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Democrats’ Best Weapon: Trump
The dictionary defines “bogeyman” as “an imaginary evil spirit, referred to typically to frighten children.” Hello Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether he set out intentionally to elect Hillary Clinton, but there is little question that he could not be fulfilling the role of Republican bogeyman to greater effect.
As Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin noted, during a week in which the disastrous fecklessness of this President and his party in the face of terrorism ought to have been Topic A, we are all talking about Trump instead. Brilliant. Tobin’s point actually applies to the entire presidential contest. By rights, it should be about the Democrats’ unraveling. From Obamacare to terrorism, from the economy to climate change, and from guns to free speech, progressive policies have proven deeply disappointing when not downright obtuse and dangerous. Mrs. Clinton promises more of the same while trailing an oil slick of corruption in her wake. And yet swinging into the frame week-in and week-out, the orange-maned billionaire bogeyman dominates the discussion.
Hell yes, Republicans are anti-Hispanic bigots, Trump (a lifelong Democrat) is supposed to confirm. Just look at the way he talked about Mexican “rapists” and vowed to build a wall that Mexico will fund.
Hell yes, Republicans want to fight a war on women. Did you hear what Trump said about Meghan Kelly and Carly Fiorina?
Hell yes, Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-handicapped, anti-Jewish, and anti-Muslim. Line ’em up and Trump will offend. Not cleverly, mind you, but crudely. Donald Trump is fond of saying that our political leaders are stupid – constantly outmaneuvered at the bargaining table by shrewder Chinese, Mexicans, and Japanese. No one can accuse him of stupidity – provided his goal is to elect Hillary Clinton.
This week, while we were still burying our dead from San Bernardino, every Republican – rather than explaining why President Obama’s refusal to fight the war on terror has led to this moment – was instead having to condemn Donald Trump’s mindless proposal to keep every single Muslim out of the United States until further notice. Again, he’s the perfect bogeyman.
It’s not just that what he says demands condemnation. It’s that it seems to give credence to the Democrats’ narrative.
One of the false notes in President Obama’s Sunday evening speech was his resort to one of his favorite libels about the American people he purports to lead. He scolded the country for its Islamophobia. “It is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently.”
That’s not the trouble here. America is an incredibly welcoming nation and has opened its arms to Muslims along with people from every part of the globe. Far from targeting American Muslims for discrimination, the US has been a haven. Though liberals like to conjure it to slander the US, anti-Muslim discrimination and violence have been minimal in the US, even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (The most common targets of religious bigotry in America? Jews.)
On the other hand, it’s only common sense to proceed with caution about admitting thousands of refugees and immigrants from the part of the world that is currently aflame with Islamic extremism. That caution, not to be confused with discrimination (there is no constitutional right to come to America), was endorsed just three weeks ago by a large majority in Congress (including 47 Democrats). It isn’t anti-Muslim to seek to exclude Muslim extremists.
Leave it to Trump to lob a stink bomb that putrefies everything.
Above all, the great favor that Trump does for Obama and for Hillary Clinton is to focus on personalities instead of philosophy. Trump, of course, has nothing to offer except personality (even if its charms elude me). But his emphasis on “getting the best people” is exactly wrong. That’s the progressive idea – that the best people know better how to run your life than you do. That’s what we’ve had under President Obama. Obama is a failure not because he’s stupid, or stubborn, or inexperienced. He’s a failure because he believes in failed ideas.
Hillary Clinton believes in all the same myths and shibboleths. After two terms of decline and decay, voters are ready for a different approach, unless someone can crash the party – the Republican Party. Can it be pure accident that Donald Trump is playing the role to perfection?
Published in Islamist Terrorism
He’s said he’s happy for them to come back as legal immigrants. Hopefully after we’ve rationalized our insane immigration system…
Since the fulfillment or abandonment of these promises is in the future, how can the distinction be anything but a retroactive one?
We can appeal to character–for example, Rubio’s my guy, but I could understand people who don’t think he’ll ever be good on immigration based on his past conduct, and disqualify him on that basis. Not sure how Trump, who is not known for ideological consistency, would be superior here, but that’s sidestepping my original question.
Let’s say you get an audience with The Man, the Capo de Capo of the Republican Establishment. What could he do or say that would convince you that he is making a genuine compromise rather than lying?
He could put his entire estate, his trophy wife, and his trophy children into escrow to be forfeited when he breaks his promise. When, not if.
This is grossly unfair. This is the epitome of drinking the anti-immigration or bust koolaid mantra. Scary.
