RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march to the nomination has intensified “establishment” Republican criticism of The Donald, especially after his big win in the Super Tuesday primaries and his trademark insults and evasions during Thursday’s debate. Indeed, Trump has been explicitly targeted by super pacs, sitting Congressmen, Mitt Romney, a Twitter campaign, and an anti-Trump statement signed by 100 foreign policy experts. Many Republicans are publicly threatening to sit the election out or even vote for Hillary if Trump is the nominee. As usual, too much of the focus is on personality rather than the long-term cultural trends that have culminated in the Trump candidacy.

In his critics’ view, Trump’s juvenile vulgarity, ignorance of policy and facts, checkered business history, dubious hiring practices, shady schemes like Trump University, blatant lies and flip-flops, and low national poll numbers in a hypothetical contest with Hillary Clinton all point to a disaster in November, with the Democrats taking the presidency and perhaps the Senate, with one or more “living Constitution” Supreme Court justices to follow.

Or not. Perhaps this is an election when millions of people, including some working-class Democrats, are eager for revenge against the arrogant elites of both parties who look down on those who have guns and religion, but no Ivy League degrees and polysyllabic vocabularies. Maybe there are enough voters sick not just of illiberal political correctness, but also of many nominal conservatives who have mastered the “preemptive cringe” and meekly follow the progressives’ rules and overlook their hypocrisy. Maybe they’re disappointed at handing Congress to the Republicans, only to watch Obama run wild with executive orders and directives to undemocratic federal agencies that are creating and enforcing laws in violation of the separation of powers.

For those people, Trump is their megaphone, the guy who says to the whole nation and the political and media gatekeepers what for seven years his supporters have been yelling at their television screens. He’s the self-proclaimed “strong leader” who will take charge and “make America great again” after eight years of Obama’s systematic demolition of their country. And maybe there are enough of them to win in November, particularly given Hillary’s long record of duplicity, abuse of power, and hypocritical money-grubbing.

We’re living through a revolution, but not the revolution you think.

You’ve probably heard that this presidential campaign is the beginning of the end for the American political establishment. It’s not. Everyone who’s read a history book knows that the end of one establishment usually leads to the rise of another, pretty much indistinguishable from it. But it might be the beginning of the end of something much more foundational to American politics: respecting the dignity of those we disagree with.

In politics, tactics are telling. And when we observe tactics, we see that at least one Republican presidential campaign bears a striking resemblance to a movement on the opposite end of the political spectrum: the rise of exclusionary, powerful, and often oppressive “safe spaces” on college campuses.

These so-called safe spaces are segments of the public square, usually on college campuses, that have been hijacked by illiberal liberals who make them into spaces where only some are safe, and others are in actual danger.

Donald Trump’s rallies, where incidents of racist aggression have become more and more common, take a page from the radical Left’s handbook by offering just such an exclusive space to the one group that is consistently excluded from other so-called safe spaces: lower and middle-class straight white Americans. As was recently pointed out in The Atlantic, what unites Trump voters is that they feel politically voiceless and powerless. They have watched their jobs dry up, their homes be repossessed, their costs for basic health care soar, and themselves become targets for ongoing insults from the Left. They’ve been called racist for being angry at President Obama’s refusal to enforce immigration laws; bigots for thinking homosexual behavior is wrong; extremists for standing up for innocent human life by opposing abortion on demand, and backwards for wanting to exclude men from the women’s restroom. And they can’t say anything about it without having their words twisted and thrown back in their faces — all in the name of “tolerance.”

It’s only a small step from “I feel voiceless” to wondering who stole your voice. At a Donald Trump rally, it’s clear who’s to blame: the politicians, the judges, the Left, the illegal immigrants. What Trump is doing so successfully isn’t new; he’s using the narrative of oppression, a narrative employed by groups across the political spectrum, to overcome rational analysis and inflame the survival instinct of his constituency. It’s worked so well partly because of the political climate created by the radical Left.

