Hillary’s Trump Card The Salesman will Flame out, Despite the Best Efforts of Democrats.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-trump-card-1436482703
We had vowed not to write about Donald Trump, but Democrats and the media are so eager to use the political apprentice to define conservatism that we can’t avoid it. He won’t win a GOP caucus or primary, but he is notable as a Democratic weapon against Republicans.
The latest to wield the Sword of Donaldese is Hillary Clinton, who broke her media silence this week to denounce the Clinton Foundation contributor. “I’m very disappointed in those comments” about Mexicans, she said—then the quick political pivot—“and I feel very bad and very disappointed with him and with the Republican Party for not responding immediately and saying, enough, stop it.”
Several GOP candidates had criticized Mr. Trump’s comments, and only Senator Ted Cruz has defended the hotelier as far as we’ve read. But Mrs. Clinton was on a determined guilt-by-distant-association mission.
“But they are all in the, you know, in the same general area on immigration. They don’t want to provide a path to citizenship. They range across a spectrum of being either grudgingly welcome or hostile toward immigrants,” she added.
The CNN reporter was alert enough to ask, “But what about Jeb Bush’s approach to that? It’s different, certainly, than Donald Trump’s?”
Mrs. Clinton: “Well, he doesn’t—he doesn’t believe in a path to citizenship. If he did at one time, he no longer does. And so pretty much they’re—as I said, they’re on a spectrum of, you know, hostility, which I think is really regrettable in a nation of immigrants like ours.”
So referring to Mexican immigrants as largely criminals and “rapists,” as Donald Trump did, is no different than favoring immigration reform with legal residence if not citizenship, as Mr. Bush does. Mrs. Clinton is demonstrating how dishonest and unpleasant her campaign is going to be as she tries to polarize the country by race and gender to replicate the Obama coalition.
That still leaves how the other GOP presidential candidates should handle Mr. Trump, who for now is doing well enough in the polls to qualify among the top 10 for the first Republican debate in August. We like Neal Freeman’s idea that if Mr. Trump won’t pledge to endorse the eventual GOP nominee he should be dropped from the debates.
But in any case he’s a political fad who will fade as voters learn that he’s no conservative. He donates money to Democrats because he says “you’re gonna need things from everybody,” which is not the best tea party appeal. He loves corporate welfare, especially government seizure of property so he can build his properties. He gives no evidence of knowing anything about public policy, other than he’d stand up to China and the menace of Mexico—though he concedes that “some” Mexicans “are good people.”
Some GOP voters may like that the casino magnate is telling politicians they should be “fired,” but sooner or later they’ll figure out he’s in the race to promote his own celebrity, not conservative ideas.
The other candidates may do best if they ignore him until the inevitable moment when his mad uncle routine turns nasty. Perhaps it will occur during the debate. That would be the moment to tell America that Mr. Trump’s bombast doesn’t represent the Republican Party. It represents what Hillary Clinton and her media allies want voters to believe about the Republican Party.
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