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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Donald Trumping the Republicans



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President Donald Trump? Just Say No

By Peter Wehner | July 8, 2015

Donald Trump is a force in the Republican presidential race. Two recent polls show him running second to Jeb Bush nationally. He’s also polling second in Iowa and New Hampshire. And his pronouncements are commanding attention, especially on Fox News, where he’s a popular presence.

Some of this is attributable to the fact that Mr. Trump is a genius at drawing the spotlight to himself. He thrives on social media. Democrats and the press are only too happy to highlight Mr. Trump’s stream of invective and outrageous utterances, including his claim that Mexico is purposely sending us drug dealers, rapists and carriers of infectious diseases.

To their credit, several Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Mr. Bush, have criticized Mr. Trump. Yet it’s also true that Mr. Trump has garnered respect from some of his fellow Republicans. According to Ted Cruz, Mr. Trump is “bold,” “brash” and “speaks the truth.” Rick Santorum likes it that he’s focused on “a very important issue for American workers and particularly, legal immigrants in this country.” An editorial in The Weekly Standard says Republicans can benefit from “a little touch of Trump” in rhetoric, attitude and bearing. According to Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Trump’s statements will “resonate” with many Americans.

They may. But they shouldn’t.

For starters, Mr. Trump, though he claims to be a conservative, is nothing of the sort. He’s barely even a Republican. For most of the last decade, he was a registered Democrat. It wasn’t that long ago that most of his political contributions went to Democrats, including Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Before he discovered his Republican roots, Mr. Trump favored a single-payer health care system and proposed a large “net worth tax” on wealthy individuals. He once declared himself “strongly pro-choice” and favored drug legalization. He is a vehement protectionist. Earlier this year he even accused Republicans running for president of “attacking” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Why would conservatives find him the least bit appealing?

Mr. Trump has no coherent governing philosophy. All he has is an attitude, and a crude one at that. As his announcement speech and subsequent statements have made clear, his command of the issues is superficial, his presentation often rambling and demagogic.

At the heart of Donald Trump’s candidacy is folie de grandeur. Mr. Trump will build a fence on the southern border — and get Mexico to pay for it. He’s got a “foolproof” plan to defeat the Islamic State “very quickly,” but when asked what it is, he told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, “I’m not gonna tell you what it is tonight.” He’ll have a “great relationship” with Vladimir V. Putin while also keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. His policy views on China consist mostly of bluster (“Oh, would China be in trouble. The poor Chinese.”). Mr. Trump is eager to tell us that “there’s nobody bigger and better at the military than I am.” He also gets things done “better than anybody.” And he will be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

Mr. Trump thinks he’ll snap his fingers and everyone from his political opponents to foreign nations will bend to his will. He is a man operating on his own fantasy island.

There’s also the matter of Mr. Trump’s erratic and conspiratorial temperament. He believes “massive vaccinations” cause autism (“the doctors lied”). He was the most prominent person in America pushing the theory that President Obama — a “psycho!” and “maybe” a Muslim — might not be a natural-born American citizen. And he delights in making malicious statements. He’s absolutely sure, for example, that Mexicans crossing our southern border are drug dealers and rapists, but he can only “assume” there are “some good people” crossing the border as well. (Mr. Trump would later say that “many fabulous people come in from Mexico” and “I get along great with Mexico. I get along great.” Of course he does.)

As for political discourse, Mr. Trump is insulting and witless. His critics are “losers,” “jerks” and “dummies.” These kinds of taunts are usually found in schoolyards rather than presidential campaigns. But a presidential campaign is right where he is.

There’s not much that can be done about that. If conservatives rally to defend Mr. Trump on the grounds that he’s “refreshing” and has “passion,” that he’s “anti-establishment” and irritates liberals, they will do considerable damage to their movement and to the Republican Party. Mr. Trump is a pernicious figure on the American political landscape. He can’t be wished away. Which means the people who have to confront and expose him are conservatives. We’re the ones who have the most to lose from a successful Trump candidacy.


