As the choices in the November presidential election become clear, the rhetoric from a contested primary season continues to echo through the political landscape. While the Democrats seem poised to battle their way to the bitter end of the primary season, the Republican leadership is making a risky move to unite the party behind a historically unique candidate.

It is a daunting challenge, especially given how dedicated the Never-Trump conservatives are in their resistance to the apparent nominee. Social-media comparisons of Trump to Hitler and other European fascists (including Marine Le Pen) suggest an ongoing Balkanization of the GOP that could spell the doom for the party.

This is a good time for the Never-Trump’ers to reconsider their view of Trump. While his talk about deporting illegal immigrants is bombastic, it is far from the ethnic-cleansing agitation that constitutes a steady background noise in euro-fascist politics. Where Front National wants to throw legal citizens out of France simply because they are Muslims of non-European descent, Trump wants to expel people who have illegally entered the United States and continue to violate our immigration laws.

The difference is bigger than it may seem at first glance. But there is another aspect to Trump’s rhetoric: his commitment and dedication to it. How important will it really be to a President Trump to take to such outlier measures as mass deportation? Once in office, will his days be filled with much more mundane issues, such as funding Social Security and increasing military spending?

There are two people who can put Trump’s upsetting, sometimes infuriating rhetoric in perspective. The first is Jesse Ventura. When he ran for governor in Minnesota in 1998, he presented himself as the guy who had done things during his Navy SEAL career that would make the other gubernatorial candidates “pee in their pants.” He ruthlessly played the populist outsider card, yet once in office he governed cautiously from the middle.

So far, Trump is more of a Jesse Ventura than anything else. If that analogy holds, we can expect a president and an administration that will govern like an expert board of executives more than anything else. This is, of course, somewhat of a speculation, but given Trump’s business background and the parallel to Governor Ventura, it is a more realistic speculation than that he would turn out to be a Le Pen or even worse.

The other person who can put Trump in perspective is his presumptive Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. There is no doubt that she is the politically more radical of the Clinton couple, the architect as she was of the 1993 failed Hillarycare plan. Even though she no longer speaks openly about her dedication to single-payer health care, it is not inconceivable that she would return to that idea once in office. One indicator of that is that she wants to bring other elements of the European welfare state to the United States. For example, she wants to force American businesses to provide paid leave to their employees for a number of reasons: vacation, sick leave, maternity leave…

Based on the European role models that inspire Clinton’s paid-leave programs, the costs to American businesses would probably exceed their total annual bill for federal and state corporate income taxes. Add to that the costs if she also pursues universal pre-K child care – another item on the liberal welfare-state wish list – as well as single-payer health care, and the total cost would be so enormous that it would send the American economy into the same long-term quagmire of zero growth and 10-percent unemployment where the European economy is now stuck.

With this probable agenda of a Clinton presidency, conservative Trump critics need to ask themselves two questions:

  1. Do they have a realistic, workable reform agenda to roll back the American welfare state, once Hillary has added the last, “missing pieces” that currently separate it from the European welfare state?
  2. Is Hillary more dedicated to expanding the American welfare state than Trump is to his anti-immigration rhetoric?

The last question is crucial. If the answer is “yes”, then it should be easy for the Never-Trump conservatives to vote against Hillary.