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POLITICS

Was Trump’s Would-Be Assassin Inspired by a ‘Climate of Hate’? By Debra Heine

Did the left-wing “climate of hate,” which has been plaguing Donald Trump and his supporters for many months, incite an autistic British man to take extreme measures to “stop” him? If Sarah Palin and the tea party could be blamed for the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, then it’s fair to question if Donald Trump’s critics can be blamed for the attempt on his life.

A few days ago, 20-year-old Michael Steven Sandford attempted to kill the Republican presumptive nominee at a rally at the Treasure Island Casino. Sandford tried to take a gun from a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer in order to assassinate Trump but failed in his attempt, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada.

The British national, who was living in the United States illegally on an expired visa, now faces up to ten years in prison after apparently making a confession to a Secret Service agent. Media coverage of what should be a major story has been somewhat less than wall-to-wall. Would the media be this curiously disinterested if the assassination attempt had been on Hillary Clinton?

The same could be said if it had happened with Barack Obama in the summer of 2008. Questions would be debated on air for weeks on end about the evil lurking in the hearts of men and why someone would be so desperate to prevent the election of the first black or female president. But when someone plots for more than a year to kill Trump, travels across the country to find an opportunity and then launches his attempt, it creates barely a ripple in the media pond.

Protests at Trump rallies have become increasingly violent in recent weeks, with the media often blaming the GOP candidate himself for inciting the violence. Of course, the only ones to blame for violence at a Trump rally are the people behaving violently. The same could be said for young Mr. Sandford, but since “right-wing rhetoric” and a “climate of hate” were blamed for a lunatic’s misdeeds five and a half years ago, perhaps it is worth examining the possibility that left-wing rhetoric and an anti-Trump “climate of hate” are to blame for the assassination attempt on Trump.

The Primaries Are Over. Why Haven’t the 2016 Oddities Stopped? By Roger Kimball

There’s not a lot that supporters of Donald Trump, supporters of Hillary Clinton, and supporters of a bright future for the United States of America agree about. Following my usual policy of fostering comity and mutual understanding, however, I am happy to have isolated one important bit of common ground that partisans of all stripes can agree on: this has been a very odd campaign season.

While that may not seem like much to work with, recognition of that oddity does contain a potentially fecund seed. Much depends on the exact valence of the relevant tense: it has been a very odd campaign. But does the oddity continue?

There is something about the disposition of most humans that encourages the belief that what is will continue to be. Our lives, we believe, will continue on tomorrow pretty much as they did today and the day before that. This election season was plenty odd — the rise but not (yet) the fall of Donald Trump, the persistence of Bernie Sanders, the steady march forward of the scandal-encumbered wife of Bill Clinton. Amazing, isn’t it?

But every step along the way the larger narrative has operated like a self-sealing fuel tank. No matter how seriously it was punctured, a gelatinous ooze of conventional wisdom was excreted to preserve the story we’d all agreed upon (didn’t we?) before.

No matter how many primaries Bernie Sanders won, no matter what breaches of national security the FBI uncovered, Hillary was the agreed-upon nominee. Nothing was going to change that. Unless, of course, something does.

The Shrinking of the Liberal Order ‘We want our country back’ is a slogan that holds for Trumpites and Brexiteers. By William A. Galston

Whatever the outcome of the “Brexit” vote—the U.K.’s referendum Thursday on remaining in the European Union—an era of Western history is ending and a new one is struggling to be born. The liberal internationalist project of the past seven decades is on the defensive, while ethno-nationalism (often illiberal) is surging.

The optimistic assumption that history’s arc is linear and progressive is being challenged by the older, darker view that order is locked in a perpetual struggle with chaos, security with danger. If liberal means are no longer adequate to guarantee order and security, say the challengers, they become niceties we can no longer afford.

In the U.S., support for the country’s postwar role as the lead guarantor of peace and the liberal international economic order is weakening. The Republican Party’s presidential nominee has rattled governments around the world with his frontal challenge to America’s military alliances.

