Jennifer Jacobs reports at
The Des Moines Register:
Some Iowa Republican caucusgoers say they're so disturbed by Donald Trump that they would never vote for him, even if it meant Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the general election.
Seven voters out of 27 in a focus group conducted in Des Moines Friday night by opinion researcher Frank Luntz said Trump so strongly repels them that they’d never cast a ballot for him.
Luntz was taken aback.
“This is a big deal,” he said.
Peter Wehner writes at The New York Times:
If Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were the Republican and Democratic nominees, I would prefer to vote for a responsible third-party alternative; absent that option, I would simply not cast a ballot for president. A lot of Republicans, I suspect, would do the same.
There are many reasons to abstain from voting for Mr. Trump if he is nominated, starting with the fact that he would be the most unqualified president in American history. Every one of our 44 presidents has had either government or military experience before being sworn in. Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality-television star, hasn’t served a day in public office or the armed forces.
...
Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.
...
I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.
Former RNC communications director Doug Heye writes:
Because of Trump’s perversion of conservatism, along with the devastating impact he would have if nominated, I cannot support Donald Trump were he to win the Republican nomination.
As the GOP battles over what – or who – defines conservatism, it should be easy to define what doesn’t: angry populism, cheap sloganeering and bombast.
Michael Gerson write at
The Washington Post:
Ultimately, these political matters are quite personal. I have spent 25 years in the company of compassionate conservatives, reform conservatives, Sam’s Club conservatives or whatever they want to call themselves, trying to advance an agenda of social justice in America’s center-right party. We have shared a belief that sound public policy — promoting opportunity, along with the skills and values necessary to grasp it — can improve the lives of our fellow citizens and thus make politics an honorable adventure.
The nomination of Trump would reduce Republican politics — at the presidential level — to an enterprise of squalid prejudice. And many Republicans could not follow, precisely because they are Republicans. By seizing the GOP, Trump would break it to pieces.
Glenn Beck told Megyn Kelly:
I know that I won't go to the polls. I won't vote for Hillary Clinton and I won't vote for Donald Trump. I just won't. And I know a lot of people that feel that way. I know people in the GOP who are like, look, well he is better that Hillary Clinton. Maybe, I don't know. I mean the guy last night, he didn't even know what the triad was. He didn't even know what are the missile silos and the strategic air command with missiles on the planes and our nuclear submarines. He didn't even know what that meant. He couldn't answer that question. It was bizarre. He is also a giant progressive. So I can't vote for progressive. I can't vote for Hillary, and I can't vote for him. I said, probably a year and half ago that I thought we were entering the times of the Whig Party. That the Republicans were going to go to the way of the Whigs, who they demolished back in Abraham Lincoln's time. I think that's happening. They have not, they got power, they said we just have to have a House and Senate. We got it. Now they say, we have to have the House and the Senate and the White House. Well wait a minute, we heard that before with George W. Bush. They're not listening. They're not doing what the people have hired them to do. If they put Donald Trump in, try to put him in office, if that's what the people want, you are going to see an end to the Republican Party. It will just be over, there'll just be nothing left.
Redstate writer Jay Caruso:
He’s a birther. He supports the completely unscientific theory that vaccines cause autism. He flirted with trutherism with respect to what President Bush did or did not know about the 9/11 attacks. He has thrown out the completely unsubstantiated claim he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheering the 9/11 attacks (and no, some woman calling into the Howard Stern show to say she saw it as well is not evidence). We don’t need (another) President spouting that kind of drivel.
...He has no class and he is no statesman. I know critics will write this off as him not being “politically correct.” But there is a line between being politically correct and being a boorish ass and Trump can’t navigate it. From making fun of Carly Fiorina’s face to his pathetic schoolyard-like bully mocking of a disabled reporter to his tantrums on Twitter about news stations or reporters “not being fair” to him (remember his hissy fit over Fox News?). It’s completely unbecoming for a man who wants to lead the free world. This is not ‘The Apprentice.’