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The Wasted Gift of Donald Trump

By Frank Bruni | July 8, 2015

I keep reading that Donald Trump is wrecking the Republican Party. I keep hearing that he’s a threat to the fortunes of every other Republican presidential candidate, because he sullies the brand and puts them in an impossible position.

What bunk. The truth is that he’s an opportunity for them as golden as the namesake nameplates on his phallic towers, if only they would seize it.

The brand was plenty sullied before he lent his huff and his hair to the task. And by giving his Republican rivals a perfect foil, he also gives them a perfect chance to rehabilitate and redeem the party.

As it stands now, he’s using them.

If they had any guts, they could use him.

They could piggyback on the outsize attention that he receives, answering his unhinged tweets and idiotic utterances with something sane and smart, knowing that it, too, would get prominent notice.

They could define themselves in the starkest possible contrast to him, calling him out as the bully and bigot that he is. Then he wouldn’t own the story, because the narrative would be about cooler heads and kinder hearts in the party staring down one of its most needlessly divisive ambassadors and saying: Enough. No more. We’re serious people at the limit of our patience for provocateurs.

There was a hint of this last weekend, when Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican-American, lashed out at Trump’s broad-brush comments about Mexican immigrants crossing into America with an agenda of drugs and rape.

Bush labeled those remarks “extraordinarily ugly” and “way out of the mainstream” and said that there’s “no tolerance” for them.

But he didn’t exactly volunteer that assessment. It came in response to a reporter’s question, and it came more than two weeks after Trump’s offense.

Neither he nor Marco Rubio exhibited any hurry in distancing themselves from Trump, though both of them trumpet their personal biographies as proof that they’re sensitive to Latino immigrants.

On Fox Business on Tuesday, Rubio gave a pathetic master class in cowardly evasion, stammering his way though an interview in which he was asked repeatedly for an opinion about Trump. You would have thought that he was being pressed for malicious gossip about the Easter bunny.

He never did manage to upbraid Trump, though he was careful to mention the “legitimate issue” of border security that Trump had raised.

As in 2012, Republicans can’t summon the courage to take on the dark heroes of the party’s lunatic fringe. As in 2012, this could cost them dearly.

The Charleston, S.C., church massacre and subsequent debate over the Confederate flag afforded them an ideal moment to talk with passion and poetry about racial healing.

But the leading contenders reacted in fashions either sluggish, terse, muffled or all three. They showed more interest in fleeing the subject than in grabbing profitable hold of it.

Trump’s rant about immigrants, which he has since amplified, was another squandered moment.

Chris Christie could have made good on his boasts about always telling it like it is and being unconstrained by politesse. Instead he made clear that he liked Trump and considered him a friend. That soft crunching sound you heard was the supposedly hard-charging New Jersey governor walking on eggshells.

Rand Paul claims the desire and ability to expand the party’s reach to more minorities. So where’s his takedown of Trump?

Bush has said that a politician must be willing to lose the party’s nomination in order to win the general election, but that philosophy can’t end with his allegiance to the Common Core. It has to include an unblinking acknowledgment of his party’s craziness whenever and wherever it flares.

Trump’s hold on voters stems largely from his lack of any filter and from his directness, traits that they don’t see in establishment candidates. So his fellow Republicans’ filtered, indirect approach to him just gives him more power.

And while he should be irrelevant, he’s becoming ever more relevant, because he’s exposing their timidity and caution.

They’re wrong to try to ignore him, because the media won’t do that and because he’s probably going to qualify for the debates.

Looking ahead to the first of them, the conservative pundit George Will bought into the notion of Trump as an ineradicable pest who “says something hideously inflammatory, which is all he knows how to say, and then what do the other nine people onstage do?”

Oh, please. That’s hardly an existential crisis. It’s a prompt for an overdue smidgen of valor.

Without any hesitation, they tell him that he’s a disgrace. Without any hedging, they tell him that he’s absurd.

It’s the truth. And for the Republican Party, it might just be transformative.


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