A Compilation of Anti-Trump Posts from Before the 2016 Republican Convention

           I usually eschew posting to this blog about specific Republican primary candidates and campaigns.  However, because of the major ideological differences that emerged, I posted several times before the Republican Convention, either wholly or partially, in response to the arguments of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump or his supporters.

I did not name him or refer specifically to his supporters.  I hardly discussed any other candidate or even always placed my posts into the context of the Republican nomination, except in regard to process matters, and endorsed none of the candidates because of my preference for avoiding divisiveness in primaries and focusing instead on defeating liberalism.  Nevertheless, I engaged in the ideological debate to defend conservatism through my posts by specifically opposing certain populist non-conservative views of Trump and his supporters.  Some of those specific posts I would have posted even absent Trump’s candidacy, but they were made more relevant by it.  Because of his arguments or those of his supporters, I sometimes took advantage of such opportunities and added relevant implicit refutations into those posts.    

            Now that I posted last month about my resignation from the Berks County Republican Committee because of Trump’s nomination by the Republican Party for President of the United States and even published excerpts of my letter of resignation, which included some of my efforts within my local Party to oppose him before the GOP Convention, I thought it might be informative to compile the links to the relevant posts into one post and to place them more specifically into the clearer context of Trump’s candidacy: 

            In post in February, The 105^th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan's Birth, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-105th-anniversary-of-ronald-reagans.html, I recalled Ronald Reagan’ cheerful optimism about America, in contrast to Trump’s negativism, and the conservative leader’s belief in accepting those who agreed at least 80% with conservatism into the movement, in contrast the insistence by some today to demand total ideological purity and dismiss potential allies who are not in 100% agreement (and yet many of these same people are accepting of a big-government liberal who was recently a Democrat as their champion).  I noted Reagan’s admonition against speaking ill of fellow Republicans during primary elections—a rule entirely ignored from the outset by Trump and his supporters, as celebrity businessman based his campaign not on serious ideological debate, but personal insults of anyone who disagreed with him in the slightest.  I cited President Reagan’s ability to compromise to achieve his conservative goals, in contrast to the disdain today for any such give and take as “losing,” “caving” or “surrendering” and the unrealistic desire instead for totally vanquishing powerful political opponents, such as liberal Democratic President Barack Obama, who are committed to their beliefs.

          Along those lines, I cited in a pair of posts, Accomplishments of the Current Republican Congressional Majority, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/04/accomplishments-of-current-republican.html and Recent Conservative Republican Successes in Congress http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/07/recent-conservative-republican.html, in April and July, respectively, the many fruits of such compromises won by conservative Republicans in Congress to debunk the myth that they have accomplished little to nothing and the cynical view that Republican leaders should be deposed and the Party taken over by more uncompromising and “pure” conservatives from outside the “establishment,” and thus lacking in supposed self-interest for power or money, who, led by a stronger leader, could only then accomplish what the current leadership could not.

            In March, in direct response to the defense made by some conservatives and Republicans of Trump because he had only recently been a Democrat and holds many non-conservative views that Reagan had also been a liberal Democrat, I posted Ronald Reagan Was Conservative Long Before He Was Elected President of the United States, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/03/ronald-reagan-was-conservative-long.html.  I noted Reagan’s service as a federal informant about Communist infiltration of Hollywood during his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s, when he was in his forties, his campaigning for conservative candidates since 1964 and his principled championing of conservative causes before he was elected President.  I observed how he became the leader of the conservative movement during the height of the Cold War, in contrast to Trump’s claimed conversion after that existential struggle and much later in his own life.  I challenged anyone claiming to have converted to conservative to prove it.

            In the meantime, I took the opportunity of another anniversary in February in my post, The 25^th Anniversary of the Liberation of Kuwait, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-25th-anniversary-of-liberation-of.html to observe the accomplishments of that war in defeating aggression and placed the war in context of the American post-Second World War strategy of opposition to aggression, such as committed in recent years by Russia, of which Trump approves, and supporting the principles of self-determination, independence sovereignty that isolationists like Trump and his supporters claim to support, but only when the threat is obvious and immediate, if at all, because when these principles are threatened anywhere, they are threatened everywhere.  In March, I posted three times in direct response to some of these isolationist arguments.  In Hussein, Qaddafi and Assad Were Bad for the United States and the World,

http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/03/hussein-qaddafi-and-assad-were-bad-for.html, I refuted the dismissal by Trump and his supporters of the threats to America and its interests by these terrorist leaders, noted Russian complicity in terrorism in Syrian Civil War Update: 250,000 Dead,

http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/03/syrian-civil-war-update-250000-dead.html, and refuted isolationist opposition to recent United States policies in The Syrian Example Suggests Non-Intervention Would Not Have Been Better for Libya, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-syrian-example-suggests-non.html.  As the Republican Convention was about to begin in July, because of Trump’s authoritarian proclivities and defense of dictators, I posted a warning about how a democratically-elected leader could become a dictator in America, as elsewhere in Turkey Is the Latest Example of Liberal Democratic Support of Democratically-Elected Dictators, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/07/turkey-is-latest-example-of-liberal.html.

           In regard to the process of the Republican nomination, I posted Political Party Convention Delegates Are Supposed to Exercise Their Good Judgment, in April, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/04/political-party-convention-delegates.html and The 2016 Pennsylvania Primary Election, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-2016-pennsylvania-primary-election.html, later that month.  In these, I explained the representative role of convention delegates, in keeping with the representative beliefs of the Republican Party, as opposed to the democratic beliefs of the Democratic Party, in nominating a candidate for president who is qualified, fit, believes in the Party’s conservative platform, and who could unite the party and lead its slate of candidates to victory in the election, as well as the process in Pennsylvania of electing delegates directly who were uncommitted to any particular candidate in order to fulfill this role as a safeguard against nominating a populist demagogue with authoritarian proclivities, like Trump.  The following month, I posted Conservative Analysis of the 2016 Primary Election,

http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2016/05/conservative-analysis-of-2016-primary.html, in which I observed the increased turnout from the first contested GOP primary in forty years and party-switching by Democrats to Republican to vote for the nativist/protectionist/isolationist big-government liberal Trump, with whom they agreed.