Replies

I am a committed Conservative. Check my history of Free Republic posts. I have been a consistently conservative Freeper for almost 16 years (I was a lurker for a couple of years before that). When I was in college, I had the honor of actively supporting and campaigning for Ronald Reagan for President, both in 1980 and 1984. It has been all downhill since then.

I am also one of the roughly 60 to 70% of Republican voters (depending on the poll) who do not currently support Trump. For Trump to win the Republican nomination he is going to have to win over at least some of us. For Trump to then beat Hillary he is going to have to convince nearly all of us to actively and enthusiastically support his campaign.

I have an open mind on Trump. Moreover, if Trump is going to be the Republican nominee I desperately want to believe that he is a conservative. If we don't elect a conservative President next year then I don't see any way that our nation can come back.

Four Supreme Court Justices (one conservative, one moderate, and two far left wing liberals) will be over 80 years old next year. Of the remaining five Justices, two are young far left-wing liberals appointed by Obama and one (Roberts) is at best a moderate. If even three of the four octogenarian Justices are replaced with young liberals then a far left-wing oligarchy will be ruling the Court and every aspect of our lives for the next 30 years.

On the other hand, we need to replace all four of the octogenarian Justices with truly conservative Justices to take back the Court. Historically, Republican Presidents have batted no better than 50/50 picking conservative Supreme Court nominees.

So all of you Trump supporters, don't attack us non-believers, convince us.

I know and have known many wealthy New York Republicans in my life. I spent the first half of the 1990s working for Wall Street firms. In my experience, most wealthy Republicans from New York City and other large northeastern cities ideologically fall somewhere between Guiliani and Bloomberg, in what used to be referred to as the Nelson Rockefeller wing of the Republican party. I honestly have seen nothing of Trump's record before his current campaign to suggest that he is any more conservative than Michael Bloomberg (another New York billionaire who ran for office as a Republican).

Why do you believe that Trump is a conservative and not just a very gifted salesman who knows how to tell his audience what they want to hear?

I totally get what you’re saying about Supreme Court Justices. The problem is many of them have turned out to be major disappointments and outright fools and frauds - even when appointed by Republicans. Possibly this is because they become part of the party circuit in Washington DC and another part may be because some of them do not have paper trails because they’re nonentities. The paper trail did in Bork who would probably have been our greatest Justice if allowed to serve. So, in my opinion, we should go for the best candidate and cross our fingers when it comes to appointing the Supremes.