by Matthew Boose
It was a wise decision for Ron DeSantis to end his presidential campaign when he did. There would have been no point in prolonging a bitter and divisive primary battle when Trump has clearly won already. By endorsing Trump, DeSantis opened the door to repairing some of the damage from what turned out to be a disastrous career move. And he did the right thing for the country by signaling to his supporters that it was time to unite and focus on ending the Biden regime.
Unfortunately, just a day later, DeSantis took a gratuitous swipe at Trump. It was chum for many of DeSantis’ hardcore supporters, who remain full of spite after months of back-and-forth with the MAGA “cult.”
The “Never Trump” brigades see getting rid of Trump as a Pyrrhic victory. They posture as “true conservatives,” but actually they’re petulant nihilists who would rather let Biden burn the country down than admit they lost a primary.
They find Trump and his followers contemptible, and they want conservatism to be rid of them, no matter the cost.
One would never know, from hearing the vitriol of these types, that the Trump “cult” is the majority of registered Republicans and that most of DeSantis’ own supporters are open to voting for Trump.
There are legitimate criticisms of Trump’s record, but his four years were full of conservative wins. Pro-lifers have Trump to thank for bringing about the demise of Roe v. Wade. Biden won’t let Trump forget it. Even still, Trump has been savaged by conservatives for moderating abortion. It’s not Trump’s fault that the pro-life position has been rejected again and again by voters. How will electing Biden, a pro-choice extremist, do anything to advance the pro-life cause?
For some ideologues on the right, nothing Trump does will ever be good enough. The unfair and often obsessive criticism that Trump gets from self-described conservative purists was encapsulated by the DeSantis campaign, which was driven by a monomania over Trump’s handling of a pandemic four years ago. Sure enough, in his concession speech Sunday, DeSantis could not resist taking one last cheap shot at Trump over Anthony Fauci. Would DeSantis have handled things any differently if he were running the country during the mass hysteria of 2020?
“True conservatives” want Trump to be perfect, but nobody is asking them to marry the man.
Even with all of his personal foibles, no true conservative can say Trump would be worse for the country than Biden. True conservatives realize that Biden’s treasonous border policy, his vicious and un-American agenda of racial preference, his predatory trans agenda, and his tyrannical contempt for free speech make him a clear and present danger to this country. The ruthless lawfare campaign against Trump—while embraced by many “true conservatives”—is a revolutionary threat to the stability of our whole political system that deserves a crushing rebuke at the ballot box.
Speaking of election rigging, Biden has deliberately flooded the country with millions of illegals, hastening political doomsday for Republicans as a national party and bringing whites ever closer to the status of a persecuted minority. That’s not very conservative.
Those “true conservatives” who feel comfortable tossing the dice and riding out a second Biden term need a reality check. Biden doesn’t need Congress to cause havoc. He did not sign any law to open our border or to turn the FBI against conservative parents. He didn’t need help from Congress to destabilize the world. He handled that by himself just fine.
Hopefully, once passions cool, the choice in this election will become clear, and “true conservatives” will vote with their convictions instead of their spleens.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
