RUTHFULLY YOURS

“For the sake of our country and the movement we have devoted our lives to, sit down with each other and work out the logistics on a single non-Trump candidate strategy that will protect this race from a Donald Trump nomination, and protect our country from a Hillary Clinton presidency.”

Several years ago I penned a piece on then Presidential candidate, Ron Paul, someone who had no chance at the time of being President, but who had captured the affections of far too many discerning people. I know my article could have never swayed the opinions of the typical Ron Paul supporter, but I have received more emails on that piece than on any non-investment piece I have ever written thanking me for that article, telling me that they did not know, or had not thought through, the problems with Ron Paul until that piece.

I hold out no hope that this article will sway the opinions of any Donald Trump supporters, and yet the stakes are far, far higher. Ron Paul never won a single state in three Presidential attempts. My motives to shine a light on his conspiratorial ideology were because he was a credible and capable spokesman for free markets and Constitutionalism, which I will take a bullet for, and yet he was damaging those causes I believed in so much with such an inane and morally reckless view of America and her role in the world. With Trump, my motive is both similar and dissimilar: Similar in that I desperately want to protect the sanctity of the movement known as conservatism for which I consider myself a passionate advocate, but dissimilar in that Ron Paul was going nowhere, whereas Donald Trump has a serious chance of becoming the GOP candidate for the Presidency in the most important election of our lifetimes. Worse, he may even become President.

Do not mistake this article, though, as motivated by the desire to change Trump voters minds. I would be grateful if it happened, but let me concede a few very important things:

Donald Trump has staked his campaign on being a successful businessman, when he is no such thing. His supporters do not care.

Donald Trump has no professed compatibility with conservatism. I don’t mean in a Burkean sense, or Kirkian sense, or Buckleyian sense, or Reaganite sense. I mean, he has no conservative sense at all. None. He has never quoted a single word of any of the great forefathers of conservative ideology, and to the extent he ever spoke or wrote about Ronald Reagan, it was to call him a con man and failed President. His supporters do not care.

Donald Trump is not content to bully the residents of just one continent, it seems.

In the mid 1990s, there was Vera Coking, the septuagenarian widow whom Donald Trump tried to squeeze out of her Atlantic City apartment to make room for a limousine parking lot for his nearby casino. Ten years later, in Scotland, trying to foist a golf course and resort onto a stretch of Scottish coastline, Trump encountered a set of equally incorrigible homeowners — and did his best to run them out of their homes, too.

In March 2006, Trump visited Scotland and proposed to build a 36-hole golf course — “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world,” as he would reiterate time and again — along with a 450-room hotel with a conference center and spa, 950 time-share apartments, 36 golf villas, and 500 for-sale houses, and accommodations for hundreds of full-time employees, in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire. He billed it as an economic boon to the country and, in his usual theatrical fashion, as a “homecoming,” waxing poetic about his immigrant mother, who departed Scotland’s Western Isles for the U.S. as a young woman. In reality, it was a vanity project.

“I always wanted to do a golf course in Europe, and of the 211 sites we have looked at, we have seen some incredible places,” said Trump. “But this was something special.” Indeed — more than Trump understood. The Menie Links, north of Aberdeen, is home to the Foveran Links, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The Foveran Links – which is a dynamic dune system that moves several meters annually, giving rise to a unique collection of plants and wildlife — is unique in the United Kingdom.

To build on SSSIs, of which there are 1,400 in Scotland, one requires special permission from the relevant municipal government, which can decide that the potential economic boon from a proposed project outweighs the environmental cost. In November 2007, the Aberdeenshire Council’s Infrastructure Committee rejected Trump’s proposal, 8–7. One month later, though, in a surprise move, the Scottish national government “called in” the plan, removing it from the Aberdeenshire Council’s jurisdiction on the grounds that the plan was of national interest.

In October 2008, the national government gave the green light. “The balance of opinion among people in the northeast of Scotland and among my constituents is very strongly in favor. And that’s because we can see the social and economic benefits.” So said Alex Salmond, then a local Scottish parliamentarian (now known for spearheading last year’s failed referendum effort). According to Salmond, Trump’s project promised 6,000 jobs across Scotland, 1,400 of which would be “local and permanent jobs in the northeast.” Construction revved up.

