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“I don’t forgive you, Jonah Goldberg,…”
“…because there is nothing to forgive.”
Jonah’s column today addresses whether a NeverTrumper needs to be forgiven. He doesn’t think so, and I agree. I voted for Trump, he didn’t. Trump won; thank G-d given the choice we had.
I don’t think Trump hung the moon and I don’t expect him to restore limited government. I do expect him to make mistakes, and I am hoping those mistakes are survivable. I do think we will be better able to assess what we will get on the 101st day of his administration than we are now. We are sitting at the starting line with engines revving and imagining how it will be. No one really knows.
2017 could be a really weird year. The one thing I am counting on is that Trump is determined to be consequential. I want that, too, because the headwinds from Democrats, academia, media, and the useful idiots and paid activists is going to be fierce. So at a level I think the Trump “true believers” (of which I am not one) will have an important role to play in sustaining the Trump momentum.
Jonah has legitimate fears about Donald Trump:
What I have chiefly in mind is that rich nexus of unrestrained ego, impoverished impulse control, and contempt for policy due diligence. I firmly and passionately believe that character is destiny. From his reported refusal to accept daily intelligence briefings to his freelancing every issue under the sun on Twitter — including, most recently, nuclear-arms policy — Trump’s blasé attitude troubles me deeply, just as it did during the campaign.
The sad truth is that people of sterling character rarely run for President, much less win. At a minimum they all must have egos that blind them to some manifest flaws. But as history has taught us this does not disqualify them from being heroes.
I am hopeful, but I am not expecting it to be pretty. As Jonah is a culture buff I commend to him the movie The Dirty Dozen. We need to secure the border, secure the Court, and re-establish the rule of law. But pocketbook issues will “trump” fidelity to constitutional reformation. So the Trump administration will not be a paragon of federalism and the Commerce Clause will continue to be abused. Conservatives will continue their sojourn in the wilderness, but hopefully will remain closer to the Promised Land. Under Hillary they would have been driven into the Red Sea.
Published in General
This just isn’t true, Jonah or the rest of NeverTrump no more wanted Clinton as President than you did.
I think that is quite the case. Thinking Trump would lose, Goldberg staked out territory for the future, and he would have been well positioned under that scenario. But that’s where political calculations influence policy and even ideology. After all, didn’t many think Romney would win? Then they thought that we needed more Hispanic votes for future elections.
Jonah got the American voter wrong, which is more damning than saying he got the election wrong, or Trump wrong. As a pundit, one needs to understand what is going on and just as the Democrats were in a insular bubble, so too were certain Republicans.
This is why I will continue to question these folks’ opinions. They still don’t get it. It’s not a matter of making one mistake and therefore they are written off as irrelevant, it’s that they haven’t diagnosed the disease and are attributing the patients recovery to a fluke or a miracle. Until they can begin to articulate what happened and stop with the silly absolutism and backhanded insults, they can’t be trusted to opine within a basic framework of accuracy.
Yup. But the primary and general election are over. Let’s see what we can do together to salvage our country.
If this was the case then he would have split his efforts. Did he?
They denigrated both equally. You seem to be ignoring decades of anti-Clinton rhetoric for your own convenience.
I haven’t done a hermeneutic analysis of his works. I read him and still voted for Trump. So did he help Hillary? Not by me.
Then you put the same weight on Democrats criticisms of Bush as you did Republicans? Opposition criticizes to harm. Support criticizes to guide. There is a clear difference, and the source has bearing on the credibility (along with the goals) of the criticism.
I can’t help but believe that there are a large number of NeverTrumps who still hope he fails, just so they can feel vindicated. It seems no matter how many good to great things he accomplishes, some are still waiting impatiently for the big THUD that shows they were not really wrong about him all along.
How do you measure the level of support? You are implying that you know better. What actions did you count and how did you weight them in order to say that Trump was helped more by the NT elites than Hillary.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-clinton-health-20160912-snap-story.html
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-election-hangover-20161018-snap-story.html
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-comey-protocol-20161031-story.html
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-hillary-clinton-first-woman-20160802-snap-story.html
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2016/08/26/hillary-and-her-wheelbarrows-n2210202
I don’t have time to comb his twitter but it had many similar Anti-Clinton sentiments during the election.
