Never Trumper Tom Nichols Begs Republicans to Vote for Dems to ‘Save the GOP’

In a Washington Post column, Harvard professor and adamant anti-Trump voice Tom Nichols told Republicans to rescue their party by voting against it.

Nichols wrote that the GOP has been “captured by the personality cult that has congealed around President Trump” and has become “utterly submissive to its erratic but powerful prime minister.”

“Republican elected officials, from Congress to the state houses,” Nichols said, “have chosen to become little more than enablers for an out of control executive branch.”

He does, however, propose a dramatic solution:

The only way to put a stop to this is to vote against the GOP in every race, at every level in 2018. It’s tough medicine. But as someone who’s voted Republican for nearly 40 years, who favors limited government and public integrity, and who believes America still needs a credible, responsible center-right party, I see no alternative.

“Every vote for any GOP candidate will be a signal from the rank and file that elected Republican officials should remain supine while Trump takes a hatchet to the American political system,” Nichols continued:

By definition, a vote for any Republican candidate in 2018 is a vote for family separation, tax cuts without corresponding budget cuts, daily insult theatrics in the Oval Office and porn-star payoffs. It’s a vote to ignore Russian corruption of our elections. It’s also a vote, no matter where in the country it’s cast, for a Trump-compliant successor to Speaker Paul Ryan, who’ll preside over the continuing farce in which Trumpists like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) remain as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, ready and willing to put party over country.

Furthermore, “it’s a vote giving Trump license to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III the day after Election Day.”

Nichols urged “real Republicans” and “real conservatives” to preserve conservatism by putting liberals in power. He said, “Unless Republican voters are willing to transfer power to another party for at least a cycle, their party will sputter out over the next few years, leaving nothing but wreckage and hoping, as a last resort, that the cause of actual conservatism will be carried forward by the one branch of government that conservatives, traditionally, do not trust: unelected judges.”