Republican voters considering a vote for former President Donald Trump on policy platform grounds received a stern check from a New York Times columnist who argued their candidate is spiraling downward.
Staff writer Katherine Miller told conservatives who are put off by Trump's personality that they should consider his violent rhetoric and repeated falsehoods, among them that Haitian immigrants eat pets, rather than their preference for Republican Party policy they may not get.
"If he wins like this," Miller wrote, "how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted."
Trump's increasingly dark rhetoric has seen him warn of World War III, invasions of murders and gang occupation that leave local law enforcement officials terrified, Miller noted.
These fear-mongering tactics muddy the political waters and make it unclear what kind of president his voters could elect in November, she argued.
"Winning a presidential race can become a force that reshapes politics itself, and in particular with Mr. Trump’s charismatic, endlessly demanding presence, his previous victory has shaped policy and politics for the last eight years, in and out of office, particularly around his hardened, transactional view of people and power," Miller wrote.
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"There’s this way that Mr. Trump bounces between fact and fiction, where the story he tells is that nobody’s motivated by much of anything other than a desire to get something from another person or the United States itself, and people who claim otherwise are in on the racket or naïve chumps — and real policy flows from it."
Trump's rhetoric also makes it difficult to decipher what it is Republican voters really want, she argued.
"Do voters really want mass deportation, with realities of sprawling detention camps, or for Mr. Trump to try again to end DACA, as Stephen Miller told The Times last year that he would do?" she asked.
Whether or not they do, it could be what they get.
"A second Trump win would probably make the G.O.P. more nationalistic and zero sum, swaths of the country would get more intense in reaction and the policies could be quite dark," she concluded.
"Even if a lot of voters just punched 'Trump' thinking first and foremost of consumer prices."