GOP needs to oust Trump

Open letter to the national GOP

To: Mr. Reince Priebus, Chair, Republican Party

December 7, 2015

Dear Mr. Priebus,

I’m not a Republican, but my dad was, and I learned a lot from his values and respected his politics. I hope you’ll consider my views here as a fellow American.

I’ll get straight to the point: the GOP needs to revoke Trump’s membership in the party and take their chances that he runs as an independent. The line he crossed today with his proposal to ban entry to the US for Muslims is not one the Republican party can or should permit to be seen as plausibly “in bounds” for anyone representing the party.

When David Duke ran as a Republican for governor of Louisiana, the elder President Bush was outraged and publicly announced that he wanted Duke kicked out of the party. As you know, it turned out that the party rules, perhaps at the state level, made it impossible for Duke to be kicked out, and he was ultimately able to run (and lose) as a Republican. But the fact that the Republican President at the time, as well as the entire national GOP establishment, publicly and unequivocally repudiated Duke and tried to oust him was important, not just for Republicans, but for America. It was patriotic, meaningful, moral, and right.

David Duke and Donald Trump – blech.

  If the Republican party can’t eject a major candidate for views that are overtly bigoted and dangerous, then the message becomes “well, most of us don’t agree with him, but we still want his people to vote for our nominee in the end, so we’re not kicking him out.” Not good enough. This is an important moment. Please think this one through and kick this dangerous man out of your party. Yes, he’ll throw a hissy fit and possibly try to run as an independent, but you’ll marginalize him for the long term. All your candidates, their campaigns, and your political organization’s strengths will be able to get on message together and take him down, instead of the way each campaign seems to be hedging its bets and zig-zagging around Trump. He’s running circles around the other candidates you’ve fielded.

By now it should be more than clear that Trump is, in the end, a self-defeating verbal bomb thrower. Let him do himself in politically without taking down your entire party with him. He may be running as a Republican, but he will stab your party in the back the instant it suits him. In a way, he already has. If you don’t stop this train now, he may be a factor in your presidential primaries for years to come. If he wins your nomination, or, God forbid, the general election, he will reshape your party to suit his narcissistic mania. He’ll trainwreck your party and the country with it.

He makes your entire party look beyond bad – he makes your party look too dangerous to elect. Kick him out. For the good of the country and your party. Please.

Sincerely,

Popular bumper sticker from the 1991 runoff election for Louisiana governor, in which former Klansman David Duke won the Republican nomination. The Democratic candidate, Edwin Edwards, was so widely believed by the public to be corrupt that people on the streets literally were asking one another, “Should we vote for the crook or for the Nazi?” This bumper sticker, urging people to vote for Edwards as the (far) lesser evil became iconic.