Latest thoughts on Trump

Not everyone who is ideologically rudderless is a squish about it.

I guess you have to be a long-term Republican, like a Bush family member, or a John Boehner to a John McCain, to take the "our-friends-across-the-aisle" approach to your rudderlessness.

If you're a Pub newbie, like Donald Trump, who was a Dem until 2009, you're apparently more inclined to take a nuke-'em-all-with-your-ego approach.  Which serves what your main purpose was anyway: keeping the spotlight on you.

The result is, as Mona Charen points out in her piece at NRO today, a dust-up that is pretty much pointless and diverts the American public's attention from what ought to be front and center:

President Obama seems on the verge of the most abject diplomatic capitulation in American history — to Iran, our bitterest enemy — and Republicans are arguing about Donald Trump? The prospect of a deal with Iran is dumbfounding and infuriating, as the U.S. held all the cards in the protracted negotiations and yet executed serial surrenders to the Iranians, rather like a courtier bowing his way backward from a monarch. While the Obama administration is paving the way for a possible mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or New York in the near term, we’re all tying ourselves in knots about what Donald Trump said about Mexicans. The Democrats seem to have a Trump card.

No one is denying that people entering our country illegally is, on principle, an important issue.  If it's not addressed, it erodes basic national sovereignty and the rule of law. Of course, this suits the radical agenda quite nicely. The problem is that it opens the door to a certain kind of demagoguery that then distracts us with a mad rush to mop any trace of suggested bigotry from the arena floor:

This drives the Right crazy. You don’t break into my house and then demand the keys, they fume. While I like a good brawl as much as the next person, it seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate, including Hispanic and Asian voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.

Charen makes the significant point that Latin-American immigration to the US is tapering off anyway, vis-a-vis Asian inflows.

She concludes that the entire discussion about immigration is "a complex subject that deserves grown-up discussion — exactly what Trump and his claque preclude."

And that concerns me, for national security reasons, but also for political and cultural reasons.

Republicans have a good slate of candidates this time around. (It also includes some clunkers, and their current prominence concerns me more than a little.)  It's a shame to see this fine group of principled conservatives getting sucked in to an identity-politics food fight.

But most distressing is the focus on Trump.  I am far from the first pundit to point out what Charen calls his oafishness, as well as his vulgarity, shallowness and lack of real conservatism.  In fact, I have already waded into that realm of contemplation:

Yesterday I tried and tried to write a post about Donald Trump.  I tried the angle of how his mode of articulation betrays his essential shallowness. ("I think religion is a wonderful thing.") ("I have a great relationship with the blacks.") ("[Latin America] is not sending us the right people.") ("Krauthammer is a dummy.") I tried the angle of the absence of evidence of any real appreciation for, and understanding of, America's founding principles. I tried the angle of the vulgarity of his braggadocio.  I tried the angle of the shallowness of the parade of women in his life.

Think about it. He's 69 years old. Is there any record of him publicly reflecting on the contributions of thinkers like Locke, Burke, Madison, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer or Hayek to the cause of human liberty?  Has he ever made any stirring speeches about the the sacrifice and courage of American fighting forces?  No, with this guy, it's all about America as a brand, in competition with the Chinese brand, or the Russian brand, or the Muslim-world brand.  It's all about sitting down at a negotiating table and squeezing out the most advantageous deal, the way he does when working on the latest expansion of his business empire.

But because the focus is on how tough he talks, he's appealing to a discomfortingly large number of people.

I was dismayed in the extreme to see such comments under Charen's piece as these:

Abracadabra, another RINO hit piece against Trump by NRO. You are running out of RINOs though.... Maybe you can get the custodial staff or the IT guys to bash Trump next, just to keep the train of hit pieces rolling.

And

Wow! Two anti-Trump hit pieces on NRO today. The gop must REALLY be getting worried.

And

.....and I was taken in by the idea that Charen was an attractive conservative. Oh Heck, Mona is nothing but another RINO on the order of Carl Rove, just better looking.

I'm also dismayed to see Laura Ingraham carrying Trump's water. I think it arises from her having become something of a two-note Johnny in the last year or so (immigration and trade).  I have heard her minimize the Iran and ISIS problems on her radio show several times.  Yesterday she cited some immigrant-crime statistics and then said, "And they say Trump's the problem?"  The other evening on the Fox News Special Report panel, she sat right next to Charles Krauthammer  and, right after the Krauthammer-is-a-dummy tweet was mentioned, said that we all need to move past such sideshows and focus on the big issues.  (Guess what they were?)

Ultimately, Donald Trump is yet another symptom of where we are spiritually as a civilization.  In a society in which such forces as an appeasement-driven foreign-policy team, a Democrat party in which anyone who isn't a power-mad Alinskyite is excluded from meaningful participation, a Republican establishment that truly is squishy and so intoxicated by the Beltway mentality that it completely untethered from conservative integrity, a general populace that clamors for distraction, and a grotesque and fragmented culture, it only makes sense that one more poisonous influence is going to elbow its way into the Thunderdome.

 

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