Actually, it isn’t, since I don’t feel nearly as strongly about anti-immigration as a lot of people do. In fact, if GOPe went to work to remove corporate welfare and create an opportunity society, I would likely be in favor of their amnesty programs. But I would never, ever believe a leftist or GOPe promise.
But according to the Trump view of immigrants they will all still be here, demanding a path to citizenship, voting for Democrats, clogging up the emergency rooms, marching for their rights, needing bilingual education.
Legal or illegal, won’t the problems be much the same? Then what is gained by electing Trump over the so-called amnesty-mongers of the fevered Trumpist imagination?
This is Mona and the entire GOPe showing how they buy into the Democrats narrative, losing the game at the outset.
Democrats are the first to wag fingers and lecture anyone who doesn’t place a litany of conditionals when referring to certain groups “but not ALL Muslims are…but not all Mexicans…” (rival Republicans being the second) as though the speaker is a bigoted idiot who can’t make simple distinctions and/or that listeners will get the wrong impression – again, as though we all live in a world of bigotry, absolutism and literalism which is the basic goal.
We read and hear Muslims by the score refusing to speak out against radical Islam on the premise that it doesn’t represent them and therefore they should feel no compunction to disavow terrorist actions. But the GOPers find it perfectly acceptable that this rogue candidate with a short history of calling himself “Republican” may be seen as standing for them and feel a pressing need to disabuse anyone from thinking all Republicans are thusly bigoted. Stockholm Syndrome.
The hand-wringing of these Republicans is absolutely pathetic.
Moreover, Trump’s idea may be hair-brained, it’s obviously meant to open up a conversation, and by many accounts it’s a negotiation strategy, or stretching the Overton Window.
If there is a breakout of e-coli in a batch of beef jerky, it gets recalled, we don’t say that “most of the jerky is good” and hope.
Yes this is a misrepresentation of the plan. Isn’t there enough low-hanging fruit with Trump? And besides, “pretty much” is just fine as long as they are vetted. The ones who would be refused re-entry are actually here now.
The GOP should see that the Trump phenomenon is a direct result of their failure to act, failure to fight, failure to lead and failure to articulate.
They should be in a locked room somewhere rather than desperately trying to separate themselves from a reality-star mogul.
That he’s not a lifelong Republican is weak soup. McCain is a lifelong Republican, so is Boehner, McConnell and Thad Cochran. It’s become meaningless. I’ve been saying this for years, to the point where I have claimed that the word RINO os meaningless because every Republican is a Republican in name only because it is ONLY a name, nothing more. Anyone can be a Republican, including Donald Trump!
But they don’t see it. They can’t see how utterly cowed they are by the left’s thought-crime enforcement department, the corporate media.
Trump is doing us all a favor by being so cavalierly outrageous. And actually, it’s not that outrageous. We have all learned something in the meta-message.
* There is no right for non-Americans to come here. One would think by the narrative of the left that we mistreat those who are refused entry to our supposedly bigoted, Islamophobic country.
*If our devoted enemy ISIS claims they will infiltrate refugee populations so as to deliver random violence to our homeland, isn’t it logical to place a moratorium on resettlement and immigration? Why shouldn’t we protect ourselves?
No, it is outrageous. Trump is jacking up the outrage each week, and the blindness of alleged Republicans to this astonishes me.
He’s playing the two rotten Republican extremes against each other to destroy the responsible core. On one end, we have the John McCain-style Entrenched Political Aristocrats who are more concerned with counting out the right amount of paces in their political duels than the fact that their Democrat dueling partners are always shooting them in the back. And at the other end, we have the Mad Millennarians like Ted Cruz – a man who, to paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, would see the Republican party burn if he could be president of the ashes. Both sides are so consumed with purging each other from government that a party filled with actual lunatics, liars, and thieves is likely to triumph, putting a woman who should be in the Big House into the White House.
The opponent this presidential cycle is not John McCain. It’s not Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Zombie Dwight Eisenhower, or the head of Richard Nixon and headless Spiro T. Agnew. The opponents are the Democrats – but Donald Trump has magically made the Republicans seem to forget that.
This is primary season so the opponent has to be the clones of previous losers. If we keep nominating from this pool we will continue to lose.
The opponents are NOT the Democrats according to GOP statist types the opponents are whomever gets in the way of expanded government power(s) their outdated views on national security, open borders for new consumers and cheap labor. They are not alarmed at Hillary, they are alarmed at Trump and Cruz. They will vote for Hillary before Trump and they just might stay home if Cruz is the nominee.
Clearly they have very narrow interests wherein both Hillary and Jeb are acceptable candidates while Cruz and Trump are on the fringe.
It’s telling that they also fear Cruz, since that negates all of their claims about Trumps boorishness and un-seriousness. That isn’t really it, because Cruz is not boorish and is stone-cold serious. What they have in common is they threaten the status quo. Everything else is just cover.
