Rational action has saved us

No Republican has a legitimate basis to complain of the way President Trump has governed

Like Brad Cook, I am a Republican, always have been, came from a Republican family, have no intention of not being a Republican, and was appalled by the nomination of Donald Trump for president. But for Attorney Cook to say in his recent NH Business Review column (“Rational action will save us,” March 29-April 11 NH Business Review) that our party has been “hijacked” is ridiculous.

President Trump won nomination and election honestly and under the rules, the latter despite the worst that his dishonest opponent’s most powerful dishonest supporters in the Justice Department and intelligence agencies could illegally do to hijack the election for her.

Unlike Attorney Cook, I ceased being a “Never Trumper” a week before the election, because in the meantime the Democrats had nominated as their candidate a person of demonstrable incompetence, dishonesty and avarice, a person who — as helpfully enumerated by then-FBI Director James Comey — had committed numerous felonies, including violations of the Espionage Act, while serving as Secretary of State. Simply to withhold my vote from Hillary Clinton and sit out the election was not enough to register my disgust with the corruption of Washington, D.C., in general and the Clintons in particular.

Donald Trump won because enough voters finally became fed up by generations of politicians of limited intelligence and few scruples, but boundless cunning and self-regard, who, elected on the basis of promises to address specific concerns of the people back home, once in office promptly ignored those promises, sloughed off the tough decisions to the federal bureaucracy and courts, and served nobody’s interests but their own by leveraging the power of incumbency and the bottomless federal treasury to perpetuate themselves in office, indulge their boundless vanity preening before the television cameras, and somehow become multi-millionaires in the process. This perfectly describes, in abbreviated fashion, Attorney Cook’s new BFF, Joe Biden.

It also, by the way, describes the late John McCain, who shamelessly exploited his “war hero” status to fashion a lifetime political career that was beyond both his talents and his deserts, free of any loyalty to party or adherence to principle.

This was the same John McCain who, having been caught in a web of campaign finance corruption as one of “The Keating Five,” attempted to recover his virginity by co-sponsoring the infamous Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold), which might more accurately have been named the Congressional Incumbents’ Protection Act, the most outrageous assault on the core purpose of the First Amendment since the Wilson Administration’s Sedition Act of 1918 and the Adams Administration’s Sedition Act of 1798.

Ambrose Bierce defined “saint” as “a dead sinner, revised and edited.” That’s John McCain.

Attorney Cook says he believes in the traditional, fundamental principles of the Republican Party. I don’t know what they are anymore. Republicans won’t defend limited government, the federal system or the separation of powers. They won’t arrest the trend towards authoritarian rule by federal administrative agencies and federal judges, and they do nothing even to limit, much less reverse, the growth of federal deficit spending that’s leading the nation to fiscal Armageddon. They won’t defend our culture from being swamped by illegal aliens who, seeking to escape from the dysfunctional societies of their birth will, ironically, transplant them here by the sheer force of their numbers. And in spite of specific promises to do so, they didn’t repeal that giant first step towards a disastrous system of socialized medicine known as Obamacare. (Thank you again, John McCain.)

No Republican has any legitimate basis to complain of the way President Trump has governed. The Never Trumpers deplore his rhetoric even as they engage in worse to denounce him. They use invective because they cannot cite anything substantive to hold against him. The candidate who to me had been nothing better than the anti-Hillary has governed as a conservative Republican rather than as a soft Democrat in the Bush tradition. Republicans should be rejoicing at our good fortune and the nation’s narrow escape from the kleptocracy of a second Clinton presidency.

Gregory M. Sorg, an attorney in Franconia, is a former four-term member of the New Hampshire House.