We have talked a lot on The Show about moderate Republicans who are stuck with this election cycle — torn between voting for a Republican candidate they do not like and Democrat they largely do not agree with.
But Arizona Republic columnist Phil Boas says there are plenty of good reasons for moderate Republicans to support Donald Trump this election, and they shouldn’t be ashamed of it.
Boaz joined The Show along with editorial page editor Elvia Díaz to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Phil, I want to start with you and your kind of main argument here. You are a moderate, a Republican. And if you’ve read what you’ve written, you know you’re not a giant fan of Donald Trump. So tell us, what’s your argument here? Why shouldn’t Republicans like you apologize for voting for him?
PHIL BOAS: Trump’s national populism has been a real conundrum for any of us who have sort of seen ourselves as part of the establishment Republican Party, the old party that has now pretty much disappeared. We’ve seen a lot of high-profile defections from the party and mostly from that establishment wing.
For me, though, I might have gone the same way, except we didn’t get the left we used to have. The left had turned more populist, had become more liberal, and had become more of a threat to the things that we value on the right, more hostile to the culture on the right. And so for me, there was a feeling — it’s the old Donald Rumsfeld saying: You don’t get to pick the army you go to war with.
And I wouldn’t pick Donald Trump to be the general of this army. But we are in a cultural war with the left, if you’re coming from the perspective of the right. And so to fight that war, you have to push back against some of the things that are being done on the left.
GILGER: Let me ask you one follow-up question there that I think is sort of the obvious question in most people’s minds when they hear you make this argument from the perspective you’re coming from, which is the concern about preserving democracy, which this election and the last were largely framed around. Do you think Donald Trump is a serious threat to democracy?
BOAS: I think what happened on Jan. 6 shows that he is a threat to democracy. He played with fire there. He can be a truly foolish man. But I think the Democrats are an enormous threat to democracy. And I would just say this: Imagine the day that Kamala Harris gets in office. Democrats have taken Congress, and then they put in place a plan that Harris has endorsed, and that is to reform the U.S. Supreme Court by imposing term limits that would immediately take out three conservative justices and put in three liberal justices and create basically one-party rule in the country. Imagine how destabilizing that would be. That’s a threat to democracy.
GILGER: Elvia, let me turn to you and your take here, especially beginning with that point about democracy. Do you think that those are equal concerns about preserving democracy going forward?
ELVIA DÍAZ: No, they’re not. One of the things that exasperated me about this column, but also the fact that I thought I liked it because it offers a glimpse into the minds, perhaps, of people voting for Donald Trump. We see the polls that are still very close, very tight. And in my mind, I just can’t fathom the idea of half the country voting for Donald Trump.
So reading this column and obviously talking to Phil on a daily basis, it offers me that perspective, and it offers readers that perspective as well. I do not agree, of course. And almost anything in how he outlines the column here is very interesting.
You will see Phil is saying here: “Don’t apologize for voting Republican.” Well, on the surface, of course I would agree with something like that if we were talking about the old-guard Republicans who talked about conservative values, who talked about being fiscally responsible. But we’re talking about Donald Trump. We’re not talking about Republicans. We’re talking about Trump Republicans and a danger to democracy.
And we don’t have to imagine that. We have already seen what he looks like and what he’s capable of. So two different things here: Republicans and Trump Republicans.
GILGER: Phil, let me turn to you here because I think one of the more interesting things you say in this column — and you started to make this argument already here — is that both of these candidates are what you call extremists. Talk about where you see the Harris campaign and agenda as extreme.
BOAS: Well, Kamala Harris, first of all, didn’t tell the truth about Joe Biden and wasn’t forthcoming about his mental acuity, that he really wasn’t fit to carry on as president. And the Democrats covered that up for a long time. And they’ve kept her in bubble wrap. She’s barely said anything. She’s running for the most powerful job in the world, and she’s not talking to the American people, barely talking to them.
And when she finally did come out with an economic plan, she comes out with price controls, which is one of the most proven disasters there could be in economics. When you impose price controls, you create food lines. You create gas lines, as Nixon did in the 1970s that I remember well as a kid.
And then on abortion, I mean, we used to be moderate in this country about abortion, but now the Democrats and Harris want to take the most extreme line on abortion: no holds barred, no regulation on abortion, no protection for the unborn, even the viable unborn. And so if you’re a Republican and you’re looking at this, you think that there are real problems on the left and a real threat on the left.
DÍAZ: There’s no equivalence here. I will say it almost is a false equivalency. We have a (former) president whose vision of America is incredibly dark. It’s gloomy, dividing the country into them versus us. I mean, the former president keeps talking about immigrants eating the pets in Ohio when it is absolutely not true.
What I want to hear also from Trump Republicans is to imagine how the country will be under a President Trump. We only hear about what a Harris presidency would be because she has actually put out some policy proposals. I haven’t seen that for Donald Trump, other than lies and diversion and rhetoric and tweets about or his post on his social media in capital letters, saying that women are unhappy and that they are not “sexy” because of that.
Oh my goodness. Talk about policy, talk about how he is going to control gas prices. The only thing that we have gotten clear from him is how he’s going to deal with immigration, which is to deport everyone here undocumented. Massive deportations. That’s it. I haven’t heard any real policy positions coming out of his mouth outlining that for Americans and how a presidency will look under him. I haven’t seen that.
GILGER: Phil, let me ask you about the other side of that, because I asked you about why you thought that Kamala Harris and her agenda were extreme. What about on the other side, looking at Trump’s agenda and what Elvia was pointing out there?
What makes you say, “I am OK to vote for this person in this agenda,” as opposed to writing someone in or voting for a third party or just not voting at the top of the ticket, as we’ve heard many moderate Republicans say they’re going to have to do?
BOAS: Well, I’m not comfortable at all with my vote. And a lot of the Republicans I talked to are not comfortable with it. We have real reservations about it. And I think it would have been a lot easier had Joe Biden done what he promised in his inaugural, and that is having tried to unite the country.
Instead, he pushed out this very left-wing progressive agenda that was an assault on conservative values. So you may have to make a judgment here as a Republican. If the Democrats get control of the federal government again, they’re going to set the path so that they control it for the next generation.
They want to bring in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states that would create new Senate seats that are all Democrat. That would make it virtually impossible to get Republican control of the Senate for a very long time. And it could be many, many years once Donald Trump is gone, that you could really begin to get Republican values into the federal government again.
So you don’t have good choices here. It’s the lesser of two evils. And this is a battle we have ongoing, we have this every week on the editorial board. So you’re getting a peek at what Elvia and I argue about every week.
GILGER: It’s an interesting peek. All right. We will leave it there for now. That is Phil Boaz, columnist for The Arizona Republic, joining editorial page editor Elvia Díaz this morning. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you both for letting us take a peek inside those arguments. I very much appreciate it.
BOAS: Thank you.
DÍAZ: My pleasure.
