Conservatives surrounded by Trump and Republicans but not crushed yet!

As we move ever closer to what appears to be the eventual nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for president, conservatives are, once again, surrounded by Trump and Trumpist Republicans who want us to believe that the GOP has all the answers to what ails America, just like they did the first time around the binary merry-go-round in 2016.

Of course, I didn’t buy their lies then, and I don’t buy them now.

In May 2016, I wrote an article showing how Trump had more in common with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton than he did with the last conservative president, Ronald Reagan. Trump destroyed the base of the Republican Party (conservatives) in 2016, going so far as to openly proclaim that he didn’t need conservatives to win. Still, one-by-one, faux conservatives, some who ran against Trump, decided to endorse Trump and the Republican establishment even as he honed his Democrat talking points.

For example, Ted Cruz, a “conservative” who caved so hard that he was enshrined in the Gutless on Principles (GOP) Hall of Shame.

After suspending his 2016 campaign for president, Cruz endorsed Donald Trump for president — something Cruz claimed would never happen following Trump’s personal attacks on his wife and father — and he justified doing so by saying that protecting the Constitution could wait and that his principles were negotiable depending on the political implications.

Some Republicans, many who have become Trumpists since then, defended Cruz’s cave to the GOP establishment. Leading the pack of supporters was Reince Priebus (a.k.a. Lord Priebus) who warned Cruz and other former challengers for the 2016 nomination (John Kasich and Jeb Bush) that withholding their endorsements and failing to come to the Dark Side and embrace Trump would destroy any future presidential aspirations they might have had.

Of course, I’m no fan of Kasich and Bush, but the bottom line to Priebus’ threat was simply that conservatives were no longer welcome in the GOP, a fact that Trump recently repeated on the campaign trail in Virginia (via WTOP News):

“We want to send a big signal, so it’s important. I mean, we don’t need your vote. We want you to get out there and vote in big margins, and we want to send that little freight train going along,” Trump told rallygoers. (Emphasis mine)

By the way, I did NOT misspeak above when I said Trump ran in 2016 using Democrat talking points.

Do you remember when Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2016 that his campaign promises to lower taxes was simply “a concept” and that he was ready to “tax the rich?” Do you remember when he dismissed the need for Republican party support and unity in an appearance on ABC’s This Week? Do you remember how he went out of his way to let people know in 2016 that he was the Republican nominee, not the conservative nominee?

Of course, there were other players in the sell-out to Trump in 2016 who are doing the same thing in 2024, such as the faux conservative media and the Evangelicals led by the Fellowship of the Pharisees.

Trump held positions on both sides of nearly every issue important to Conservatives during his 2016 campaign, like: abortion, the LGBT agenda, Planned Parenthood, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, gun rights, and illegal immigration. He also promoted abandoning NATO, inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign imports, raising the minimum wage and socialized medicine.

It would have been nice if we could have worked within the Republican Party in 2016 to nominate a constitutional-loving, small-government conservative. But as anyone who follows me knows, the GOP establishment has been lying to conservatives ever since Mitch McConnell announced his intention to destroy us in 2014 — a reality that has only grown worse under Donald Trump.

As I consider how hopeless our situation appears to be — being surrounded on all sides with no apparent means of escape — I’m reminded of one of my favorite Scriptures found in the fourth chapter of Second Corinthians. Or TWO Corinthians if you’re Donald Trump.

“WE are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”  – II Corinthians 4: 8-9

It would be easy to play the duopoly’s game and pick the lesser of two evils, even though that has never worked, but I believe that now is the time pray, be strong, and fight for our Christian constitutional conservative values while there’s still time. Personally, I believe that our only hope of reclaiming liberty in America is to birth a new party that represents American conservative values.

Things may look hopeless, but we need to stay committed to our principles. Remember, conservatives may be surrounded by Trump and Trumpist Republicans, but we are not crushed . . . yet.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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