A Plea to My Republican Friends
As most of you know, I made my living as a community newspaper publisher for more than three decades, starting in 1982 in San Augustine, down in Deep East Texas. I had just turned 27. Running The Rambler for five years (I ended up buying it) provided a valuable hands-on education. One of my teachers was Ambassador Edward A. Clark, a San Augustine native who became a prominent Austin attorney and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “key man in Texas,” as biographer Robert Caro termed him. Clark was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Australia when Johnson ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Clark, who had a high-pitched giggle that almost always came out in conversation, seemed to take a shine to me. Early on, I made a portrait of him and his wife, Ann, for a feature I called “Hometown Folks.” As always when in public, he was dressed in a suit and vest, the archetypal Southern gentleman.
I began endorsing candidates while running The Rambler, starting in the fall of 1982, in both statewide and local races. Ambassador Clark, who had the paper mailed to his Austin office, would clip out the endorsement editorial and grade my selections, from “A” to an occasional “F.” He would scrawl occasional comments as well, such as “He’s terrible!” or “Good pick” and mail the clipping back to me in San Augustine. I still have those clippings, a treasured souvenir of my encounters with that wily, fascinating character.
When one lives in a town of 3,000 (the population has dropped since), making endorsements or taking any type of editorial stand on local issues means that you are going to personally encounter folks who do not agree or appreciate your point of view. It might be in the produce aisle at Brookshire Bros., or while trying to sell advertising to the local Otasco owner. It helps to have both a thick skin and a disarming nature when you run into the wife of the county commissioner whose opponent you have endorsed. A couple of folks during those years threatened to kick my ass, but happily it never came to fruition.
In San Augustine, as in every town in which I published a newspaper after that (seven more in all), my political views – progressive, favoring Democrats in most cases – put me in the minority compared to the newspaper’s readers. That did not bother me. I always welcomed dissenting viewpoints in the paper and only rarely encountered any overt hostility. I was publisher of the Longview News-Journal in 2008 and readily assented to the paper endorsing Barack Obama in a fine piece by Pete Litterski, who passed away last August. Readers grumbled but nobody made overt threats. I recently looked up the results: Obama garnered 30.9% of the vote in Gregg County that year. Clearly if the newspaper wanted to reflect its readers’ political views, we would have endorsed John McCain.
Our role was not to reflect the majority view. Our job with endorsements and any other editorial position we took was to give readers our honest appraisal. It was nowhere near infallible. Still, I considered a 
newspaper’s editorial page to be the soul of the paper. As long as we encouraged and published opposing views, I believed that we were doing our job. I still do.
From that heady time in 1982 – learning how to run a community paper through immersion (since I pretty much did everything) – until bowing out of publishing in 2015 when I was about to turn 60, I ran community newspapers throughout East Texas, as well as stints in Kansas, West Texas, and Central Texas. My longest tenure was in Nacogdoches, where I was tolerated despite my liberal leanings, to the point that in 2000 I became chair of the Nacogdoches Chamber of Commerce. That prompted one of my even further left-wing friends to joke it was likely the first time a communist had ever headed the chamber of the Oldest Town in Texas. (For the record, I am a staunch capitalist.)
In all those decades, I played golf and tennis with Republicans, drank beer with them, considered many of them in these towns to be my friends. I still do. We were genuinely able to disagree without becoming hostile. Either that, or we learned to just avoid a topic that might cause rancor.
Those were the good old days.
That tolerance for differing political views began to vanish when Donald J. Trump descended a golden escalator in 2015. He certainly hastened its departure. The cult that has grown up around this loathsome individual is both baffling and distressing. Here in East Texas, putting a Harris-Walz sticker on one’s truck invariably results in good old boys – and girls – saluting you with their middle fingers as they drive by. A yard sign likely will not survive the election season, especially out in the country, where miscreants can get away with more. Times have changed and not for the better.
I am addressing this to my Republican friends as we near the start of early voting. Please consider what I have to say. It is time to be shut of this man who is singularly unfit to hold elective office of any stature, let alone the highest position in the land. For many of you, voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is simply too big of an ask. It shouldn’t be, given the stakes, but I do understand that. For me, voting for a pathological liar, narcissist, convicted felon, and sexual predator – all in one lumpy package – is far too big of an ask. But if you cannot bring yourself to vote for someone who will restore decency to the Oval Office, whether you agree with her policies or not, then write in a name, any name. Just do nothing to contribute to the election of someone who did his level best on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow an election, among his many crimes.
The few times I have gotten into arguments with folks who love Trump, they invariably turn to “what-about-isms,” as in “What about (fill in the blank with whatever perceived shortcoming you wish).” Bill Clinton comes up often, to which I can truthfully reply that I called for his resignation in an editorial in The Daily Sentinel after the Lewinsky scandal. (Unsurprisingly, he ignored me.)
Just stop it with the what -about-isms! All perceived sins and shortcomings held by anyone currently holding or seeking public office, or who held it in the past, pale in comparison to Trump. Even Nixon! Trump has immeasurably degraded this country solely to benefit himself. Nothing else matters to him, which should be clear to anyone after nine excruciatingly long years of him dominating our public discourse and sowing chaos. It is time for him to fade into obscurity, content with selling electronic trading cards of him dressed as a superhero, or $99 Bibles, on obscure cable channels.
Imagine: a 78-year-old man who posts I hate Taylor Swift after she announced she was voting for Harris, which was not exactly a surprise. Who does that at age 78? No slight, real or imagined, is too small for this small man to ignore.
The number of Republicans both elected and appointed who have publicly repudiated Trump continues to grow. Among those who have said they will not support Trump and are endorsing Harris:
- Former Vice President Dick Cheney
- Former Rep. Liz Cheney
- Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger
- Former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham
- Former (briefly) communications director Anthony Scaramucci
- Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan
- Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
- Longtime conservative columnist George Will
Others have not taken the step of backing Harris but have made clear they will not vote for Trump, including his former attorney general, William Barr; his former vice president, Mike Pence; his former defense secretary Mark Esper; his former director of national intelligence, Dan Coats; his former national security advisers, John Bolton and H.R. McMaster; and his former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, called him “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
That is just a sampling. It should give pause to my Republican friends that so many of those who worked for Trump in his first term have no intention of voting for him again. Imagine if you owned a company and conducted an employee survey to find out how the working folks regard the person you hired to run your company. When the results arrive, you discover nearly all the employees revile their boss and are actively seeking employment elsewhere. Would you give that manager a raise or extend an employment contract? Doubtful.
Trump does not deserve our support or trust. He has demonstrated time and again his unfitness for office. I pray my Republican friends agree. After all, if Trump were a Democrat (and he would have been if he thought it made him more likely to be elected), just a fraction of his actions and lies would make him unelectable.
If you want to get a sense of how deranged this man’s words are, go to trumpstruth.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan site that archives all of Trump’s TRUTH Social posts. His words are even starker when seen in print, compared to simply viewing a video snippet.
My fervent prayer is that Trump goes down to a decisive defeat and disappears from the political sphere. This country needs two strong political parties; right now, we have one party that is a cult movement beholden to a criminal. I yearn for the days when my Republican buddies and I could knock back a few beers after a spirited tennis match and amiably discuss politics, agreeing to disagree. That is not possible when the Republican nominee is a convicted felon, pathological liar, sexual predator and irredeemable narcissist.
I will go to the end of my days baffled that we ever allowed such a small man to reach such a lofty position. It is well past time to turn the page.
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Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-endorsing-kamala-harris-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/02/trump-aides-wont-vote-for-him/
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