How far has the GOP fallen? The only two presidential candidates fit for office are unworthy of support
Only two Republican primary candidates have had the guts to unequivocally condemn Trump's criminal conduct. But they aren't worthy of my vote.
For all the talk we’ve heard from some Republican talking heads about the need for their party to move on from Donald Trump, time and again we’ve seen it’s just that—talk. For example, the person tapped to deliver the official Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was the newly-elected governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In her previous life as Trump’s White House Press Secretary, Sanders was an accomplice to some of the worst outrages of the Trump administration—from siccing an angry mob on an anonymous White House staffer (later revealed to be former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor) who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about his efforts to restrain Trump, to falsely accusing CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta of chopping the hand of a White House intern, to publicly posting a letter to Nancy Pelosi revoking her permission to use a government jet to visit troops in Afghanistan.
I’m a very partisan Democrat, but have been willing to support Republicans on a case-by-case basis. Even then, such Republicans would have had a hard sell to make to get my vote. But the moment that Sanders was chosen to deliver the GOP response clinched a decision I had made soon after the Senate Republicans failed to summon the political and moral will to convict Trump for inciting the horror of Jan. 6. I cannot and will not even consider supporting Republicans at any level again until the party fully purges itself of Trump’s influence. Until then, we do not have a liberal and a conservative party in this country. We have a party committed to democracy and a far-right, borderline fascist party—and I stand with democracy.
That decision was cemented in the days after Trump was arraigned on charges of willfully absconding with classified documents. In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, most of the candidates in the Republican primary field have turned their fire on the indictment itself (Tim Scott and Nikki Haley immediately come to mind), with a number of them (like Haley and Ron DeSantis) indicating that they would pardon Trump if elected. Several of them have suggested they would still support Trump if he won the nomination. Take Mike Pence, for instance. Just after declaring that his former running mate should never hold office again, Pence said he would “absolutely” support whoever ultimately won the nomination.
The standard for acceptable behavior is set much higher than the bar below which you go to jail. And that bar is even higher for those seeking elected office. Anyone who reads the classified documents indictment ought to conclude that even in the event Trump’s actions weren’t criminal, they are not acceptable behavior for the president of the United States. And I would be saying that if Biden had done even a fraction of what Trump did. Trump’s refusal to return those documents, as well as the wanton and reckless disregard for national security portrayed in the indictment, are yet another reason why he must never be allowed within an area code of elected office again. As near as I can determine, only two Republican primary candidates seem to have drawn that conclusion—and are hence the only Republicans who are fit for office. Namely, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Within hours of Trump announcing his indictment on Truth Social, Hutchinson rushed out with a burning statement calling for Trump to drop out of the race. After calling out Trump’s “willful disregard for the Constitution” and “disrespect for the rule of law,” Hutchinson said that even though Trump should be presumed innocent, the “major distraction” posed by the indictment demanded that Trump “respect the office and end his campaign.” Earlier, Hutchinson called for the Republican National Committee to loosen its requirement that candidates commit to supporting the eventual nominee in order to take part in debates. Hutchinson noted—and rightly—that there ought to be an exception if the nominee is convicted of “espionage or a serious felony.” And just in case he hadn’t made himself clear, Hutchinson told Politico that he would not support Trump if he were to be convicted of a felony.
Hutchinson had already called for Trump to drop out of the race after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg won an indictment against Trump for falsifying his business records in order to conceal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
But it’s very telling that he showed no qualms about reiterating that demand after special counsel Jack Smith won a federal indictment against Trump. After all, Hutchinson was the U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas—everything from Hot Springs westward—for most of the first half of the Reagan administration. He knows how federal criminal investigations are supposed to work. That was why when he sat down with ABC News’ Linsey Davis, he said that Smith had spelled out “a very strong case.” Watch here.
There’s one other former U. S. Attorney in this race—Christie. For those who don’t recall, Christie rose to fame as U. S. Attorney in New Jersey for most of the Bush 43 Administration before his election as governor. That probably guided his analysis of the indictment when he sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Watch here.
Christie asked a question that few Republicans had the guts to ask—“Is this the type of conduct that we want from someone who is the president of the United States?” For him, the answer was no. While he tried to throw bones to the Trump base by saying that he thought Hillary Clinton should have been indicted for her emails and that he believed there was nothing to any talk of Trump being compromised by Russia, he made clear that this didn’t justify Trump’s conduct—and, as he put it rather mildly, “the conduct is bad.” To Republicans like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who claimed the indictment could disrupt the country, he pointed out that Trump was responsible for that disruption.
Christie was equally unsparing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” this past Sunday. Watch here.
Christie told guest host Robert Costa that Trump’s conduct—keeping classified documents “that he had no right to keep,” showing them to people “not cleared to see them, obstructing efforts to recover the documents and getting his lawyers to lie—was “very disturbing,” and was not anything “we should have from someone who wants to be president of the United States again.” To those who claimed this was a witch hunt, Christie reminded the nation that “we would not be here” if Trump had simply returned all of the documents.