Dear Donald Trump Fan,I’m going to tell you the truth, friend.
You say you want the truth. You say you want someone who speaks boldly and brashly and bluntly and “tells it like it is” and so on. According to exit polls in South Carolina, voters who want a president who “tells it like it is” are an essential demographic for Trump, just as they’re an essential demographic for Judge Judy and Dr. Phil. You say you want abrupt and matter-of-fact honesty, and you want it so much, you’ll make a man president for it regardless of whether he defies every principle and value you claim to hold.
Personally, I think you’re lying, and I’m going to test my theory. In fact, I believe I’ve already proven my theory because you’re now offended that I called you a liar. But Trump has called half of the Earth’s population a liar at some point over the past seven months, and you loved every second of it. You said you loved it not out of cruelty or spite, but out of admiration for a man who’s willing to call people liars — even if he’s lying when he does it.

Yet here I am employing the same tactic — accurately, I might add — and you recoil indignantly. Over the course of this campaign season I’ve said many harsh words about you and your leader, all of which I stand by, but you’ve never respected my harsh words, or the harsh words of any Trump critic. Indeed, you insist that our tough criticism of you only vindicates your support of Trump, while Trump’s vulgar and dishonest criticism of everyone else also vindicates your support of Trump. You’re tired of people being critical, but you love Trump because he’s critical. You say you like Trump for his style, but you hate his style when it’s directed at him or you.

You say you like Trump for his style, but you hate his style when it’s directed at him or you.

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You say you want someone who’s politically incorrect. You’re so desperate for political incorrectness — a supremely ridiculous reason to vote a guy into the Oval Office, but never mind — that your esteem for him only grows when he belittles the disabled, mocks American prisoners of war, calls women dogs, calls his opponents p*ssies, calls for the assassination of women and children, says he’d like to have sex with his daughter, brags about his adultery, etc.

You’re excited by the most vile statements and most cretinous behavior imaginable — not remotely deterred by any of it, no matter how many times he gloats over infidelity, curses his opponents, and publicly ogles his own children — because, you say, it’s politically incorrect. That is how unfathomably desperate you are for someone to come along and just say what’s on their mind, you claim. You’re so fed up with political correctness that you celebrate political incorrectness without distinguishing between the healthy sort and the “LOL I slept with married women and I’m not sorry” sort. It doesn’t matter if you don’t personally agree, you say, you just respect the hell out of someone who’s willing to shoot straight, even when ”shooting straight” means comparing Ben Carson to a child molester, calling the entire electorate of Iowa stupid, and referring to women as “pieces of ass.”

Trump won South Carolina on the support of Evangelical Christians who were so impressed with his alleged straight talk that they overlooked the fact that he’s a crass, cruel, unrepentant philanderer who says he does not need God’s forgiveness, and who praises Planned Parenthood as “wonderful” and his radically pro-abortion sister as a “phenomenal” candidate for the Supreme Court. That’s how much you pretend to admire bluntness in a man. So much that it overrides literally everything else.

Among South Carolina Republicans who preferred above all else a candidate “who tells it like it is,” 77 percent voted for Donald J. Trump.

That is astonishing, given that Donald Trump’s entire life has been an extended exercise in deception.

Start with his wealth. How much is Donald Trump worth? $1.7 billion? $6 billion? “TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” as he claimed in his presidential filing? Tim O’Brien, then a reporter for the New York Times, wrote in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, that in one 24-hour period, Trump claimed two different net worths differing by $3.3 billion. He has never permitted an independent, third-party audit of his finances. The closest anyone has come is Deutsche Bank, which in 2005 estimated that Trump was worth . . . $788 million. Several sources with knowledge of Trump’s finances have put the number significantly lower.

And Trump has admitted to lying about his wealth. “Have you ever exaggerated in statements about your properties?” he was asked during a deposition in the mid 2000s. “I think everyone does,” Trump replied. “Does that mean that sometimes you’ll inflate the value of your properties in your statements?” the lawyer followed up. Trump: “Not beyond reason.”

Translation: “Yes,” as evidenced by this exchange about a Trump-owned property in Westchester County, N.Y., which Trump claimed had doubled its value in twelve months. “Did you have any basis for that view other than your own opinion?” he was asked during a different deposition. “I don’t believe so, no.”

Trump’s wealth-related lies abound. Did he actually receive $1 million for a 2005 speech, as he told Larry King?? No. He was paid $400,000. He lumped in promotional efforts on behalf of the address to inflate his compensation.