This conservative argues Trump has been disastrous for his own party and its ideological movement

A long list of Never Trump conservatives, from veteran columnist George Will to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a former Republican congressman) to GOP strategist Rick Wilson, have made it abundantly clear that they plan to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. But some conservatives who have been critical of President Donald Trump in the past are now arguing that they have no choice but to vote for him because the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left. Author Robert Tracinski, a Never Trumper, addresses that argument in a September 15 article for the conservative website The Bulwark — and he concludes that instead of making a strong case for Trump being the lesser of two evils, those conservatives end up making a case for “the relatively inoffensive Joe Biden.”

Tracinski, author of the 2019 book, “So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” explains:

I’ve recently noticed a miniature wave of former Never Trumpers — or at least those who claim they were Never Trump — recanting and saying they have to vote for Donald Trump now because the left is such a catastrophic threat, either because of the riots or because of ‘cancel culture’ or for some combination of these reasons. Sure, they will acknowledge, Trump has many character flaws and encourages the worst strains of the right. But we face an emergency in which we need Trump, with all his faults, as a short-term stopgap to protect us against an apocalyptic threat that would put a final end to the American system.

Truth be told, the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is still quite prominent — so prominent that Biden, not Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, became their 2020 presidential nominee. But the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic Party — as in Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Corte, Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Rep. Rashida Tlaib — is at least getting a seat the table in 2020.

Tracinski, in his article, makes it clear that he is no fan of the left wing of the Democratic Party. But he argues that the U.S. will be better off if: (1) Trumpism is rejected in the GOP, and (2) Democrats reclaim the White House with a centrist nominee.

“The more (Republicans) convince me that the far left is a horribly dangerous threat that is taking over the Democratic Party and threatens to destroy the republic — and I really don’t need any convincing on this — the more they remind me that if I ever want to stand up to what’s wrong in the Republican Party, I had better do it now, when the alternative is the relatively inoffensive Joe Biden,” Tracinski writes.

The Bulwark contributor goes on to explain why he believes Trump has been so terrible for the GOP and the conservative movement.

“The real problem with Trump is neither about style nor about policy,” Tracinski writes. “It is the disastrous ideological impact he is having on conservatism and the Republican Party…. ‘Libertarian’ has become a dirty word among conservatives, and they don’t mean it as a narrow critique of the libertarian movement or the Libertarian Party. By ‘libertarianism,’ they mean the advocacy of freedom, including free markets.”