“Vote for the Crook or the Clown. It’s Important”

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump waylaid Nikki Haley (R-Beltway) in the New Hampshire primary. Unless he’s found soon in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, Trump will be the Republican nominee.

I stole that last line from the late, great Democratic governor of Louisiana, Edwin W. Edwards, who used it to boast about his chances of winning the next election. He was right, too. Edwards, who died in 2021 after a long and colorful career in Louisiana politics (as well as a stint in federal prison), was both loved and hated in his day. He was fabulously corrupt, but most Louisianans forgave him that in part because he was peerlessly funny.

He once said that a dull Republican opponent was so dumb “it takes him an hour and a half to watch ’60 Minutes,’” a popular news show. Famous for his womanizing, Edwards quipped that the pharmaceutical company drew his blood to make Viagra.

The best line associated with Edwards was not one of his own. It appeared on bumper stickers all over the state during the notorious 1991 gubernatorial showdown between Edwards and David Duke, the former head of the state’s Ku Klux Klan, who, thanks to the state’s unusual primary rules, made it into the runoff with Edwards. The slogan on the cars and lips of many Louisianans that fall, even conservatives like me, was:

VOTE FOR THE CROOK. IT’S IMPORTANT

Edwards, of course, was the crook. The idea was that even though many of us, especially conservatives, understood exactly what Edwin Edwards was, the state would be far better off governed by a man of loose morals than by an actual fascist and white supremacist. When I pulled the voting lever that fall for Edwards (who won), I was sure that never would I be faced with such a dreadful choice in a major election.

I was wrong. Now that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has left the race, leaving only Nikki Haley (the candidate for those who want a third George W. Bush term) and Trump, U.S. voters will face a November showdown that most do not want: a Trump-Biden rematch. And that being the case, it is hard to see how conservatives, however much they may despise Trump, can avoid holding their noses and voting for him.

Aside from his judicial appointments, there’s not a lot to cheer for regarding Trump’s term. Of course he was persecuted by the media, the Democrats, and the Deep State, but he knew that was coming. Trump was too vain and distracted to resist effectively. And then there was his appalling behavior on January 6th. Trump is scarcely fit for office.

So why vote for him? Well, have you seen the other guy?

Joe Biden built a reputation over his professional lifetime of being a ‘moderate’ Democrat, an Irish Catholic who could talk easily with working class folks. Yet he has governed as a hardline progressive. On identity politics, on race, on LGBT, and on abortion, Biden has been as extreme as anybody else in his party.

The U.S. southern border has been effectively wide open during his presidency. According to the U.S. government’s own statistics, some 6 million foreigners crossed illegally into America across the Mexico border since 2021. That number is higher than the populations of thirty-one individual American states. It is roughly three times the population of Paris.

They all came on Joe Biden’s watch. Recently, the border state of Texas, fed up with the federal government’s unwillingness to defend the frontier, ordered its agents to do so. The Biden administration appealed to the Supreme Court to force Texas to stand down, and prevailed. As a matter of law, perhaps the high court was right to say that it is Washington’s responsibility to secure America’s borders. But as a matter of policy, Joe Biden is doing his best to prove believers in the Great Replacement right.

Meanwhile, U.S. military capacity has degraded under Biden. He has emptied America’s arsenal sending weaponry to Ukraine in its futile war with Russia, even though most observers understand that the U.S.’s most serious rival is rising China. America’s manufacturing capacity is not capable of replacing the missiles and other ammunition transferred to Ukraine fast enough to meet Washington’s needs in case of armed conflict with Beijing.

What’s more, the all-volunteer U.S. armed forces face a dramatic recruiting crisis that is seemingly unsolvable. There are several reasons for this, but the one neither the media nor the government likes to talk about is the way woke ideology has captured the military’s leadership ranks. The armed forces has been especially poor at recruiting whites, especially white men. According to the website Military.com, whites were 56.4 of all recruits in 2018—a number roughly commensurate with the percentage of whites in the overall US population (59 percent)—but last year’s recruiting class was only 44 percent white. The declining white numbers are not being countered by rising non-white recruits.

For those not blinded by ideology, it’s easy to see why white males are less interested in serving in the armed forces. The military, like universities, corporations, and so many other American institutions under the sway of wokeness, openly disfavors white males. Your chances of rising in the ranks based on your performance will be hampered if you are white and male. Besides, it’s a hard sell to convince young whites to potentially risk their lives to defend a system that in some ways treats them as second-class citizens.

The military embraced woke policies under the Obama presidency, and Trump, to his discredit, barely lifted a finger to reverse them. It was full steam ahead for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion under Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, whose administration even promoted an official Navy drag queen in an effort to boost recruitment.

There is no more important responsibility of U.S. leadership than defending the nation from enemies, and securing its borders. Biden is failing those tests, and is accelerating the internal disunity and decline of the country. Would a second-term Donald Trump reverse these disastrous trends? Based on his first term performance, one has to be skeptical, though it is encouraging to see that smart Washington figures like the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts have been working hard to learn from the mistakes of Trump’s first term, with an eye towards making sure they don’t happen again if Trump returns to office.

Finally, the United States is suffering an ongoing meltdown in public confidence in the nation’s institutions. Relatively few people cared about the scandal that led to the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay. What does the Ivy League have to do with the price of milk and eggs? But they do understand that debacle, in which a remarkably underqualified scholar was awarded the most prestigious job in American academia not on the basis of her scholarship (which was puny, and partially plagiarized), but obviously because she is black and female. The Gay affair symbolizes the fundamental hostility of the American ruling class to merit, competence, and justice.

These elites who oversee, and even advance, American decline disdain Donald Trump as a blowhard and a buffoon. They’re not wrong about that, necessarily, but it takes some nerve to freak out over the supposed Trump threat when Biden and the entire leadership class, drunk on woke ideology, is enfeebling and eviscerating a once-strong country.

Do I think Donald Trump, with his juvenile antics and comic narcissism, will Make America Great Again this time? Nah. But taking a long look at the opposition, with its pudding-brained standard bearer, I still say:

VOTE FOR THE CLOWN. IT’S IMPORTANT