While everyone was watching videos of protesters being hustled out of Trump rallies last week, here’s what happened under the radar in California that illustrates the point.

The campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at California State University–Los Angeles invited conservative author Ben Shapiro to speak to their group about trigger warnings and illiberal liberalism in general. Just a week and a half before the event was to take place, Cal State–Los Angeles’s president, William Covino, canceled it, saying that Shapiro couldn’t participate in an event that would feature only his view. He would have to appear on a panel with a diverse group to “better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas.”

Donald Trump suffered a sharp drop in CNN’s Political Prediction Market after Saturday’s voting. CNN’s market uses polling and forecasts from more than 100,000 users to predict election outcomes. Trump had a 78 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination before the voting in four states on Saturday. Afterwards, in the wake of his losses in Kansas and Maine, his odds fell to 63 percent. Trump narrowly won Kentucky and tied Ted Cruz for delegates in Louisiana.

Whether or not Donald Trump becomes the GOP presidential nominee will depend in large part on whether his support is declining in strength — as it did on Saturday – or continuing to expand.

If he takes from candidates who have left the race, such as Ben Carson, he is on track to win. If he is declining, he is unlikely to enter the Cleveland convention with the 1,237 delegates needed to win, because many of the delegates bound to win on the first ballot aren’t personal supporters and will probably abandon him. Trump could cut a deal for the delegates of, say, John Kasich, who has been noticeably reluctant to criticize Trump, even in the wake of the KKK brouhaha. But there are obstacle to such a deal as well.

So far, there are signs that Trump’s debate antics, his flip-flops, and the consolidation of the GOP field is slowing him down. As Henry Enten of FiveThirtyEight pointed out, Trump won 35 percent of the vote in Super Tuesday primaries on March 1 and only 33 percent in Saturday’s contests in Maine, Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. He was favored to win the first two states but saw Ted Cruz beat him instead.

Consider what happened in Louisiana, a state where Trump’s final lead in the average of all polls surveyed by RealClearPolitics was 15.6 percent of the vote. He wound up winning by three points, only because he carried early votes with 47 percent. Ted Cruz won 23 percent, and Marco Rubio won 20 percent. Of the votes cast on Election Day, Cruz beat Trump, by 40.9 percent to 40.5 percent.

Right now, Trump has won 44 percent of the delegates selected so far. Cruz has won 34 percent, and Rubio has won 17 percent. Starting on March 15, the first states to allocate delegates on a winner-take-all basis start voting, led by John Kasich’s home state of Ohio and Marco Rubio’s home state of Florida.

If Trump wins both, he will have about half the delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination. He then would have to win just over 50 percent of the delegates selected after March 15 to reach the magic delegate number of 1,237. If he did so, he would enter the convention with enough votes for a first-ballot victory, although some of his delegates who are established party officials and not Trump partisans could abstain and bring his total below a majority.

Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands the American military. He sees it as an instrument of savage brutality, restrained only by political correctness. There is no honor. There is no law. If only the military were free to torture, murder, and blaspheme, then America would win its wars. By believing that American soldiers would follow those orders — or would want to follow those orders — he slanders the character of the American military.

For months, he has promised that he would order the military to commit war crimes, torturing militants and targeting their families for execution. He was just as emphatic in promising that those orders would be followed.

He was wrong. There is no scenario under which the military would ever follow directives so offensive to its honor and so blatantly illegal. No man I served with in Iraq would comply with an order to intentionally kill an innocent woman or child, and no officer with a shred of decency or honor would give such an order. The Pentagon has many flaws, but truly bad soldiers are few and far between, and the military is institutionally hard-wired to resist exactly this kind of corruption. Trump would instantly sever the relationship between America’s armed forces and their commander-in-chief just by asking them to do such things.

