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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.
^^^
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.
***
