I’m hesitant to put this in print, but the idea has kept me awake much of the night. I meant to mention the idea in yesterday’s post about state legislators flipping their party affiliations after an election, but but, as too often happens, I was rushing because I had other responsibilities to fulfill and left it out.
I wouldn’t call this post an Ethics Quiz; I’d say it’s a thought experiment. Here it is:
What if Donald Trump either announced that he was no longer a Republican, or threatened to do so?
There is nothing stopping him from switching parties, or declaring that he is President under the banner of his own party, whether he called it “MAGA” or something else. The Constitution didn’t have a word about parties, and the Founders generally thought they were something to avoid. Trump could even cloak his radical decision in the spirit of the Founders. “I am not a President for Republicans or Democrats, but for all Americans!” he could say in the announcement, a national address. What would happen? The mind boggles, or at least mine does. Here are some thoughts and questions…
1.Would doing this be unethical in the same sense that the post about the legislators explained? I don’t think so, because the Presidency shouldn’t be a partisan, and certainly not a hyper-partisan position as it has been under President Biden. One reason the 2024 election has been called a re-alignment election is that Trump has shattered what had been long-standing party alliances and loyalties. Trump was a Democrat for most of his life, and is neither strictly conservative or progressive. An argument could be made that he already has created a new party: he just has to make that fact explicit.
2. There is a precedent for this, sort-of. The populist President Trump resembles in many ways, Andrew Jackson, eliminated the Jeffersonian Democrats, now referred to in history books as the “Democrat-Republicans,” and also drove the last nail into the metaphorical coffin of the Federalist Party. “Jacksonians” were a new political breed. Between his election in 1828 and Lincoln’s election in 1860, the old parties didn’t elect a single President as the Whigs, the Jacksonian Democrats and the rising abolitionist party, the Republicans, battled for dominance, with the Whigs falling by the roadside along with some other short-lived contenders like the Know-Nothings.
3. Would the unprecedented decision be ethical, then? I have concluded that Trump discarding the Republican label would be the equivalent of throwing a monkey wrench into a machine’s works when the machine is archaic, malfunctioning, but too expensive and difficult to replace until it breaks down. That is not to say that its a good idea, responsible, or wise. The result would be chaos and uncertaintly, and chaos and uncertainty in a government are to be avoided. Still, we have had chaos and uncertaintly for the past 8 years, with rumo being either the catalyst for much of it or the creator. One reason not to vote for Trump again that I believe would have had a decisive impact if the Democrats not been trying to defend a clown show Presidency while running an obvious incompetent against him is that the U.S. needs a solid, reliable, trustworthy and predictable White House presence, and that is not, and could never be, Donald Trump.
4. Depending on chaos to result in a better status quo rather than a worse one is irrational. One can guess, one can try to predict, but it’s like flipping a coin, or rather flipping a million coins.
5. The threat to flip parties, however, might be a useful bargaining chip and bluffing strategy as Trump has to negotiate within his own party, with the MAGA revolutionaries like Steve Bannon, and the Democrats as well. You know how Trump loves bargaining chips, and boy, will he need all he can get.
6. I confess: I would love to see Trump float the possibility just to see and hear heads exploding all over the country at the prospect. Talk about violating norms! I am convinced that Trump would at least be intrigued by the idea if only for its trolling potential.
What do you think? One thing I’m sure of: this hypothetical will prove beyond any doubt whether Ethics Alarms has any deeper cultural reach than I think it does.
Ethics Alarms 
Instead of announcing or threatening something like this, how about openly discussing the need for a third party which intentionally crosses the political aisle, like Trump seems to have done, and resides smack dead in the political center. It would be a great thing to push the wackadoodle extremes back to being social outcasts carrying their signs of doom and gloom on the street corner with all the other nuts.
It seems to me that starting the discussion is the right thing to do and then let “We the People” either make it happen or stick with the two party system.
This movement could easily use tactics that have been used by the extremes against “We the People” for the last 15 years, either you follow “We the People” back to the political center or you’ll be tarred as Scarlett Letter social outcasts.
“We the People” have tremendous political power if we choose to join together and exert that power.
Has Trump crossed the political aisle? It seens like he’s won over most of the hard right and the independents, but few of the moderate right and very little of the left.
Gamereg wrote, “Has Trump crossed the political aisle?“
I guess I have to ask you this; do you actually think that Trump is a run-of-the-mill Republican or even a Reagan Republican? I don’t think he is. I think he’s an Independent that leans conservative and he’s wearing the cloak of a Republican because it’s politically expedient. So has Trump crossed the political aisle, nope I don’t think so, I don’t think he was never bound by it.
By the way; look back at where Trump came from, politically. Personally, I think he’s been an Independent that leans conservative, I bet he voted for Democrats and Republicans when he was younger.
Gamereg wrote, “It seems like he’s won over most of the hard right and the independents, but few of the moderate right and very little of the left.”
Trump has been openly reaching out across the great political chasm and building a bridge towards classic liberals while he puts the extreme progressives in their well-deserved place. Trump appears to be gaining allies from that classic liberal demographic by plugging in rhetoric similar to this…
…into his usual loose cannon mouth trolling. I think some moderate classic liberals are paying attention, you bet they’re cautiously optimistic, but the point is that they are paying attention and Trump knows it. Heck, even leftist propagandists media outlets are putting forth an olive branches and the Republicans are equally being cautiously optimistic, but they’re paying attention.
The overall point here is, this election has forced us to pay more attention to each other.
The lunatic extremist are gonna remain loud mouthed and extreme for a while and the pure blood TDS anti-Trumpers are not gonna change their “Trump is an insurrectionist, treasonous, fascist, Hitler” rhetoric anytime soon; however, I honestly don’t think you’ve been paying close attention to what’s been happening to the moderates, especially on the Democratic Party side of the aisle. I know life long liberals that are calling for a new party in the middle because the lunatic extremists took over their party. There are true life-long classic liberals openly abandoning the Democratic Party and becoming either Republicans or Independents. People are moving away from the lunacy of Democratic Party dominated political bubbles of the USA and towards more moderate or conservative areas of the country, they’re voting with their feet and taking their tax dollars with them!
Does that mean that everything is going to be hunky-dory and pleasantly civil in less than a month when Trump is inaugurated, heck no, in fact if observed patterns repeat themselves, as I think they are, I think it’s quite likely to get worse in the short term before it gets a better in the long term. As I said it’s gonna be a while before the extremists are reigned in by the moderate middle and a while before the gullible brainwashed TDS suffering morons realize they’ve been played for fools by immoral power hungry totalitarian propagandists.
You’re welcome to disagree but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.
It seems to me that the ethical voter votes for candidates who have created the more persuasive argument that embodies both common sense and strategic thinking. The person who systematically makes a choice among the candidates based solely on party affiliation (meaning party and nothing else) is the unethical voter. The ethical voter evaluates that for which the candidate stands relative to he party and if necessary votes for the candidate from the party that most aligns with their beliefs regardless of party. For that reason the ethical voter should be able to anticipate the possibility of their party’s candidate jumping ship at some point. The only unethical candidate is the one who breaches a trust between him or herself and the voter by failing to live up to the promises they made and not the label they ran under.