When a #NeverTrumper and a Former #NeverTrumper Debate

Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host. Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College. They both have a lot in common, not the least of which is their conservative ideology.

And while they both have, at one time, been sternly opposed to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, that’s one area where they are in deep disagreement these days. Having hashed out their disagreement more than once on social media, the two agreed to an airing of their differences on Hewitt’s program Wednesday.

“I think Donald Trump is a fundamentally unstable person,” Nichols, the current #NeverTrumper, said. “I don’t think he has policies. I think there’s something genuinely wrong with him.”

He said he could not entrust the Oval Office to someone he thinks has “some serious emotional problems,” and who is “willfully ignorant” about important affairs of state and public policy. Over the course of the primary, he added, he doesn’t believe Trump has “gotten any better.”

“Now to add to that, I also think that Donald Trump has done things that I, in my heart of hearts, I find to be not just things I disagree with, but that are anti-American,” he added. “I mean, I thought Trump’s campaign would be over when he went after John McCain, which I found shocking.

“I mean, you can disagree with John McCain, but what Trump did was horrifying, inviting a hostile foreign power to interfere in our election, going after a Gold Star family. One thing after another that would have been an easy disqualification for anybody else, has just been tolerated and tolerated and tolerated. And I just can’t envision—I kind of go with P.J. O’Rourke’s comment that, you know, Hillary is awful, but she’s within the normal parameters of awful. Trump is off the charts, and so I have to say that.”

Hewitt agreed Trump has quite a learning curve ahead of him on matters of state, but turned the discussion immediately to the Supreme Court. He quickly got Nichols to agree that Hillary Clinton would appoint liberal justices to the high court, and then ran through the implications of those appointments.

“I’ll begin with Michigan v. EPA, which was last year’s court ruling that reined in the EPA imposing massive costs on, without oversight,” he said. “The Rapanos decision of 2006—I mean, there’s a long list of them where the administrative agencies would essentially be ungoverned under a 5-4 liberal majority.”

Nichols said he would be unconcerned about that when the alternative is “somebody who is emotionally unstable and fundamentally, in his bones, anti-American.” He then suggested Trump would be a “Manchurian candidate” if allowed in the White House.

Hewitt pressed on with his consequences of a lost Supreme Court.

“Gonzales v. Carhart is a 2003 5-4 decision that upheld the partial birth abortion ban,” he said. “Hillary’s appointee would restore the partial birth abortion ban if it reached the court again. Does that bother you?”

Nichols refused to answer the question, deflecting instead that he didn’t want to “litigate … every single possible Supreme Court case that’s coming down the pike.” He said he simply refused to put an “emotionally unstable guy who’s in the pocket of the Kremlin into the Oval Office.”

“I want you to think on—I think it’s bigger than most #NeverTrumpers consider,” Hewitt replied. “One of them, and I’ll run through it, U.S. v. Texas, unilateralism on immigration. That did not get through, because the Fifth Circuit overturned President Obama’s executive orders, and that was upheld by a 4-4 court.

“The Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, and McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. The First Amendment, Citizens United in 2010. All four of those cases would go the other way.

“Immigration would be essentially be governed by the president, Second Amendment rights would go out the door, and First Amendment rights, speech rights, would go out the door. Does that not weigh in your balance?”

Nichols again refused to actually answer the question, but instead said he believed it would “not do any good” to save the Supreme Court if the country “fundamentally loses its soul” with Trump as president. He also disagreed with Hewitt’s argument that Trump would appoint conservative justices.

“I made this argument in an article in the Federalist back in February,” he said. “Trump will actually destroy the conservative movement by doing the kinds of unpredictable, crazy things that he’s doing, and force what’s left of a GOP Congress to have to justify it, accept it, live with it and smile and pretend they liked it.

“I would rather have a healthy, vigorous GOP Senate majority fighting a liberal president in Hillary Clinton than to have the GOP become Donald Trump’s footstool for his own personal whims, which may or may not be conservative. You’ve really taken seriously that a 70-year-old man has become a conservative in the twilight years of his life? I don’t believe a word of that.”

Hewitt said he’s taken it very seriously, just as he has Trump’s 11 potential Supreme Court nominees. He said a Republican-controlled Senate, if Trump is president, should do as it has done with Chief Judge Merrick Garland and refuse to hold any hearings if he appoints someone not on the list to succeed Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

He then asked Nichols if he is a man of faith. The professor said he was. So, the host brought up the Hobby Lobby religious freedom case, noting that First Amendment protections for the free exercise of religion would be constrained, if not completely overturned, with Clinton in the White House.

Nichols argued that did not outweigh his concerns of a “would-be authoritarian” like Donald Trump. He said the nation cannot trade off all of its other liberties in order to save one. Hewitt then brought up several cases in which federalism—the nature of U.S. government—was protected by 5-4 Supreme Court decisions.

“So the very structure of the Constitution—not just the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment, and the 10th Amendment—but federalism and religious liberty, they all get swept away, Tom, if the Court goes,” Hewitt said. “And that’s forever. That’s not for four years.

“I have great, great confidence in Article I, Article II and Article III balancing each other out, even if Donald Trump is as bad as you say—and I don’t think he is—but I know what will happen under Hillary Clinton. Aren’t you—are you averting your eyes from the certainty of what will happen to the Supreme Court?”

The entire discussion is embedded below.