The Republican dilemma

Donald Trump presents a lot of problems for conservative Republicans, but National Review's Mario Loyola may have a solution for them, albeit an unorthodox one, in his editorial, "Trump and Reconciliation".

Here is the problem:

Even if you think Trump would be a disaster, a general-election position of Never Trump has significant downsides for a Republican member of Congress, not least of which is that it makes Hillary Clinton’s victory all the more inevitable, and the larger her margin of victory, the more harmful will be the effect on down-ballot races. This is not the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was willing to embrace conservative proposals in the service of a broad majority agenda. Leading lights such as the brilliant Ira Magaziner, Bill Clinton’s muse, have been replaced by the likes of Elizabeth Warren, angry enforcer of hard-left ideology.

With this increasingly leftward Democratic party, allowing Hillary to nominate the successor to Antonin Scalia would be one of the worst disasters in the Republican party’s history. It would give progressives a majority on the Court for the first time since 1986. Take a moment to think about the constitutional devastation wrought during the nearly 50 years of progressive dominance of the Supreme Court that began in 1937, when Franklin D. Roosevelt intimidated the Court into abdicating its most solemn responsibility, that of protecting the Constitution’s limits on government power. It was then that the original Constitution was overthrown and replaced with the progressive scheme of protectionism for politically organized special interests, which was the point of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and of its conversion of the Commerce Clause into an unlimited source of government power.

On the other hand:

The other side of the argument, of course, is that Trump is himself a danger to the Constitution. One can hardly be blamed for worrying about this. Trump promises heavy government intervention on virtually every issue, and he doesn’t seem the least bit concerned with legal technicalities. He often strikes a decidedly authoritarian pose, and his supporters seem to love it. He threatens to change laws and interfere heavily in commerce, and he shows even less interest in the Constitution’s separation of powers than Obama has. Where the succession of power in American democracy has long presupposed magnanimity to one’s critics and opponents, Trump brags that he will go after his naysayers. He doesn’t wear a Fascist’s uniform, and his supporters aren’t organized in uniformed paramilitary cadres, but the nationalist, socialistic, state-heavy, strong-leader tendencies that led to Fascism and Nazism are clearly visible among supporters of both Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Solution:

Still, the best outcome of this election, from the point of view of a traditional conservative Republican, is for Trump and the GOP to have a landslide victory and then for Trump to resign immediately in favor of Vice President Mike Pence, who is both eminently qualified to be president and a real conservative.

That’s not going to happen, but something similar could — namely, impeachment. 

Republicans, especially Republicans of a truly conservative stripe, should support Trump, but keep that impeachment bullet handy. If Trump turns into the disaster many of us expect, nobody would blame the GOP for turning on their own president.