse.

look, you screwed up. You failed to guard the border for several decades, and people have been slipping through for years. Many people, whose only crime has been to cross the border illegally, have gotten jobs, pays taxes, speaks english and have children in the USA. What good would it do to deport those people? You can say "I enforced the law" but the real effect has simply been to remove a hardworking tax payer. it's better to just say that you screwed up, let's give them amnesty, fix the border and not screw up more in the future. they don't even have to be given citizenship. Just let them continue to work and live there, but legally. obviously, anyone who has committed any serious crimes should be deported, but for those whose only crime was crossing the border ten years ago, it's just not worth it.

Trump isn't the last hope for conservatives. if he's elected he will be the final spasm, possibly signalling the death of the conservative movement.

 

This is the post of the day or more likely of the week. That is my philosophy also the point that ideology is not most important thing. Neither is loyalty to polical party. You hit it right on the head - common sense is lacking here in our country.

 

Trump puts America and common sense before party and ideology. Too bad both the Dem and GOP hate him for it.

 

It's not about ideology this election. People voting for Trump is pretty much telling the GOP where they can stick it.

 

Indeed, but when was voting for potus ever the right place to vent your emotions?

 

What's it to you?

 

Yes that's my blog. Sometimes if I've written a post there, if the exact same issue comes up here, I just copy myself. As to you being Swedish, I'm surprised that you are getting a lot of push back on that. I guess I've not been following along carefully so I don't recall you posting very much about your life there.

See I disagree with you there. Trump isn't too far to the right at all. He's actually, if you go position by position, pretty much a moderate Republican; a RINO. That makes the whole Mitt Romney attack yesterday crazy. Position wise, Romney and Trump are almost identical. In fact, Trump's health plan, that he released this week, is about 90% cribbed from Romney's plan in 2012. On immigration, Romney was the "self deporter." He even agreed with Trump on trade during his speech with Trump accepting his endorsement in 2012.

That may be, but I know Hillary is corrupt. It's not an election choice between a devil and an angel, it's a choice between two fallen humans.

All things being equal, I agree with you; free trade is beneficial to all parties. However things aren't equal, and in terms of the promised jobs and GDP, the US was screwed. There is no advantage for the people of the US to have free trade with third world countries that can beat us every time in wages. That's turned into a disaster and has bled the middle class dry. If you are in a hole, you should at least stop digging.

We've already done that in 1986. So it's not a realistic deal, it's just a ploy, since it's a massive political advantage to flood the country with unskilled, uneducated people not conversant in the language that are dependent on Democratic friendly sources of media. That's how California went from a reliably Republican state to one that a Republican couldn't get elected dog catcher. So I'm not doing that again.

I don't think you fully grasp the demographics issue in the US. It's already over as far as a chance of a Republican, all things being equal, of winning the Presidency again. To flip that you need an out of the box candidate who has cross party appeal and this year, that's Trump. Any other Republican candidate means Hillary will be President.

 

I agree, I don't think anger is going to win a election. But, GOP voters don't seem to care.

 

You will note that most of trumps support isn't coming from ideological conservatives but rather from new people flocking to the Republican Party. As has been pointed out by numerous pundits on both sides of the spectrum Trump is an ideological neuter. Until Scalia died he was my second choice candidate now I have only one simply because I do not trust Trump's judgement for a Supreme Court nomination. By the way he was my second choice candidate only because I figured him to be better than the establishment jackasses who really aren't conservatives either. By the way the Romney attack was little more than pot-kettle 101. Romney lost because he had no truly conservative credentials neither social nor economic.

Trump is a populist. To expect him to make any sort of sense from a purely ideological perspective is like expecting monkeys to design the first successful lifting body craft. Trump is almost literally the embodiment of the American electorate's desire for change at any cost.