Conservative calls on anti-Trump Republicans to stop playing around and endorse Biden

Nikki Haley's campaign may have been the last stand of the Reaganite wing of the GOP against the MAGA takeover, but one conservative said more traditional Republicans must consider doing the unthinkable and back President Joe Biden.

Mona Charen, a former White House staffer for Ronald Reagan and now a columnist for The Bulwark, called out another veteran of that presidential administration who lamented the choices in this year's election and concluded that a principled conservative must reject Trump in favor of a third-party challenger.

"The world might look very different if traditional Republicans had been willing to stand firm for their values when they came under assault from an ignorant, cruel demagogue," Charen wrote. "So I was briefly optimistic when I saw that an honest-to-goodness Reaganite, John Lehman, who served as secretary of the Navy under Reagan, had weighed in [with a Wall Street Journal op-ed]. The headline was promising: 'Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump.' But after that bold beginning, the subhead was deflating: 'He also didn’t care much for Biden. Like me, he’d be looking for a strong third-party candidate to support.'"

Charen agrees that Reagan, like most conservatives in the 1980s, were bothered by Biden's opposition to failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and supported a nuclear freeze, but she's baffled that Lehman would not endorse the one candidate who actually has a chance of stopping a candidate he believes to be a genuine threat to constitutional order and democracy itself.

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"One might suppose that given all of that and so much more, Lehman would counsel that Trump’s reelection would be a disaster and accordingly, that he would vote for Biden," Charen wrote. "It would be bracing to hear people say, as Dick Cheney has, that 'In our nation’s 236-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.' But no, Lehman makes a feeble accusation in the final paragraph that Biden has 'turned his platform over to Bernie Sanders' and accordingly, Lehman will vote for the No Labels candidate."

"That’s rubbish. Biden has done no such thing," she added. "Lehman, like so many who should know better, is failing to take responsibility for the decision we must all make. He’s treating his vote as a resume item, unwilling to tarnish his conservative bona fides by voting for the internal enemy. His longing for purity is overwhelming his judgment. If Trump is reelected, none of the things he worked for as Navy secretary is safe. The country will be in secure hands with a reelected Biden. But with a reelected Trump, we risk our most cherished freedoms and traditions."