Conservative starlet Tomi Lahren has contributed a great deal to the modern conservative movement, and she has undoubtedly helped bring a lot of young men and women into the Trump fold. We don’t begrudge her a place at the table, and we still think it was slight overkill for Glenn Beck to fire her because she has pro-choice views. There’s room for that under the Big Tent, even if we personally find pro-abortionists to be misguided and wrong.
On the other hand…
Lahren is out there right now saying that Trump should not pick a pro-life candidate for the Supreme Court and that, furthermore, the Republican Party should not support such a nominee. That’s beyond a strict “opinion,” and goes into a strategic claim of fact. And it is one with which we simply cannot agree.
“This president is winning for the American people on the economy, foreign policy, and tax reform,” Lahren said last week. “These are areas that benefit all Americans regardless of religion or social beliefs. If we continue to focus on these things and immigration, we’ll sail into 2020 with all three branches in our control. That’s how we get things done for the American people, that’s how we win.”
“We lose,” she concluded, “when we start tampering with social issues.”
There is some wisdom in what Lahren is saying, we won’t deny that. The GOP and conservatives in general have been on the losing end of the culture wars for a long time. Lahren isn’t the only one to recommend that Republicans drop the anti-gay marriage, pro-Christian views that have been associated with the party for decades. And we don’t deny that some strong portion of the Trump base is made up of people who do not necessarily share those views. Some portion that believes that Mike Pence, for instance, makes for a strange counterpart to the president.
Here’s what Lahren is missing. The fact is that Trump did not win the presidency – or even the nomination – in spite of evangelical, traditional Republican support. He won because of that. He beat Ted Cruz in the primaries among those VERY demographics! Why? Because Christians believed that Trump was a more authentic man of the faith than Cruz? Hardly. He won because Christians believed that he was the man that could beat Clinton and actually go to war for their beliefs. He was the imperfect warrior in all his glory, and he has yet to let the Christian right down.
Trump could pick the Pope for his Supreme Court justice nominee and it wouldn’t guarantee the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
But the president knows that this is the time and this is the place to make a stand that could change the face of American law forever. If the Supreme Court overturns this – the worst of their decisions since the Founding – it would not make abortion illegal. It would hand the power back to the states, and thus, back to the people. That’s what democracy should be about, and that’s why the decision was so very wrong to begin with.
