Looking Down on the American Voter Whining about Donald Trump’s support instead of trying to grab it.By William McGurn
We’ll find out the Republican answer in a few hours, when their presidential contenders take the stage in Las Vegas for their first post-Paris, post-San Bernardino debate. It promises to be a boisterous night, given how they are already mixing it up offstage. Their challenge will be to get out from under the rhetoric of both President Obama and Donald Trump.
Mr. Obama does not trust the American people. We saw this earlier this month, when he used an Oval Office address about the carnage in San Bernardino to lecture the rest of us about tolerance. Once again he refused to call Islamist terror by its rightful name, perhaps because he is not sure how Americans he once described as clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” might react if he were to speak honestly.
Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.
That’s a pity, because as admirable as a lack of political correctness is in a dangerous world, it’s no substitute for a tough foreign policy. For the main weakness of Trump foreign policy is not that it’s “fascist,” “unhinged” or “outrageous.” It’s that it’s almost all seat-of-the-pants.
In Las Vegas, Mr. Trump’s rivals have an excellent opportunity to move us past chest thumping. He (or she) might start by distinguishing his approach from the lead-from-behind ethos of the Obama years, which has left the world with a highly destabilized Middle East and an Islamic State fast rewriting established borders.
He might further outline what a GOP alternative would look like, beginning with more and better intelligence on enemies foreign and domestic—information that would give a president more and better options for acting.
But better intel requires more than simply restoring tools such as the National Security Agency’s just-shuttered metadata-collection program. It also means supporting the men and women who do the hard work—instead of calling CIA officers torturers and treating the NSA as an enemy of our liberties rather than a defender of them.
Then there’s the question of American troops. In almost every international crisis, Mr. Obama responds by telling us (and our enemies) that he will not send in U.S. combat forces. Instead of declaring for or against troops on the ground, how about a Republican policy that spells out the broad criteria that would guide us when it’s in the nation’s interest to send them?
Mr. Trump has been loud about what he would do to terrorists. But again, waterboarding terrorists “even if it doesn’t work” is not a strategy. Neither is treating Vladimir Putin like some corrupt Albany pol who only wants his cut of the action.
Come to think of it, have any of Mr. Trump’s debate rivals asked him why any conservative should believe he has the judgment to be president when he himself voted for Barack Obama in 2008?
The point is, we do not need another lecture on tolerance from Las Vegas this Tuesday night. In the 14 years since hijackers shouting “Allahu akbar!” turned civilian aircraft into weapons of mass murder, the FBI statistics inform us that, notwithstanding some ugly incidents, we have had many more “hate crimes” against Jews than we have had against Muslims. So why no presidential lectures about America’s treatment of Jews?
In this terrible long war the real hallmark has been American decency: In San Bernardino, the colleagues whom Syed Farook gunned down had given him and his Muslim wife a baby shower a few months earlier. Not to mention the U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have given their lives defending Muslims from jihadists who seek to impose their sick rule on any Muslim who doesn’t share their understanding of Islam.
After seven years of a U.S. commander in chief who talks down to his fellow citizens, this nation is desperate for a president who has enough faith in the good sense of the American people to lay before them a strong foreign policy for fighting this war that sets out sensible objectives and doesn’t hide the costs.
Instead of whining about Mr. Trump’s support and the stupidity of his followers, here’s to the Republican contender with the wit to try to take that support away from Mr. Trump by offering Mr. Trump’s voters a clear, strong and superior alternative.
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