[David Post] In the matter of Donald Trump: A response to the responders

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally last week in Charlotte. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

It is becoming increasingly difficult to have a civil conversation across the electoral battle lines, and the events of the past week have hardly made things any easier. But I meant it when I said, in my earlier posting (“An open letter to Volokh Conspiracy readers who are Trump supporters“), that I was hoping to engage readers who are Donald Trump supporters in something resembling a civil conversation. And insofar as a conversation is necessarily a two-way street, I thought it incumbent upon me to give some sort of response/reaction to the comments I received.

The posting generated more comments than is the norm here for the Volokh Conspiracy — 718 comments at last count, more than anything I’ve written in the past — but I did read them (though I admit that toward the end I was skipping the replies, and the replies to the replies), and I did try to get at least a sense of what Trump supporters are thinking.

Here’s my takeaway. I asked two questions: In light of Trump’s shall-we-say “erratic” behavior (I originally called it “unstable”), what gives you any confidence that he will behave responsibly when he is in command of U.S. armed forces and the U.S. nuclear arsenal? And second, even if you have satisfied yourself on that score, what makes you think, given his rather long history of conning people, that he’s not conning you now, that he won’t be both unwilling and unable to deliver on any of the things he is promising?

I found the responses on Question 1 to be most interesting. Many commenters disagreed with my characterization of Trump as “unstable.” Not much one can say about that; we may just have different definitions of instability. (The discussion online took place before Trump’s revolting — even by the relaxed standards one applies to “locker-room talk” — conversation with Billy Bush was made public. Perhaps some of the commenters who defended Trump’s stability have revised their position on this question by now.]

Many other commenters responded with some variant of the “lesser of two evils” position: “Sure, Trump’s behavior is at times odd, maybe even unstable; but Hillary [Clinton] would be so much worse.” (One commenter — I hope in jest — said he’d vote for Satan in a hypothetical Satan-Clinton matchup. Satan!) As one commenter put it: “I am not voting ‘for Trump’ — I am casting a vote for Trump because the other alternative is clearly worse to me than Donald Trump would be.”

I certainly understand the notion that sometimes (perhaps often) one ends up voting for the “lesser of two evils.” I also understand that, for any number of reasons, many people genuinely and deeply dislike and distrust Clinton and think that Trump, for all of his flaws, would make a better president than she would.  Fine; let’s just agree to disagree about that.

But as I said in the earlier posting, Question 1 wasn’t about Clinton’s qualifications, nor did it invite a comparison between Trump and any other candidate. Whether or not the Clinton-bashing is justified, what’s the point of it? Why is it relevant to my question? In response to my request for reasons that I shouldn’t be terrified of placing our armed forces and our nuclear arsenal in Trump’s hands, you say “Clinton is a monster”??  I don’t get it.

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter has, for months, been issuing a spirited defense of Trump along these lines. [See, e.g., here and here.] Trump, he admits, is “Mr. Nauseating,” with “all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy,” and an “infantile vulgarian.” There are “important objections” to his candidacy: “Trump would be dangerous. He would further endanger our national security and world position. He might start unnecessary wars. He might even push the nuclear button.”

But, Gelernter continues, Clinton would be so much worse. “There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump” — for Mr. Nauseating. And not to worry about that nuclear button thing: “Ordinary politics says that Mr. Trump will not do crazy things or go off half-cocked, because Republicans in Congress will be eager to impeach him and put Mike Pence in charge. … Impeachment is Trump-voters’ ace in the hole.”

In an election year featuring some very peculiar arguments, this is probably the most peculiar of all: Vote for Trump, because he will be impeached.

Maybe the source of my