#NeverTrump Potential Third-Party Candidate David French: ‘I’m Voting For Trump’ [Video]
David French, a possible third-party conservative candidate for president, is on record saying that he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election.
French made this commitment to a Huffington Post interviewer around the time of the Iowa Caucus which occurred on February 1.
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is touting French, a National Review writer, as a viable third-party candidate. Both publications are at the vanguard of the #NeverTrump movement on the right, given Trump’s lack of ideological purity as they see things. The New York real estate mogul is a former Democrat and Independent.
In a tweet on Thursday, French accused presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump of “inciting violence” in an apparent reference to the attacks on Trump fans outside the San Jose Convention Center.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has called any third-party run as a “suicide mission.” Others insist that a spoiler candidate will make it easier for Hillary Clinton to win the White House for the Democrats as Obama’s third term.
Parenthetically, MNSBC host Chris Matthews predicts that the news media will declare that Hillary Clinton is the general election nominee well before the polls close in California on Tuesday, much to the dismay of the #NeverHillary movement.
David French has a stellar resume, which includes Army service in Iraq, a Harvard law degree, and success as a best-selling author and constitutional attorney.
Often classified as “neocons,” Kristol and his like-minded colleagues are generally globalists and interventionists, while Trump is running on an America First platform.
According to the liberal website Slate, the #NeverTrump movement is a dodge for Kristol Republicans to avoid admitting they’d prefer Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.
“Kristol’s principled case against supporting Trump because he is unsuited for the presidency falls apart when, in scrambling for an alternative, he reached for one of his pals on the nearest conservative-magazine masthead. And you are not qualified to be president if your consideration involved Bill Kristol asking a few months before the election, ‘Dude, what about you?'”
Byron York of the Washington Examiner noted that “French has not yet said whether he will run. But if he does, or if someone else takes on the anti-Trump mantle, the new party will operate on a set of wishful-thinking scenarios in which victory depends on one improbable event after another.”
Foes of the #NeverTrump movement have argued, moreover, that Beltway pundits like Kristol have accomplished little to stop the Obama liberal agenda.
While Trump has campaigned against one-sided international trade deals that have sent many thousands of job overseas, David French wrote in late March that “Clinton, by contrast, would probably maintain the trade-policy status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American families.”
As alluded to above, when asked by Huff Post what he would do if Trump became the GOP nominee, David French responded in this way.
“I’ll vote for Donald Trump. I’m not one of these Republicans or conservatives who says ‘I’m going to take my ball and go home.’ As much as I don’t trust that Donald Trump is going to go into office to advance the conservative values he claims to have recently embraced, and as many concerns as I have about some of his other positions, he’s not in the same league as a Hillary Clinton, who I believe should be indicated before the election for her mishandling of classified information, or a Bernie Sanders, a socialist who proposed one of the largest government expansions and tax increases in human history — and he’s just getting started with his socialist platform. So there’s tremendous differences between the parties. This is about the GOP primary in my mind…once the GOP primary is over, it is an entirely different political race.”
What do you do if @realDonaldTrump gets the nomination? "I vote for Donald Trump." David French https://t.co/q23TlzpWda
— Dan Scavino Jr.??? (@DanScavino) June 2, 2016
In March, however, David French acknowledged that he would be taking his ball and going home, and in so doing signed on to the #NeverTrump movement as detailed in an article posted at the National Review website. His view on voting Trump changed in part over social issues and Trump’s character flaws including bragging about “his adulterous sexual conquests.”
Trump also apparently alienated French and others when, in an emotionally charged broadside in the February presidential debate in South Carolina, which he since tried to walk back, he accused the Bush administration of lying the country into the war in Iraq.
Most, if not, all neocons hold to the belief that the Iraq War is still worthy of defense.
Is potential independent candidate David French the answer to @ananavarro's prayers?"I need to pray a little harder" https://t.co/aKV8l9PSNR
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) June 1, 2016
David French also separately immersed himself in controversy when a National Review colleague dismissively suggested that white working class neighborhoods hard-hit by the decline in manufacturing jobs, and which tend to support Donald Trump for president, “deserve to die.”
According to David French in a National Reviewcolumn, based on his experience living in Kentucky and Tennessee, “These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say.”
In a follow-up, French wrote that “There is an enormous problem with self-destructive behavior in the white working-class — indeed, in poor and working-class families of all races. There is an enormous problem with entitlement.”
“While professional Democrats advocate for the use of government power on behalf of their base, professional Republicans like Mr. French seem to argue that their own base deserves what’s coming and, as penance, should be left defenseless,” Breitbart News suggested.
[Photo by Jae C. Hong/AP]
