If the Choice for You is Either Trump or Not Voting, Please Vote for Donald Trump
For the sake of full disclosure, I will not be voting for Donald Trump. Though I respect enormously all those who will be exercising their right and responsibility — as citizens of a democracy — to vote, including those casting their ballots for the Republican Party’s nominee, I will be looking elsewhere on the ballot. The main reason is his policies.
From what I can understand of his foreign policy, simply from listening to the speeches and interviews of Trump and his supporters, it consists of the following:
1. Insulting our democratic European allies as much as humanly possible.
2. Cozying up to unabashed dictators, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and expressing admiration for their style of leadership.
3. Blaming each of America’s problems on Mexico, China, or all Muslims in general, or some conspiratorial combination of the three.
Trump policy point #3 is also the cornerstone of his domestic policy. To outside observers, perhaps looking at American politics for the first time this year, they may be surprised to hear that not so long ago, the Republican Party had a reputation for being the party of personal responsibility. If your life was not turning out the way you had hoped, you had no one to blame but yourself. The Republicans’ standard-bearer for this election, however, has set aside the old mantra, and has instead offered voters a bevy of excuses on which they can blame their individual troubles: most of these excuses happening to have ‘funny’ accents, and perhaps looking a little ‘different’.
To a small — but vocal — minority in this country, Trump’s ideas, sincere or not, fall directly in line with their worldview. This is not the case, however, for most Americans, or even most Republicans. To many more conservative-leaning voters, Trump represents the ultimate ‘f*** you’ to a process from which they feel utterly detached, a government of which they are deeply suspicious, and a system in which they have completely lost faith. A group of these more ‘detached conservatives’ may be paying attention to politics for the first time. Donald Trump is nothing if not a showman, and they may find his nonchalant attitude toward sacred American cows like ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ somewhat refreshing; the same way we all laughed when the class clown called the teacher a ‘doo-doo head’ in the first grade. It is to these voters I direct my plea.
Surely, if one believes a candidate is so personally and ideologically unfit to lead the nation, shouldn’t his uninitiated supporters be discouraged from participating? So say the ‘cynics of democracy’. These are the same people who fail to see any moral repugnance in the half-truths of negative advertising, ‘as long as it works’; the same people who will sacrifice any personal conviction, just to get their party’s candidate elected. In fact, this line of thinking is fatally dangerous. Trump’s new voters already feel as though ‘the system’ is rigged against them. Inasmuch as they are encouraged to express their resentment in a healthy way — through the democratic process — Trump has actually done society a favor; it is far better that they be made to feel a part of the system they distrust so much, rather than allowing their feelings of alienation to fester, only to be expressed in less desirable ways down the road. The ‘cynics’ would then bear a significant responsibility for anything that happened as a result.
So if you are deciding between voting for Donald Trump, or not voting at all in this election, I implore you to cast your ballot for Mr. Trump. But do not do it out of protest. Do it because you think he — of all the candidates — has the seriousness, compassion, and the ethical and moral fortitude to do the job. By definition, a protest vote is a vote for a candidate that is outside of the mainstream. Therefore, since Donald Trump has a real chance of winning this election, a vote for him can in no way be a protest vote. If you want to protest, write in ‘Ronald McDonald’ or ‘Colonel Mustard’ or choose the Constitution Party’s candidate. But if you vote for Donald Trump to ‘shake things up’ just to ‘stick it to the man’, and he is victorious, then you bear personal responsibility for his election. Our British friends learned this hard lesson recently with the Brexit referendum: like it or not, in a democracy, elections mean something, and the citizens of that democracy are solely responsible for the consequences of their own self-government. There is no such thing as a ‘protest vote’ if it is cast for one of the top two choices. If you vote for Mr. Trump, and he is elected, you are now invested in his success, and will have to spend at least four years defending his actions to your friends. Hopefully, next time around, you will feel engaged enough in the process to consider factors beyond ‘shaking up the establishment’.
To summarize, if Trump is your man, Heaven bless you. If it’s Trump or no one, do your duty as one of the rulers of our democracy, engage in society, and register your vote. Of course, if you’re oscillating between Trump and another candidate, remember that playing the Blame Game is not a policy solution. Choose someone else. Anyone else. Please.
