Is Trump the root illness or just the symptom?

There's no doubt he is an unfortunate phenomenon unto himself, but there's also a good case to be made that he serves the purpose of distinguishing between conservatives to whom the three pillars - free-market economics, an understanding of why Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind, and a foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature - are sacrosanct, and conservatives whose understandable - indeed, shared - zeal for blowing up the unholy axis of the pro-tyranny-and-decline camp and the Beltway-establishment / Reasonable-Gentleman / leadership-class-as-defined-by-Codevilla camp can override fealty to those three pillars.

It's dismaying as hell.

Dismaying to see Erick Erickson subjected to a hate-mail barrage like this:

COWARD TO A NEGRO DEMOCRAT DAILY ____YOU SUCK HIM DAILY WHILE HE INTERRUPTS AND RUNS HIS MOUTH TO DISRUPT A SHOW EVERY SINGLE DAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and this one

Hey Erick…. Go Fuck Yourself ya dipshit, not seeing it and then embracing it!…… MORON…. Bath in the TRUTH!….

and this one

You disinvited Trump! We’ve disinvited you. we had planned on streaming the event. That won’t be happening in our household. Hopefully you will become a conservative organization with some balls one of these days. 

That one had a verse of scripture underneath.

Then there is this one.

Guess what, dumb bass, the non Washington Republicans, like us, want no fucking part of the current Republican Party, like you. Leave the real conservatives alone, quick mailing shit, quit begging for help, and most of all, KEEP BASHING TRUMP. You are incredibly fucking stupid.

and this one

Trump is the man! Fuck Eric Ericson. hope he and all women in his life are raped, beaten and murdered by illegal spics! Go Trump!

Sad to see John Podhoretz and Breitbart.com going at each other on Twitter (although, because no one should mistake my distress for neutrality, I agree with Podhoretz that Andrew Breitbart "would vomit" over what has been done to his namesake site.)

Sad to see Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter getting so excited over Trump's immigration plan when it's basically a statement of the obvious. (Coulter called it "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta").

The plan makes for more nuanced and less inflamed points of departure than other issues on which Trump has pronounced, for the above-mentioned reason. Noah Rothman at Commentary finds it basically awful, but says it contains elements, such a E-Verify, enhanced penalties for visa overstays, and moves to stop the tacit federal endorsement of the sanctuary-city trend, that Rothman does indeed get behind. That said, he points out that pretty much all Pub prez candidates sign on to such measures. Then there's Neo-neocon, who can only find so much agreement with Rothman:

Noah Rothman at Commentary, thinks Trump’s proposals will hurt Republicans in the election. I don’t agree; I think the jury is out on that. Of course, many Trump supporters would also consider any harm to the GOP as a positive feature rather than a bug. 

If I understand Rothman correctly, he also seems to think that Trump is suggesting that birthright citizenship be rescinded retroactively, and that children of illegal immigrants who have become citizens because they were born here should be deported, too. But I see nothing in Trump’s proposal that states that is what he is saying, although I suppose he might be. But he merely writes that he wants to “end birthright citizenship” for children born here of illegal immigrants, which I take as probably meaning he wants this to happen in the future as a disincentive to the arrival of more illegal immigrants.

Neo-neocon also reminds us of the existence of a 2011 clip showing Trump advocating that Nancy Pelosi impeach W and saying that the Most Equal Comrade "has a chance to go down as a great president,"  among other gems.

This past weekend also saw him getting back into that "we-should-just-take-the-jihadists' oil" bluster, a pronouncement that garnered an appraisal as "sophomoric" by Lt. Gen. Mark Hurtling, as well as uttering this gem: “I’m fine with affirmative action. We’ve lived with it for a long time. And I lived with it for a long time. And I’ve had great relationships with lots of people.” Whatever that last part means.


The big guns at National Review (Goldberg, Williamson, Lowry, Fund, Charen, Will), Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard, and John Podhoretz are right and, damn it, Limbaugh, Coulter, John Nolte of Breitbart, Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin are wrong, dangerously wrong. I can't believe I'm penning these words, but it must be said. Donald Trump, as I have written here (no more often than I've felt it absolutely necessary, as I'm not interested in facilitating his oxygen consumption any more than I have to) is rudderless, inarticulate, narcissistic to the point of being solipsistic, utterly lacking in depth as a human being, and, for all his blather about "making America great again," completely unfamiliar with the reasons for its actual greatness.

Maybe this whole society is so brittle, at such a hair-trigger juncture, that, just as the lefties are down to a choice between a power-mad criminal perfectly willing to put the nation in grave danger and a forthright socialist, the right no longer has a solid enough foundation to prevent the fissures we're seeing all over the place.

Maybe the country that our enemies conquer and / or obliterate will no longer be recognizable, in which case their violation of us will be a mere postlude to the real tragedy.