From the Adults in the Room to the Clown Car: Today I Quit the GOP

Matthew McLean

March 2024

 I have been a lifelong registered Republican since I was first eligible to vote 41 years ago. With the nomination of Mr. Trump as the Republican nominee for President, I am formally dropping my membership in the GOP. It is now unrecognizable.

While the Party probably doesn’t care, I don’t make this move casually. I spent 20 years in federal service in Washington, including ten years in the intelligence community, five years on White House staff (National Security Council), a Congressional staffer on the House International Relations Committee, and other senior-ish foreign policy positions.

For decades, Republicans were considered the adults in the room of American policymaking. Names like Reagan, Kissinger, James Baker, Georges Schultz, Henry Hyde, and others stood as pillars of statesmanship. This pedigree gave way to the next wave of Cheney, Powell, McCain, Bush Jr, Rice, Hatch, Danforth, and others, who maintained the combination of decency and hard-nose politics and harder-nosed policymaking.

What do we have now? We see a little car zigzagging around the big top floor while the likes of Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, that Pillow Guy, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and others tumble out to circus organ music. The clown show was inspired and now led, of course, by Donald Trump, who has hijacked the Party with hyperbolic self-praise to reinforce a messianic vision of himself that – if shouted loud enough and often enough – becomes believable to the gullible. He is today’s Jim Jones where way too many people are drinking the Kool-Aid… and the results will be the same.

The quick summary of Trump is simply that he is the modern version of King Midas, except everything he touches turns to shit. For those who defend the indefensible, my short list of Trump’s unredeemable sins include:

·      To my fellow conservatives: Trump is no conservative. He is a real estate billionaire from New York City who has funded various stripes of politicians for personal advantage. He has no identifiable ideology. (No, Trumpism is not an ideology). He doesn’t believe in smaller government; he believes in a big, all-powerful government controlled only by him. Conservatism is a proven lens to see and interpret the world. How is the party of conservatism led by a vapid egoist with no philosophical core or guiding principle?

·      For those who value leadership in our President: The most damning argument for changing the locks on the Oval Office door comes from many of his closest former advisors who personally witnessed his unvarnished ineptitude on matters of great importance to our country. VP Pence, COS General Kelly, General Mattis, NSA John Bolton, AG Bill Barr, SecDef Mark Esper, CJCS General Mark Milley, Gov. Chris Christie, NSA HR McMaster, COS Mick Mulvaney, and others are all waving bright red flags that reject Trump’s basic fitness to be President. Wow. That’s a looong list. And this is not anecdotal but based on direct daily observation. It should send a chill to any voter with a pulse. And those who dismiss the House’s January 6th commission hearings as a witch hunt, I’ll concede that the Dems were goofy, but all the witnesses under sworn testimony were Republicans and many were Trump’s own White House staff who directly witnessed the day’s events standing next to Donny Unhinged. Am I missing some alternative definition of the term, “insurrection?”

·      For those of you who value the rule of law: Trump walks around in a permanent cloud of lawsuits, like Pigpen from Peanuts. He currently faces 88 charges in four separate indictments… so far. His history of legal troubles is rampant and unending. Yes, people are, in fact, out to get him … uuuhhh, because he did a lot of illegal stuff. Duh. Dude can’t make bond and has paid more in legal fees than he brought in for his campaign. Can’t make this stuff up. Does anyone actually think that he didn’t try to defy and mislead the FBI looking into his handling of highly classified documents? Or didn’t directly pressure state officials to illegally “find” votes. Or didn’t try to illegally overturn the 2020 election? Or didn’t contribute to the January 6th riots? Or didn’t deliberately misvalue Trump Org assets to cheat on his finances? Or didn’t strong arm foreign leaders to get dirt on his political rival?  Or was unfairly impeached, um, twice? Or doesn’t have a history of sexually assaulting women? Or didn’t provide hush money to a porn star? Or… Or… Or… Folks, it’s another loooong list, and it won’t stop because that is simply who he is. (In reference to former rival, H. Clinton, the chant of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” has lost its savor.)

·      For you policy types who say, “I don’t like him but I like his policies”: Perhaps some kudos for flipping over the table about real problems, but seriously? Was anything ever ultimately fixed? His go-to solution is a fabulous photo-op (Hey look! We can step over this thingy and we are in North Korea, now step back to South Korea, now back to North Korea…) followed by zero policy follow through or the necessary grind to actually solve an issue. Immigration, China, North Korea, Middle East, NATO, healthcare, meth and fentanyl, healing a divided America, pandemic, etc. I will give a nod to the Abraham Accords but Cancel the Iran Nuclear Agreement! Super! Then fill the vacuum with what? Repeal Obamacare! Cool! And replace it with what? Build the wall on Mexico’s dime! Eh, right. And Trump’s “Dictators R Us!” orientation breaks the first law of foreign policy: Don’t treat your enemies better than you treat your allies. We can blame Ghost Biden for the continuation of failure, but Don the Con had four years of putting up Potemkin store fronts as policy solutions that produced few finished successes to show for it.

