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If we are to vote President Trump out of office, his opponents of all political persuasions must realize that the nominee of the Democratic Party is not going to have views shared by all of them.
Whoever gets the nomination will have his or her faults in the eyes of some of the anti-Trump electorate. Some will see the nominee as too far to the right or left or too centrist, too young or too old, too rich or too poor. Sone will be aggrieved by views the nominee holds. Still others will be angry that their preferred candidate did not get the nomination.
Slip-ups, gaffes, walk-backs and memory failures will also no doubt occur during the campaign, but should not be considered fatal to the Democratic nominee.
Despite their differences, the Democrats who remain in contention for the party’s nomination have one thing in common: They are all honest and honorable people. Can that be said of the incumbent president?
We can work on our differences after the election. We should remember that a successful nominee’s policy views with which we disagree do not under our system of checks and balances automatically become law. Legislation must pass both houses of Congress and perhaps review for constitutionality in the Supreme Court before it can become law.
The sole issue in this campaign is whether the president should be reelected.
The economy is good. Trump, however, has been the beneficiary of sheer luck in the timing of a positive economic cycle that began under President Obama. The economy is strong because the women and men who lead American businesses and provide the workforce for those businesses have done their work well.
The tariffs the president has imposed on China were ill-considered. The Chinese retaliated with tariffs that badly hurt our farmers and manufacturers. We don’t know whether the Chinese will honor the agreements they made in the so-called phase-one agreement. We do know a Federal Reserve study concluded in December that the Trump tariffs had done more harm than good to our country.
Did the president keep his promises? Well, he promised on many occasions that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico refused. The president is taking money from the U.S. military budget to build his wall.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump promised he would bring lost jobs back to America. Many working people trusted him and voted for him. Their jobs have not come back.
Is America great again? The president has attacked without justification people who oppose him and institutions that have made America great, including our military heroes, justice system and our intelligence agencies. He has enlarged the swamp. He tells us Russia is our BFF.
The president has created deep divisions among us with his tweeting, retweeting and public pronouncements, and he has given credence to the hysterical claims of the alt-right, QAnon and the madness that a Deep State exists to oppose him and his followers.
We do not have the luxury of being hypercritical about the Democratic nominee for the 2020 presidential election. Not voting or voting for the president’s reelection on the basis of perceived flaws in the Democratic nominee will take us further down the dark path we have been on since the president won the Electoral College vote.
We must vote Donald J. Trump out of office and return America to normalcy. It’s not, “Lock him up.” It’s, “Vote him out.”•
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Mishkin is a retired Indianapolis attorney.Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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