I got to thinking about how dispiriting it must be to be a principled Republican right now, forced to choose between a candidate you can’t comprehend supporting (Clinton) and a candidate who is a total sleazebag maniac.
And I think people who support Clinton might just have easily been the target of Trump (or someone like him) ginning us up and telling us whatever we wanted to hear. We are not so smart that we would never possibly fall for it, and we would happily rationalize away all their flaws.
And I marvel about the place we’re in as a nation where Clinton is so hated that she could even lose to TRUMP, I mean c’mon, and also Trump is such a trashfire that he might even lose to CLINTON, hated as she is.
So I wrote a news report from an alternate universe where Trump decided he wanted to be a Democrat instead, and principled liberals were faced with the choice of either buying into his sales pitch despite his manifest terribleness; or voting against him, which would mean reconciling themselves to the prospect of voting for someone they loathed — his opponent, Dick Cheney.
Now, I think Democrats had something like a promise-the-moon candidate in Sanders, and clearly that didn’t work out. I’d also like to think that Democrats would be less accepting of abhorrent personal behavior than Trump’s ardent supporters seem to be.
The point of this piece isn’t quite “Trump could have fooled Democrats instead, had he chosen to.” The point is to try and give Hillary supporters a visceral way to feel what many conservatives are feeling right now:
“Imagine what it must be like to have to choose between someone your party canonically hates, and Donald Trump.”
Read the whole piece on Medium: