McMullin’s NeverTrump Pontification Continues

Failed NeverTrump presidential candidate Evan McMullin is fast securing his position as a metaphorical cold sore in American politics — admittedly non-lethal, but supremely irritating, unattractive, and prone to appear at a particularly annoying time.

Just as the Left’s Trump-is-literally-fascist hysteria finally looks to be waning, McMullin surfaced on Monday with an article in The New York Times subtly titled “Trump’s Threat to the Constitution.”

McMullin is awfully eager to pontificate for being such a spectacularly failed candidate.

Apparently, Trump’s lack of constitutional knowledge, coupled with alleged “authoritarian” tendencies, make him an unprecedented threat to the Constitution. “Shock swept through the room as Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution,” McMullin writes of Trump’s meeting with congressional Republicans.

Trump may not know much about the Constitution, but surely his ignorance of the founding documents pales in danger in comparison to, say, President Obama’s or Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s or Justice Elena Kagan’s blatant disdain for the Constitution.

“In our nation, power is shared, checked and balanced precisely to thwart would-be autocrats,” writes McMullin. “But as we become desensitized to the notion that Mr. Trump is the ultimate authority, we may attribute less importance to the laws, norms and principles that uphold our system of government, which protects our rights.”

Let’s just pause for a moment and note that McMullin is writing this in a publication — The New York Times — which routinely rails against the laws and principles that uphold our system of government and has since Election Day published at least five different editorials calling for an end to the Electoral College system.

Indeed, McMullin may wax convincingly about the danger to the Constitution posed by Trump, but a closer examination of his diatribe reveals a man at least as ignorant of the Constitution as the president-elect he so clearly loathes.

“We can no longer assume that all Americans understand the origins of their rights and the importance of liberal democracy,” McMullin writes.

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It’s interesting to see McMullin extol the so-called importance of “liberal democracy” for a constitutional republic created by men who were deeply skeptical of democracy and designed the Constitution to specifically combat the democratic impulse — hence the existence of the Electoral College.

But McMullin uses the phrase “democratic norms” twice and the phrase “democratic institutions” once in his piece. He is apparently unaware that there was supposed to be nothing “normal” about democracy for Americans, and our institutions, by the ingenious design of our forefathers, inherently protect against the dangers of pure democracy.

McMullin is awfully eager to pontificate for being such a spectacularly failed candidate — he received only .47 of the popular vote, less than half of what Green Party nominee Jill Stein managed to get — yet The New York Times found ink to provide for this man with no constituency to bash the president-elect.