There are seven GOP candidates who have any business saying they have a shot at being president—Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Pence, Hutchinson and Christie. Of that group, Hutchinson and Christie are the only ones willing to take off their red blinders and see Trump’s behavior in the way that any right-thinking person ought to see it—as criminal and disqualifying. We used to call this being presidential. And yet, if I were to even consider my refusal to support any Republican candidates for a long time, neither Hutchinson nor Christie would get my vote.
Hutchinson’s unequivocal condemnation of Trump’s behavior doesn’t begin to make up for his woefully inadequate handling of COVID-19 in Arkansas. He was the only Southern governor who didn’t issue a statewide stay-at-home order. A number of Republican governors in that region deserved to be pilloried for their responses to the virus. Indeed, my state’s governor, Roy Cooper, was one of the few governors south of the Ohio River who seemed to believe in science. But even the likes of DeSantis, Brian Kemp, and Greg Abbott—to name a few—were willing to take a painful, but necessary, step to give their states’ health care systems a chance to catch their breath. Hutchinson didn’t even do that.
In April 2020, Hutchinson told CNN that he believed his “targeted approach” to fighting the virus made sense due to Arkansas’ relatively low population density. But Vox noted that exponential spread and the high risk of asymptomatic transmission made such an approach dangerous.
Unlike Ebola, which is extremely deadly but hard to spread, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 appears to spread very easily while being only moderately deadly. That means that, absent comprehensive testing and surveillance systems — things no US state has — by the time you notice a lot of people showing up at hospitals with serious Covid-19 cases, you have an order of magnitude more people bouncing around your community spreading virus everywhere. Since cases grow exponentially, your health care system can get rapidly overwhelmed, at which point the case fatality rate spikes because patients can’t be treated as carefully.
That proved catastrophically prescient when Arkansas moved into the second phase of its reopening process in May 2020. This led to a spike of over 3,000 cases within a week. At one point in the summer, the death rate in Arkansas was almost three times the national average.
In the spring of 2021, Hutchinson not only refused to issue a statewide mask mandate, but actually signed a law banning local governments from requiring masks even in the midst of a surge of cases. He subsequently regretted doing so—most likely due to Arkansas getting hammered by the Delta variant. That came as cold comfort to a friend of mine in Arkansas who was given the left foot of fellowship from a church she’d attended since she was a girl. They knew that she had breathing issues that could cause her to break bad—REALLY bad—if she ever caught COVID. And yet, they still got on her case for wearing a mask.
That friend is one of many in my circle who are either high risk or immuno-compromised. Supporting anyone who would run for president and take such risks would be giving them the finger. Hutchinson wasn’t nearly as incompetent as, say, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem or Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, or even Trump. Nonetheless, his mishandling of COVID in Arkansas was still staggering—and it caused people to die.
Hutchinson fails one test of leadership—how to respond in a crisis. Christie, if possible, failed on a more fundamental test by fostering the environment that led to Bridgegate. How’s that, you ask? Well, New Jersey’s governor is arguably the most powerful governor in the 48 contiguous states. The governor and the lieutenant governor are the only officials elected statewide; most state-level officials that would be elected in most other states are appointed by the governor (subject to confirmation by the state senate). The state constitution places almost all responsibility for day-to-day administration in the governor’s hands.
For that reason, almost no one believed Christie when he claimed that he first learned about the so-called traffic study that shuttered lanes on the George Washington Bridge. Given his authority over state government, how could he not have known? And even if he didn’t know, he damned well should have made it his business to know—and didn’t.
Moreover, there is no scenario in which Bridget Kelly, David Wildstein, Bill Baroni, and the other amateur mafiosi who concocted this scheme would have even attempted it unless an environment existed that made such behavior even remotely acceptable. They were willing to cause a massive traffic jam all in the name of screwing people who had the temerity to vote for Christie’s opponent in the 2013 gubernatorial election, Barbara Buono. They damned well knew what they were doing, and didn’t even give it a second thought. The result was an egregious betrayal of the most sacred trust in any democracy—that your government will not willfully put you, the people it represents and for whom it works, in harm’s way.
Within a week of this shameful stunt coming to light, I called for Christie’s resignation. When a governor is willing to tolerate an environment in which staffers have no qualms about keeping ambulances from getting through, it’s time for that governor to go. A decade later, I still don’t understand why the Democrats in the state legislature didn’t find a way to get Christie the hell out of the governor’s mansion. Maybe it’s because I’m half North Jerseyan, but this really hit a nerve with me.
And this guy thought he could run for president in 2016 after all of this, and still thinks he can run for president now? What nerve he has. While Christie deserves to be applauded for calling out Trump’s behavior for the depravity that it is, he has a hard sell to make to show he himself deserves the presidency—and hasn’t begun to make it.
So, the only two Republicans who are morally qualified for the presidency are a former governor who kept his state open even as his state was slammed by COVID, and another former governor who fostered the environment that caused Bridgegate. As much as I want to get back to debating policy rather than worrying about the existential threat posed by Trump, the fact that this is the best the GOP has to offer says a lot about how far it has fallen.