Why Vote for Trump? Part of the electorate thinks it has nothing to lose. Most of us do.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-vote-for-trump-1453854189
Can Republicans and conservatives bring themselves to maybe support Donald Trump after all?
The question has come up as people like Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani have begun to express themselves on the preferability of Mr. Trump to Ted Cruz, though it’s far from obvious that the choice comes down to those two. At the other end are the conservative writers at National Review who’ve tried to excommunicate Trump from themselves, or vice versa.
Mr. Trump calls himself a conservative because it is convenient to do so when stumping for GOP primary votes. He has adopted positions on abortion and guns that nobody believes.
He’s an avatar of New York values, goes the slur, but that’s a way of saying he fits the mold that umpty-million upscale voters say they want; a socially liberal, fiscally conservative candidate.
Indeed, if Mr. Trump bothered to know what he really thinks, as a lifelong New Yorker, business person and multiple divorcee, he probably slots right in with GOPers who aren’t social conservatives or evangelicals. And yet his success so far has been almost entirely with the social conservatives and evangelicals.
If angry white populists can make the unlikely Mr. Trump a vessel for their hopes, why not economic conservatives with NYC values? Coalition building!
Immigration has been central to his campaign but try to figure out what he’s saying. A respected social scientist like Christopher Jencks can admit that low-skill migrants may undermine the earnings of low-skill workers. The phrase downward assimilation has been adopted for the fact that not all second- and third-generation immigrant kids climb the educational and income ladder; some expand the ranks of the underclass.
The Donald, though, does not seem to take a position on immigration policy. His complaint is with the system itself. It doesn’t work. Too many people get around it.
Is it a kind of anti-dog whistle for the liberal media when he also says he hopes that hardworking illegals, after being deported, will return legally? Who knows? Every campaign is partly about signaling, letting voters know you’re on their side without committing definitively to their views. And Mr. Trump’s campaign has only been about signaling.
Since they don’t really know what he’s for, how can Republicans and conservatives know whether they are against him?
Next question: Can he do the job? The federal government already exists and is staffed by hundreds of thousands who keep coming to work when a new administration takes office. Presidents are surrounded by advisers who help them decide what realistically can be enacted. On a regular basis, the country survives a year or two or eight with a president who has no idea what the hell he’s doing.
Mr. Trump, in his business life, has been a can-do guy, though so have lots of others. Still, you might like having Trump as your president if you like his particular can-do agenda. He talks about deals. Deals is what you want if you’re a pro-business, free-market conservative who wants tax reform, who wants Keystone XL approved, etc.
The problem is, you don’t have the foggiest idea what Mr. Trump might really do as president. Where would he put his deal-making chips? To those conservatives who fret at length in the National Review that Trump is not all the things a conservative should be, the answer might be, So what? If he could deliver one or two things (hint: tax reform), that would be 10 times more than they get from most Republicans.
We come to the “f” word—fascist. Mr. Trump has no policy anchor; his political strategy is to rile up the ignorami. Well, yes. Just as possibly, though, behind closed doors he would be a cautious administrator who cares about keeping the economy ticking over and placating major interest groups.
Again, the problem is, nobody knows. Nowhere have we seen even a thoughtful commentary committing itself to a theory of what a Trump administration would be like. Can he temper his ridiculous tongue? And just because certain conservatives suddenly find it useful to ride the Donald wave doesn’t mean they actually believe he should be president.
Obviously part of the electorate thinks it has nothing to lose, but most of us have something to lose. And Donald has a long, long way to go to demonstrate that he’s prepared to be or even interested in being a responsible chief executive.
A place to start would be lodging a security with the public in the form of reputable advisers and credible endorsers prepared to risk their own standing by backing him. We don’t see any—which tells us his campaign is still a lark, not a serious endeavor. One day this GOP primary season will stop being about the freak show and become about beating Hillary Clinton: then our money is on Rubio.
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