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Will tomorrow’s primary elections in the GOP signal another turn in the party toward candidates who mimic Donald Trump’s attitudes and affect? That’s the question we focus on today, as well as the question of whether Democrats and liberals are falling prey to a temptation that will harm their efforts to get Trump—which is to embrace figures like Stormy Daniels and thereby normalize the president. Give a listen.
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I’m willing to bet that if Blankenship manages to win the primary, Trump will do as he did in Alabama and say maybe he picked the wrong guy and support him.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush refused to support Republican David Duke who was one of the two finalists in the Louisiana Governors race. Would Trump refuse to support Blankenship if he wins the nomination? I would hope so.
I will not support Mini-Trumps like Kelli Ward or Joe Arpaio if they are nominated as the Republican candidates in Arizona for the Senate. I hope that we can drive out the Mini-Trumps and restore the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes. (John Rhodes was the U.S. House Republican Leader after Gerald Ford and before Bob Michel and Newt Gingrich.)
As you note in this podcast, despite the coarsening of the culture, we seem to be less likely to put up with atrocious acts – such as Kennedy behavior (or Roosevelt behavior) mentioned in this show. Since the 60s, cover-ups in the priesthood have been exposed, bad behavior at Hollywood has come out and cost people their careers, and I could easily go on (boyscouts, the New York attorney general, etc.). In days gone by, much of this behavior was covered up or otherwise ignored, especially at the highest levels. If it requires the coarsening of the culture to no longer ignore, expose, and punish this behavior, then perhaps the coarsening of the culture isn’t as bad as we make it out to be.
There was one noticeably inaccurate statement in this podcast. Indeed, the mini-Trumps are all losers, it is great that we avoided them in these oprimaries after the Roy Moore debacle, etc.
But the comments about 2010 equated Sharron Angle, Todd Aiken, Richard Mourdock, etc. with the mini-Trumps of 2018, and that is dead wrong. Those candidates were bad, and unforced errors, just as the bad candidates were/are (e.g., Arizona) this year. But the 2010 crop were not populists, they were truer-than-thou, perfect social conservatives in some cases who almost wanted the government to enforce strict theology. They were more like Ted Cruz than Trump, and those are both unviable models, but for quite different reasons. Angle was the second coming of Phyllis Schlafly, Aiken was a prim ultra social con. Mourdock was slightly less wacky, but careless about his comments about abortion (the position was not really bad, the comments were silly). In no way were they Trumpian populists; they were all about cutting spending and reducing entitlements.
The current spate of wacky candidates as mini-Trumps is really new; the main common thread is wackiness birn of anti-Washington urges, but for different reasons. In 2010, it was spend less on everything. In 2018 it is more “spend OK, but spend it on me instead those other guys.”