RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oh Puleez! I admire David French but he and Kristolantics will do nothing, absolutely nothing to intimidate Trump or his supporters. Like McCarthy whom I respect and admire,I will, reluctantly vote for Trump. Unlike him, I think that Kristol and the holdouts are ridiculous and destructive and have painted themselves into a corner, wasting time and energy on a silly plan and aiding Hillary in her battle against Trump….rsk

“Thank God for David French.

As anyone familiar with David’s character, career, and oeuvre knows, there are about a million reasons to utter that sentence. But I offer thanks today for his public consideration of an independent run for the presidency. It’s a very American thing to do — or at least it would be in pre-Obama America.

Allow me to explain myself before the inevitable fusillade from Donald Trump’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later (if ever) legions — the trolls who may make it even harder for reluctant conservatives to board the Trump Train than does the Donald himself.

I expect to vote for Trump in November. As I’ve previously conceded, this is not exactly a momentous concession: I live in New Jersey, which is going to be carried by the Democratic nominee regardless of whom I vote for or whether I vote at all. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wisely observes, the probability that any of our votes will determine the winner of the 2016 election “cannot meaningfully be distinguished from zero.”

More significantly, however, I intend to do everything in my (admittedly limited) power to help Donald Trump arrive at policies that promote American national security and prosperity. I hope that can be done in a cordial, if wary, alliance. That is, notwithstanding my skepticism, I hope Trump’s conservative supporters are correct that Trump is no longer the by-the-numbers left-leaning Democrat he was for so many years. I hope that he really has made a conversion, that conservatives really can have a mutually advantageous relationship with him.

Yet, I am not banking on the Road to Damascus — especially for a rider who vacillates between wanting nothing to do with Syria and salting the earth beneath it. I am perfectly prepared to provide help of the adversarial “tough love” variety. After all, what we really love and want the best for is the United States. The presidency is an important means toward that end, but it is not the end itself.

It keeps happening. In Chicago, Kansas City, South Bend, Janesville, Albuquerque, Costa Mesa, and countless other cities, gaggles of paid, increasingly violent left-wing agitators are doing their best to shut down the rights of Trump supporters to peacefully assemble. In some cases, they are even physically attacking people. Earlier this year in Chicago (ground zero for left-wing agitation), the protesters actually succeeded in shutting down a rally. All across the nation, people’s constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly are being threatened by unhinged and out-of-control radicals.

Last night in San Jose, yet another violent mob of far-left protesters assailed and assaulted Trump supporters as they were leaving a rally, in the latest example of this ongoing anti-democratic spectacle.

Trump supporters were assaulted and even pelted with eggs when they left a San Jose rally for the presumptive Republican nominee.

The crowd also stole Trump merchandise and set it on fire, and they yelled accusations of racism at Trump’s backers.

One Trump supporter told a news report that he had his Trump sign stolen and was then sucker-punched.

Some members of the media characterized the incidents as “fights.” These weren’t fights; they were violent assaults. In the photograph below, a terrified young guy is running for his life with the mob in close pursuit.

This is what passes for political engagement in 2016 America:
Protesters against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump chase a man leaving a Trump campaign rally on Thursday, June 2, 2016, in San Jose, Calif. A group of protesters attacked Trump supporters who were leaving the presidential candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) Protesters against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump chase a man leaving a Trump campaign rally on Thursday, June 2, 2016, in San Jose, Calif. A group of protesters attacked Trump supporters who were leaving the presidential candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground. (AP Photo/Noah

The Republican establishment dismissed Donald Trump as a joke, then reacted to initial victories with confident predictions his salad days would wilt and fade. What didn’t resonate in Washington’s hermetically sealed echo chamber was disgust, not with the tycoon but with the elites.
The sentiment is familiar: ‘I hope the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump because it will be a bloodbath for them’, or words to that effect, is a social-media staple among non-Republicans. The seductive notion is that Trump is so unpalatable he will lose November’s presidential election in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Therefore, or so the logic goes, Republicans would do better with someone less divisive. As a prevailing meme it serves not only as a reminder of the folly in taking advice from political enemies, but also of the punditocracy’s abysmal record of what are, quite frankly, delusional prognostications.

When the primaries season began, the conventional wisdom was ‘Republicans will never nominate Trump’. When the tycoon began to gain traction, it was ‘Trump will crash and burn’ and ‘he’s a temporary fad’. As he continued to gather delegates, wishful thinking coloured the prophecies, as in ‘they’ll wise up and pick Jeb Bush’. Each and every reading of the auguries proved untrue, a reminder that few things can equal the inertial mass of a political elite confronting a contrary reality. Whatever else Trump has achieved, he has certainly eroded the credibility of numerous political commentators.

The pundits’ mistake was to apply the rules of 2012 four years too late. When Trump denounced illegal aliens and the crimes many commit, the media establishment painted him as a racist and, tellingly, neglected to mention that his pledge to build a wall along the Rio Grande was prompted by, to cite but one example, the Mexican thug who had been deported five times before slipping over the border yet again to kill a young woman in San Francisco. Those who voted for Trump knew better. They grasped that there is already a border “wall” of sorts — armed patrols, cyclone wire, movement detectors – it’s just that it doesn’t work very well. In 2012, the racist tag worked just fine as a handy smear. Today, though, non-pundit Americans have watched the invasion of Europe, seen the erosion of borders and national sovereignty, made note of crimes committed by those with no legal right to be on US soil. In the world they inhabit, the world the elites refuse to acknowledge, what Trump says makes perfect sense.

Likewise, Trump’s pronouncements on Islamic immigration. After every latest Islamist massacre the elites grab the nearest photogenic imam, summon the media and proclaim Islam as the Religion of Peace™. Voters, however, recall 9/11 and, more recently, the San Bernadino massacre by a Muslim husband and wife who killed the very same workmates who organised a baby shower for them. Once again, Trump emerges as the candidate who best grasps reality.

Likewise, previous orthodoxies also have been called into question. Obama campaigned in 2008 on the implicit pledge that he would restore the world’s love for America by renouncing what he evidently regarded as its arrogant and imperialist hubris. The result? A shrunken global presence, a shameful deal with Iran’s religious fascists and a vacuum where once Pax Americana prevailed. These factors, compounded and manifested in the rise of the Tea Party, contributed to an overall feeling of disconnect between Main Street and its Washington betters.

With Trump as nominee, social conservatives might think that by not voting for him they are keeping their hands clean. These people fail to recognize that under a Clinton regime there will be no refuge from a systematic agenda that seeks to destroy the very notion of “nature” and of any restraint on federal power.

Trump is an old-fashioned Whig—and I am not referring to his hair.

In an excellent article at Public Discourse, Matthew Franck compared Donald Trump to Stephen Douglas, “the showboat orator, the bulldog debater, the racial demagogue, the slippery character seeking to wriggle free of Lincoln’s grasp, and finally the exhausted boozer losing his voice.” But the historical analogy could be read in a very different way.

As Allen Guelzo points out, “the greatest danger to democracy” in the 1840s “was not an insurrection of discontented laborers but the maneuverings of a pig-eyed aristocracy to strike up a dark alliance with the working classes, whispering that economic mobility was a chimera and that what the workers needed was subsidy and protection from mobility.” Clearly, the Democratic Party has been the demagogue party since its inception. The nineteenth-century Democrats offered slavery—not only racial slavery in the South, but also the slavery of cradle-to-grave socialism, as Orestes Brownson made clear in his essay “On the Laboring Classes.” The fact that we can imagine Trump as a new threat of demagoguery demonstrates quite brilliantly Alasdair MacIntyre’s old point: “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”