Elephas, Trump didn’t make the John McCains of the GOP decide that the Tea Partiers are illegitimate wacko birds. Consequently, he isn’t the author of the TP push-back which Cruz so successfully tapped into.
He’s a magnifying glass, or maybe a catalyst. But the divisions within the GOP were already there.
I accuse the McCains of the party just as much as the Cruzes. The entrenched “gentlemanliness” of McCain is exasperating; he treats the Senate like it’s a London drinking club and fails to see that the Democrats he thinks are his “friends” would throw him in a bathtub of ice and cut out his kidney to sell for beer money as soon as give him the time of day. Wanting to snub real conservatives in favor of Liberal drinking buddies is disgusting.
But Cruz’s one-man-band approach is equally bad. He apparently has offended and alienated everyone in Washington, which is not really what we need for a president. (We already have that as president now.) I don’t think they “fear” Cruz; to me, it seems folks just personally dislike the guy. And while I think he’s smart and sharp, I don’t like his Obama-style divisiveness. I’ve had enough of that over the last eight years.
My point is that “the McCains” are the root of the problem. Take them away, and you take away the impetus for both Cruz and Trump to be where they are today.
Even if you could do away with Trump and Cruz, the root of the problem would remain. The next “Trump” or “Cruz” will likely be worse.
I share your contempt for McCain and would have agreed with this take before, oh, around 2007.
But now I believe he is actually in alliance with them. McCain hates conservatives first, Democrats second (if at all). That’s his list. He hates conservatives and it animates him the most.
Cruz has made exactly the right enemies for the right reasons. That’s leadership and resolve.
The GOP, by playing it safe, by playing basically on the same team as left-wing socialists, by lying and misrepresenting themselves and their erstwhile opponents, have lost the high ground in this fight.
They coddle Democrats. They don’t challenge their hairbrained ideas with the same vigor they reserve for their opponents on the right, and they won’t listen to the many voters who are looking for viable alternatives to
DemocratsSocialists.I’m still reeling over the hubris that got Jeb in the race. He gave Hillary Clinton the Liberty Medal! She’s an Alinskyite socialist who wants to make America an unfree nanny-state. Liberty? Such is the “core” of the GOP
There is only going to be one winner. None of them were “it” regardless of Trump’s candidacy.
That’s not quite how I view what makes John McCain tick.
John McCain is a creature of Government – he is a Washington Courtier, and his place at Washington Court is all-important to him. Conservatives have no stomach for the idea of Government as a royal court, and the do not respect Court hierarchy, while Democrats, being creatures attracted structured power, find Court etiquette to be second nature. Republicans will either quickly adapt to the world of Court – either maintaining some vestiges of Conservatism while working within the hierarchy or being completely consumed by world of Government and its trappings – or buck against it and be ostracized by the likes of Viscount McCain. But the Conservatives who threaten the very existence of the Court itself are the ones McCain and his brand of entrenched courtier most abhor.
As any baseball fan can tell you, the hot can’t-miss AAA prospect very often does miss. Perhaps the 2016 lineup simply wasn’t as good as we thought.
Then the team goes out and gets a star who is all wrong for the team and more importantly all wrong for the fans of the team. And they do it in such a way as to actually injure future prospects for a few years. I’m looking at you Alfonso Soriano.
Is Trump the Alfonso Soriano of the Cubs stint? Maybe. Or maybe he’s the Ron Cey who’s stepping in to the long empty shoes of Ron Santo and doing an adequate job of filling them instead of failing outright.
Trump is an effect, not a cause. If you shot Trump dead today, nothing would change. A worse polecat would pop up.
Establishment tantrums against Trump supporters are of course the same thing they were before Trump. Pardon me, but your contempt for the base is showing. Of course.
Has there ever been a more defensive group than Trump supporters?
Objectively, even if one likes Trump, one has to agree that there is a lot to criticize about the man. But if someone points out his various shortcomings as a presidential candidate, this is identified as “contempt for the base.”
Who gets to decide who is a member of “the base?”
Can’t a person actually respect the base, even be a member of the base, and oppose Trump and Trumpism? Or are Trump supporters and the base one and the same?
I’m a member of the base. I would put spikes in eyes before I’d vote for Hillary or Obama. But I oppose Trump, and I admit that I have contempt for Trump. But not for the base. I like and respect the base. I encourage them to support a candidate who can win, and who will be good for the country.
Well, you don’t often hear Cruz and Obama equated as divisive, especially when the point was (supposedly) to distinguish Cruz from McCain’s clubbiness.