Last Friday, I wrote a piece for The Hill urging establishment Republicans to resist the impulse to abandon President Trump and instead embrace his agenda. If the Republican Party turns against Trump, I argued, “it would be a death blow to conservative resistance and revival in America.”
It’s a simple argument: Trump is in sync with the electorate right now, and establishment Republicans generally aren’t. A rejection of Trump’s winning formula (and his unrelenting attacks on progressivism) by party leaders would be a surefire way to kill the GOP and usher in decades of electoral irrelevancy. It would be the death of the Republican Party as we know it.
Apparently, this figurative talk of death triggered Chauncey Devega, a left-wing, social-justice-warrior blogger for Salon, who, after a long-winded, sophomoric rant about propaganda that read like a poorly-sourced college term paper, accused me of inciting “civil war” and “violence”:
Cannon’s threat that Republicans face a binary choice between Trump and death is but one more example of the nightmare-dreams of violence and a second civil war that are peaking under Donald Trump’s regime. Movement conservatives and Trump supporters want blood. Their opinion leaders are inciting them to violence. … Appeals such as Cannon’s have already caused death and harm to the American people.
Devega then proceeded to call me a terrorist and blame conservative writers like me for both the 2015 Charleston church shooting and the violence in Charlottesville last month.
Okay…? Three thoughts in response:
1.) Devega’s arguments are so ridiculous and over-the-top, I’m 95 percent convinced he is a right-wing mole embedded at Salon to make the Left look crazy.
2.) My piece was not targeted at Trump’s conservative base, which very much supports President Trump. The target audience was queasy establishment Republicans who care more about holding on to power than advancing the conservative movement. My point was that the Republican Party will die a swift and decisive death if the Party abandons the president, who is beloved by the vast majority of Republican voters.
3.) Hysterical, shrieking “think pieces” like Devega’s are why Trump won. Keep up the good work, Salon!
Photo credit: Ilias Bartolini via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
