Joe Walsh announces he’s out of the Republican Primary, ends his campaign by saying he’d rather have a socialist in the White House than Donald Trump.
This is a news article by the editor.
Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) becomes the second GOP challenger to drop out of the presidential race. This follows a dismal performance in the Iowa caucus, where he failed to garner a single delegate. This leaves former Gov. Bill Weld (R-Mass.) as the sole remaining GOP challenger against Donald Trump. While Bill Weld also had a particularly poor showing in Iowa, the organizing efforts of his campaign have chiefly focused on New Hampshire, where the results will likely dictate the future of his campaign.
Joe Walsh’s failed presidential campaign does not come necessarily as a surprise. His past political positions made a poor fit for a “Never Trump” challenge to Donald Trump. His single term as a member of Congress could easily be characterized as Pre-Trump Trumpism. Walsh’s rhetoric in the early parts of the decade was very similar to the rhetoric Trump would eventually adopt as a candidate in 2016.
Further complicating Joe Walsh’s presidential efforts was his support for Donald Trump’s candidacy and continued support for the first year of his presidency. Throughout this period, he hosted The Joe Walsh Show on conservative radio, where he was often more hard-right than other hosts such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. His past inflammatory remarks on Twitter also plagued his campaign, including one in October 2016, when he said, “If Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
While Joe Walsh’s aggressive rhetoric against Donald Trump garnered a lot of attention on Twitter throughout his recent campaign, he failed to gain any serious consideration from Trump skeptical Republicans or from former members of the party who might have returned to vote for a non-Trump option. I, for one, could not fail to notice he couldn’t help but continue engaging in inflammatory and overly-aggressive rhetoric, even if he had now directed it at Trump instead of at Trump’s detractors.
The final and most bizarre twist to this story is Walsh’s final admonition on CNN as he announced the end of his campaign. Asserting that “any Democrat would better than Trump in the White House,” he punctuated that notion by saying, “I would rather have…a socialist in the White House than a dictator, than a king, than Donald Trump.”
I can’t fail to notice the similarity between Joe Walsh’s current view of Trump and his view of Clinton in 2016. His “Vote Red or We’ll Be Dead” stance in 2016 has migrated to “Vote Blue No Matter Who” in 2020. I can’t help but wonder why flipping the script on the lesser-of-two-evils argument is supposed to bring about any measurable change in the direction of the country.
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Justin Stapley is the owner and editor of The Liberty Hawk and the voice of The New Centrist Podcast. As a political writer, his principles and ideals are grounded in the ideas of ordered liberty as expressed in the traditions of classical liberalism, federalism, and modern conservatism. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.
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