Alan Zendell, October 15, 2024

Real Conservative Republicans, the ones Donald Trump, in a classic reverse projection, calls RINOs have been standing up in droves to denounce Trump and endorse Kamala Harris. I subscribe to former Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s definition of Conservative in his Conscience of a Conservative. Former Senator Jeff Flake, also an Arizona Republican and Goldwater’s protégé, published his own version that speaks directly to the lie that the MAGA movement has anything to do with Conservatism.

According to Goldwater and Flake, Conservatives cannot coexist with lies, immoral behavior, and criminal acts. They prefer low taxes for all Americans and balanced budgets. They believe that entitlement programs are necessary, but are sometimes ineffiient and counterproductive, and they value integrity and adherence to the Constitution. Is there anything in that definition that sounds like Donald Trump? When I read Flake’s book, I was surprised that I agreed with almost everything he wrote, my only real disagreements being where to draw the line on government spending.

President Ronald Reagan was a Goldwater Conservative. His Vice President, George H. W. Bush, was another. Fifty years ago, when Reagan first touted trickle-down economics, Bush referred to it as “Voodoo economics,” but as happens in politics, he was persuaded to embrace it, which he continued to do when he succeeded Reagan as president in 1988. Despite Republicans traditionally supporting the wealthiest Americans, that is the only similarity between Reagan/Bush Conservatism and MAGA’s distorted definition.

Neither Reagan nor Bush would have supported Trump. Nor would Bush’s sons Jeb and George W. We know because the two most powerful people in the younger Bush’s cabinet, policy gurus Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, both told us. Cheney told the media that in our 248-year history there has never been a candidate as dangerous as Trump, and his daughter, Liz, donning her father’s mantle as protector of Conservative values, voted to impeach Trump and has joined the Harris campaign.

In recent months, an unprecedented number of prominent Republicans at all levels of federal, state, and local governments have endorsed Harris over Trump. The list includes 238 former staffers of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and John McCain, and senior officials who served under Reagan and both Bushes. It includes Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, former Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors, military leaders, national security advisors, aides and analysts, and more than 100 former Republican House and Senate members. The very long list also includes General Mark Milley, who Trump appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Conspicuously missing from the above are former President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, a former Florida Governor. If you remember back to Trump’s first campaign, at a time when Americans had never before met such a shameless, slanderous, immoral candidate for a major party’s nomination for president, you’ll recall that the one of Trump’s opponents was Jeb Bush. You’ll also recall that Trump savaged Bush at his rallies and on the debate stage.

He referred to Jeb and his brother, the former president, as weak and stupid, and W as one of the worst presidents in our history. I thought W made some terrible decisions as president, like ignoring the fact that almost all of the nine-eleven terrorists were Saudis, and the attack that day was funded by Saudi oil money. But because of his family’s relationship with the Saudi royal family, he used faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. I disagreed with much of what the Bushes did in office, but as politicians go, they were honorable, decent men.

Today’s Republican Party bears little resemblance to the party of Reagan and the Bushes. For anyone in the Bush family to claim party loyalty as a reason to not campaign against Trump is inexplicable, but it is especially so for W. He was president for eight years that included the worst attack executed on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Whether or not he was a great president, he possessed a conscience and a sense of decency. Unlike Trump he is neither a racist nor a xenophobe. Most important, he, like his father and his most prominent appointees all revered our Constitution.

I have to ask – why, President Bush, haven’t you added your voice to the anti-Trump uproar? What could possibly justify remaining silent at a time when most of your colleagues and allies have had the courage to speak out against the gross unfitness of the man who openly craves unlimited power and an end to constitutional law?

George W. Bush’s voice could tip undecided voters away from Trump and toward Harris. Surely, he knows this, yet we haven’t heard a peep out of him. Maybe I’m expecting too much from a man who prematurely declared victory aboard an aircraft carrier as he was getting us dragged into a misguided eighteen-year conflict.