I submit that the problem wasn’t Jonah’s reluctance to criticize Clinton but your failure to read or look for it.
The lie is that they were not helping Hillary when they went after Trump. She was going after Trump. They were going after Trump. She relished their attacks on Trump because their attacks (the NT elites’ attacks) were much more effective than her own.
I put weight on whether I find the criticisms convincing or factually valid.
As for your mind reading abilities of NeverTrump folks I suggest you refrain – you’re pretty bad at it.
This are either right or wrong – Jonah was either right to criticize Trump on the merits or he wasn’t. We don’t believe in relativism on the right, or at least I thought we didn’t.
So, now we have it: you have weighted ancient statements equally with statements made during a recent election. I don’t count things that way.
AND it’s a fact that he endorsed publicly McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 which PREDATES your claim of being a Democrat as recently as 2 years ago. Be responsible for your statements, man!.
The man lives in NY and has buildings there. Do you have any idea what the political environment in NYC is? I think not. Donating to the Clinton Foundation is not a political endorsement, it is a bribe. So attack him for being a businessman not as a partisan hack.
Moreover, we have discovered, haven’t we, that political donations don’t elect candidates. Voters do.
By the way, Reagan was a Democrat. A lot of people are ex-Democrats. Who’s being the party purist here?
Nope, but tell me, what convincing did you need from Jonah that Hillary was awful? How many National Review readers do you think required that convincing?
So, from the general to the particular. Pauline Kael might be someone you would appreciate reading.
I didn’t make that claim go back and check the comments. I’m simply providing facts.
The evidence on Ivanka is much less equivocal btw: http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/donald-trumps-kids-donate-to-democrats/
She was clearly a liberal Democrat prior to her father running.
And Reagan spent decades giving speeches to GE and others during his shift away from the Democrat Party and towards conservatism.
Reagan had been a loyal and outspoken Republican with a well earned reputation for being too conservative for the establishment for at least twelve years before he ran for President.
Trump, by contrast, was a huge gamble. We got lucky that (so far) NeverTrump appears to have been mostly wrong in hindsight, but to say it was obvious beforehand is simply not defensible.
So what? My daughter (one of them) is a rabid anti-Trump,anti Romney et al. So I shouldn’t ever run for office? What? Who cares? Oh wait. McCain’s daughter is an outspoken Dem, and what of Reagan’s son Ron? Are you really that desperate to be proven right?
Notice I didn’t contest this part of your comment? This is why we can’t have nice threads here at Ricochet….
This is just sniping. You don’t acknowledge you made a completely false statement and were called on it. You just skip to whatever little weakness you see in the rebuttal making commenting tedious.
YOU said Trump was a Democrat two years ago. I suppose you also thing Colin Powell is a Republican. I can’t understand your labeling system – quite odd. If Trump were giving speeches for a giant corporation, I have no doubt you’s find a way to criticize it as cronyism or some such.
If you ran would your leftist daughter be one of your top advisors?
Ivanka is by all measures his closest advisor and he is thinking about staffing her in the White House.
All politics is local.
I made no false statements. Quit with the vitriol. Provide a link where I said he was a Democrat two years ago.
To paraphrase Jon Gabriel (“My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing”): My favorite part about the Trump era is all the winning together.
I say he was neutral. He was as much against Hillary as Trump.
When did he say this?
Sorry. It is defensible. I saw it clearly. I’m no genius, I’m no soothsayer, I’m no pundit for NRO. All I did was read his website, listen to his speeches and people like Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence and newt Gingrich, talked to regular people from different backgrounds (including white working class Dems and Reps) I also know/knew that once Trump got infoed-up and once he found himself in the partisan fray he was bound to become more conservative. Politics works that way. You are defined by your enemies and thus you will end up fighting them because they are fighting you. Then you seek allies.
It’s unfortunate for the NR -NT types they cut themselves out of the loop.