The Candidate Who Must Not be Named is having a hard time getting GOP backing. By the time he clinched the nomination last week, said Candidate (I still gag at the thought of naming him) had insulted everyone in the party except a congressional janitor named Lou. Then said Candidate called Lou “a wimp and a disgrace to his profession,” and the sweep was complete. But who would support a candidate like that?
Not Jeb Bush. Not Paul Ryan. Not anyone whose party loyalty was trumped by a creeping sense of doom and waves of nausea. Perhaps the Candidate Who Must Not be Named should look to past pundits for support. What would he find?
Our Founding Fathers were men of great foresight. Their uncanny genius let them see into the future to create a nation that would outlast its occasional crooks and frequent fools. Somehow they foresaw every problem, we are told, every foible. So it’s not surprising to find that the Founders saw this particular candidate coming.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are — hey what’s that up ahead? OMG! Nooooo, don’t even think of nominating that joker! Are you people serious? Wait till Hamilton hears this one!”
But Jefferson wasn’t the only Founding Father with the foresight to dread the looming election. Consider what Patrick Henry had to say: “As for me, give me liberty or give me death. For that matter, give me anything other than that big-mouth buffoon in the White House. Jeez, what’s this country coming to? London, here I come.”
Lincoln, of course, had the greatest foresight of all. “You can fool some of the people all of the time, Lincoln said, “and all of the people some of the time. But this guy’s a world-class jerk. Did he really talk about his privates in public? For this we fought at Gettysburg?”
And so, we hear our founders spinning in their graves. But certain voices rise above, voices that did not merely foresee a clownish billionaire hijacking a political party but who, like some of us, find the whole debacle kinda funny.
“Speak softly,” Teddy Roosevelt said, “and when the big-haired guy with the brainless blather speaks, carry an air sickness bag.”
Not to be outdone, FDR also weighed in. “We have nothing to fear,” the four-time president famously said, “but fear itself. Oh, and some loony loudmouth who talks about building a wall on our border and can’t open his trap without embarrassing America. What? He’s the GOP nominee! Hahahahahaha …”
As you might expect, Harry Truman also foresaw trouble. “The buck stops here,” Truman said of the White House, “but only when the bucks finally stop gushing like a mighty river into our politics will we be free of bloviating windbags who think they can buy democracy.”
And then there was John F. Kennedy. “My father always told me that all businessmen are sons of bitches,” he once said. But JFK, like so many of us, reserved a special loathing for this particular businessman. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” Kennedy said, “Ask what you can do to keep this hopelessly unqualified egomaniac out of the Oval Office.”
Savvy Republicans might note that, other than Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, most of the above quotes came from Democrats. We know how our current GOP crop trembles at the thought of November, but what would their exalted Ronald Reagan say?
“Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” Reagan said in his farewell address, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears. Not like SOME candidates I know, who shall remain nameless.”