·      For you who value personal capability: Trump is dreadfully incompetent. His speeches are total fluff with mountains of hyperbole and modifiers (Huge! Horrible! Amazing! Witch Hunt! Rigged! Best ever in history! Worst ever in history!) but rarely contain any arguments of substance. He’s a walking National Inquirer in a really long necktie. Don’t believe me? Go back and re-watch his greatest hits. His political history of high-volume blah blah also suggests that he is lazy and eschews doing the necessary homework to understand hard problems. Instead, he relies solely on the force of his personality. It is survivable to have a leader who is irrationally bold, but its catastrophic if he is irrationally bold and incompetent. Which leads us to…

·      For those who value reality: Trump is the promoter-in-chief of delusion. Since he disregards the details of issues and is unbounded in the certainty of his own brilliance, he is in a constant mode of just making stuff up. Often wrong but never in doubt. If he thinks it or says it, it must be true! Then, as he repeats it loud and often, he pied-pipers his MAGA movement straight into Coo-coo-ville and off the cliff of irrationality where belief no longer comports with reality. Biden may be involuntarily incompetent, but Trump is deliberately incompetent. I wonder if he stays awake at night wondering how far he can stretch the nonsense and still get his loyalist NPCs to believe it.

·      For those who value our nation’s international credibility: Trump makes the United States the global joke. Allies are shocked while Putin and Xi Jinping are laughing their asses off that the American people would actually elect a guy to run the U.S. of A. like the República del Banano. He is straight outta central casting for one of those weird autocrats (complete with creepy hair!) in some unpronounceable country operated like a police state. I know what those guys are like because I’ve dealt with many of them over the years. My work has taken me to many countries, and in every instance during the President Trump years, foreign colleagues would offer their condolences with a look of pity and usually a snicker. Every time. It’s like when you walk into a bar and the guys are having a good laugh about the town drunk. It’s uncomfortable and hard to offer a defense in the face of the truth because he is your dad after all.

·      For those of you who value loyalty: Trump demands fealty to him completely and to him alone – not the country, not the Constitution, not the law, not the Party, nada, zip, nothing else. I agree with Trump’s statement of America First (what else would it be?), but he is only focused on the nucleus of one. With skin as thick as rice paper, if he thinks you are suddenly a liability to him, he will drop you instantly like a turd out of a tall ox. (How’d he help with those legal bills, Mr. Giuliani? Or that prison time, Mr. Cohen?) Anyone with a different last name is completely expendable regardless of past performance. If he so easily sacrifices his own people on a whim (see list of former officials above), there is zero chance he cares about you. (Read: He doesn’t.)

·      For those of you who like winners: Trump says he hates losers, but he is a proven loser. He already lost once to Biden. (“Stop the Steal”? Pfffttt, please. See delusional, above.) And he will somehow lose again to the weakest and most unpopular President in a generation. Ms. Haley was correct to say that a vote for Biden was a vote for Kamala Harris; but a vote for Trump is the same. He needs more than the rabid MAGA base to win. He has already alienated a portion of Republicans; he will have a tough time getting independents to hold their nose (although Biden is doing his best to assist); and he will convert exactly zero Dem voters. What’s that spell? L-o-s-e-r. (Say it twice.)

·      Finally, for fellow people of faith: At a personal level, he is flat-out a-moral. By any accounting – including scriptural and courts of law – he is… what’s the technical term for it? … Oh yeah that’s it, a douchebag. Whether assaulting women or cheating in business or trampling constitutional boundaries of power, he’s a total sack. How is it possible that the religious are bowing at the altar of a spiritless conman and sexual predator?

We have more than a sufficient sample size to see what a second term of Trumpaliciouness would look like. (Insert shudder here.) The Chaos Premium for this guy is through the roof.

Now, about our Republican colleagues, especially those in Congress. Sure, there is a cadre of true believers, but the majority of you roll your eyes in private and whisper your concerns to trusted colleagues that Trump is a disaster – only to shift instantly to sycophant mode when a microphone appears. Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney refused to play the hypocrite and their reward is to be vilified and cast out by those who knowingly do. Look, Trump will be Trump, but you are disgustingly worse because you know better. You’re too afraid to say what you honestly believe for fear of backlash from nuts or getting “primaried.” You may label me a RINO, but you are Chicken Shit Republicans. The lack of personal and professional integrity and the scope of pretense among you CSRs no longer deserve my support nor association.

This letter reads like crazy-bad fiction, but amazingly it isn’t. No crystal ball could have predicted 30 years ago this non-exaggerated litany of preposterousness. Today’s GOP trowels the lipstick on this grotesque pig of a once great party. This post will likely get a lot of hateful responses from some quarters, but folks need to realize that when you are getting conned, you don’t double down on the ruse.

Where will I go from here? Well, not to the Democratic Party. It’s like choosing between Hannibal Lector and Freddy Krueger for a sleepover. No thanks to either. Policy solutions from the left have rarely been good and are worse now than ever. (Socialism? Massive redistribution of wealth? Defund the police? Inflation-feeding policies? Really?) Independent it is, I suppose. And to support those whose political currency is rationality, competence, and decency … if I can find them.