Not quite an endorsement
There is a way to do it. Here, let me show Asa Hutchinson how. You say:
“As a proud lifelong Republican, and a true-believing Republican still and evermore, I never would have dreamed that circumstances would arise by which my party would nominate for president a vulgar, megalomaniacal candidate who blatantly proclaims a politics of grievance and resentment and who tried to defy and overthrow our democratic process.
“The Democrats have never set the bar lower for us than with their nomination of the failed and inept Joe Biden. Yet Donald Trump implausibly drags my party under that bar somehow. He forces me to make the nose-holding pragmatic choice to vote … not for the horrid Joe Biden, exactly, but for his name on the ballot because it isn’t Donald Trump—for him only by virtue of being against him, while a lot, it’s less than I am against the unfit candidate destroying our party, and, if we let him, our country.
“The sooner we Republicans rid ourselves of the cancer of Trump, the sooner we can begin to recover. Biden is the bitterest pill, even if we must swallow it for four long years.
“America is in trouble, but we will revive. The fastest way under these circumstances is to spend the next four years enduring and deploring Biden’s ineptitude—purging ourselves in a way— rather than living with the even greater risks of Trump’s madness.” Let’s say the Democrats were the ones who nominated a monstrosity like Trump and that the Republicans nominated Ron DeSantis, whose smarmy demagogic right-wing politics I abhor.
Could I vote for the monstrosity? No.
But could I bring myself to vote for DeSantis and say so? It would be grudging. It would be hard. But I could do it and would.
I’m trying to be somewhere between fair and charitable to Hutchinson. It takes a good man to come to my LifeQuest class on politics, knowing it’s to his left, and, after definitively and admirably declaring he could not and would not vote for Trump this fall, proclaim to this mostly Democratic audience that Biden is utterly failed as a leader.
After he deplored Trump, then deplored Biden, and said the problem in American politics was the weight of both, I praised him for the repeated pragmatism he applied for eight years as governor of Arkansas. Then I asked whether it wasn’t the pragmatically responsible thing for him to face the truth that either Biden or Trump would be president, and that the choice was absolutely and unavoidably binary, and that no one would be worse than Trump, not even Biden.
After the class cheered the question, Asa said a position of none-of-theabove was a meaningful one. He said it demanded reform in his Republican Party. He said it spared him any false intimation of Biden’s election-worthiness. And, he said, there’s much yet to happen before the election that could affect what needs to be said.
Why, he said, Trump might reform, which was one of his finer quips.
In the meantime, he stressed that he was not alone among vanquished Republican candidates in not backing Trump but also declining to embrace Biden. Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are in the boat with him, though Asa said he expected Haley would endorse Trump in due time.
He said—and this was the most interesting part—that these decisions are never final until they’re final. There might come a time when he’d find it advisable or necessary to declare a choice. But he sure does dread it.
Here’s what I could see happening late in the campaign, in late September or early October: Leading Republicans encompassing top White House officials and Cabinet members in Trump’s first term, along with two or three vanquished GOP primary challengers to Trump, including Hutchinson, would call a joint news conference to stress Trump’s utter unfitness for the presidency, and the frightfulness of his return, and to say that they’ll vote for Biden on the sole basis that he is not Trump and that they believe serious well-meaning Republicans and swing voters should do the same.
It might do not one bit of good except to serve the sense of patriotic responsibility in the endorsers, but that’s something.
A class member asked Hutchinson: You say both these candidates are unable to inspire the American people. Do you see anyone who could?
“Asa Hutchinson,” said Asa Hutchinson.
I asked him later if he was, by that declaration, announcing for 2028.
“If so, you noticed that the audience reaction was laughter.”
A self-aware, self-effacing politician who speaks easily but candidly to an ideologically opposing audience, producing a healthy laugh or two—that’s a good man and a good day, even if he won’t let himself get browbeaten into saying that disdaining Trump means he must say those three foul words— “vote” and “for” and “Biden.”