A former speechwriter for multiple Republican presidents said this week former President Donald Trump presents a greater risk to his party than Vice President Kamala Harris.
Peter Wehner, who served as a speechwriter under three Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush — made no secret of his total disdain for Trump and the far-right MAGA movement in an Atlantic opinion piece released Tuesday night.
"It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a far-left liberal," Wehner argues. "She is neither, and if she's elected president, she is likely to govern from the center-left, at least on most things. But the strongest conservative case for voting for Harris doesn't have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris."
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The 63-year-old Wehner adds, "Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That's no surprise, because his desire isn't to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground."
Wehner argued many of the policies that Trump champions — tariffs, protectionism, mass deportations — are a big departure from the pro-free trade, pro-immigration conservatism of the Reagan and Bush years.
"It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism," Wehner explains. "Reagan was a fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union…. Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the world's most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he's rooting for his friend Putin."
Wehner continued, "Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term."