As Lieutenant General James Mattis put it in a 2005 memorandum to the United States Marine Corps, “Marines fight only enemy combatants.” It should go without saying that the same principle applies to soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Our men and women in uniform do not fight innocent civilians and they do not assault prisoners in their custody. Both the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice bind American soldiers to the laws of war, which prohibit such actions.

“Anyway, Sort-of-Super Saturday confirmed my feeling that while it is late, it is not yet too late. From where I sit, the candidate who has the best chance of derailing the Trump Express is Ted Cruz. He performed far better than predicted on Super Tuesday and Sort-of-Super Saturday. His talk at CPAC was a masterly performance, full of humor, insight, and sober political analysis. Watch it. Unlike Mitt Romney in 2012, he has a superb ground game. And Donald Trump’s not-so-slow-motion implosion gives Ted Cruz some momentum of his own. It’s by no means a sure thing. It will be an uphill struggle. But the most savvy candidate is also the one most committed to returning the country to its tradition as a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law and a deep respect for individual liberty.”

Impressions

The great Ace of Spades captured the essence of last night in a headline:
Rubio Collapsed, Cruz Surged, Trump Stable

Peeking behind the headline, however, Ace shows that Trump’s “stability” is anything but stable. First, the math. Cruz scooped up 64 delegates last night. Trump took 49. In Kentucky, Trump’s narrow win gave him 17 delegates to Cruz’s 15; in Louisiana, it was even closer: 18 for Trump, 18 for Cruz. In Kansas, by contrast, Cruz walked away with 29 delegates while Trump took 9. In Maine, it was Cruz 12, Trump 9 [NOTE: these figures and those below have been updated since this morning.]

Getting out the abacus and doing the sums that gives us:

Trump: 382 delegates

Cruz: 300 delegates

382 – 300 = 82

So, now Trump, who was supposed to win everything, is only 83 delegates ahead of Ted Cruz. At the moment, Marco Rubio has 128 delegates.

During the most recent Detroit debate, even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or a macho reassurance in LBJ fashion?)

Trump gave more than enough evidence that his positions are liquid and change as often his perceptions of his flatterers and critics. He is a blank slate, who as president could build or tear down a southern wall with equal ease, depending on the dynamics of the political deal of the moment. Has there ever been a Republican candidate that Republicans feared was too liberal and Democrats too reactionary? Planned Parenthood advocates usually do not wish to build a wall on the southern border. Trump’s perceived danger to the Republican Party is that he would move not only to the Left, but do so in an especially crass and crude way—expanding the party by not being of the party, winning as a Republican precisely by not being a Republican. To the degree that he would succeed as a president, liberals would applaud his conversion to liberalism; to the degree that he would fail, they would cite his innate conservatism.

In the debate, in passive-aggressive fashion Trump pouted and pounced, furious that others had broken the Golden Rule and done unto him what he has done unto others. His entire moral universe is predicated on a preteen morality of liking those who praise him, and hating those who criticize him. For Trump, to the extent that Megyn Kelly or Bill O’Reilly is or is not a good journalist depends entirely on his own transitory perceptions of how obsequious or prickly each was to Trump in their last encounter. All politicians operate like that; Trump’s great strength or weakness is that he is not shy in expressing it. (And that he knows most journalists wish to be liked rather than respected, and so make the necessary adjustments for Donald J. Trump.)

All that said, I doubt Trump will lose much of his 35-45% support in the next rounds of elections. It does no good for his critics to point out that he never reaches 50% margins in either elections or polls, when he can still win primaries well enough without gaining half the electorate. His genius so far has been to turn his third of the electorate into proof he’s a winner because his opponents never united to marshal a majority against him. In other words, Trump counted on the egos of his opponents to outweigh their concerns for their establishment party. His 35% is unimpeachable, and the anti-Trump 65% is at this late date still hopelessly fragmented. The more candidates talk about “uniting” around an anti-Trump candidate, the more they sound like medieval proverbial mice who dream of someone else putting a warning bell on the marauding cat.