Max Boot Supports Hillary

Neocon Max Boot explains his support for Hillary Clinton in The Los Angeles Times.

For the time being, at least, that Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump.

Trump is an ignorant demagogue who traffics in racist and misogynistic slurs and crazy conspiracy theories. He champions protectionism and isolationism — the policies that brought us the Great Depression and World War II. He wants to undertake a police-state roundup of undocumented immigrants and to bar Muslims from coming to this country. He encourages his followers to assault protesters and threatens to sue or smear critics. He would abandon Japan and South Korea and break up the most successful alliance in history — NATO. But he has kind words for tyrants such as Vladimir Putin.

There has never been a major party nominee in U.S. history as unqualified for the presidency. The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.

But if I'm not for Trump, who am I for?

Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of. Even in his prepared foreign policy speech couldn't pronounce “Tanzania.” For all her shortcomings (and there are many), Clinton would be far preferable to Trump.

As it stands, I only know one thing for sure: I won't vote for Trump. My hope is that he will lose by a landslide, and the Republican Party will come to its senses, rejecting both his ugly, nativist populism and the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz.

There is no shortage of Republican leaders today — the most prominent is House Speaker Paul D. Ryan — who represent Reaganesque conservatism. (Ryan has pointedly refused to endorse Trump.) As far as I'm concerned, they are the real Republican Party, in exile. I only hope that they — and I — can return from the wilderness after November.