Leaders in both parties have rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, despite President Obama’s compelling geopolitical argument that if the U.S. doesn’t write the rules for East Asia in the 21st century, the Chinese will. Long-suppressed ethno-nationalist sentiments within America’s aging, shrinking white majority have found their public voice, blocking long-overdue immigration reform and questioning the loyalty of American Muslims.

In Europe, illiberal majoritarianism is on the rise. Hungary’s Viktor Orban was the earliest example of this trend, which intensified with parliamentary inroads last year by the extreme-right Jobbik party. Many other countries have followed in Hungary’s wake.

Meanwhile, support for the EU, the world’s most conspicuous example of liberal internationalism, is waning. A survey released this month by the Pew Research Center found that the share of French citizens with a favorable view of the EU has declined to 38% from 69% during the past decade, lower than even the U.K.’s 44%. In Germany, the linchpin of the European project, support has declined to 50%, while disapproval has risen to 48%.

There are specific complaints behind these trends. Overwhelming majorities throughout Europe fault the EU’s handling of the refugee crisis and its response to the aftermath of the Great Recession. But the objection goes deeper.

The founding document of what became the EU pledged signatories to “lay the foundation of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.” For decades, leaders believed that the cure for the continent’s ills was “more Europe”—the progressive deepening of economic and political integration. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump Nuclear Bomb Other public figures won’t admit they agree with him — but they often quietly adopt his ideas. By Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump has a frightening habit of uttering things that many people apparently think, but would never express. And he blusters in such an off-putting and sloppy fashion that he alienates those who otherwise might agree with many of his critiques of political correctness.

Nonetheless, when the dust settles, we often see that Trump’s megatonnage strikes a chord — and, with it, sometimes has effected change. In an odd way, the more personally unpopular he becomes for raising taboo issues, the more resonant become the more refined variants of his proposals for addressing these festering problems.

For the last several months, anti-Trump demonstrators have sought to disrupt his rallies; they attack his supporters and wave offensive anti-American and often overtly racist placards, while burning American and waving Mexican flags — often with a nonchalant police force looking on.

Trump shouts back that their antics are only further proof of his general point: Illegal immigration and an open border have subverted our immigration laws and created a paradoxical movement that is as illogical as it is ungracious. After fleeing Mexico, entering the U.S. illegally, and being treated with respect (try doing the same in any Latin American country), some foreign nationals have been waving the flag of the country they do not wish to return to, while scorning the flag of the country that they demand to stay in. But apparently they are not fond of Trump’s larger point, disguised by his barroom rhetoric, which is that the old melting-pot protocols of rapid assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have been sabotaged — and now the American people can at last see the wages of that disaster on national TV.

In response to the general public disapproval that focused on the violent demonstrations, anti-Trump protestors recently have announced that they will ban Mexican flags from their future rallies. They probably will not, but why did they even play-act that they would? Are illegal-immigration activists suddenly turned off by Mexico and appreciative of the United States? Be that as it may, it would surely be a good thing if immigrants to the U.S. and their supporters stopped attacking the icons of the country that they have chosen to reside in.

For that matter, why suddenly during the past six months did 16 Republican primary candidates begin talking about enforcing immigration laws, avoid the very mention of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and promise to finish the southern border fence? While they all deplored Trump’s mean-spirited rhetoric, they all more or less channeled his themes. Until the approach of the Trump battering ram, outrageous developments like the neo-Confederate concept of sanctuary cities being exempt from federal law were off limits to serious criticism — even from the Republican congressional establishment.

Trump dismissively characterized Judge Gonzalo Curiel as a “Mexican” (the absence of hyphenation could be charitably interpreted as following the slang convention in which Americans are routinely called “Irish,” “Swedish,” “Greek,” or “Portuguese,” with these words used simply as abbreviated identifiers rather than as pejoratives). Trump’s point was that Curiel could not grant Trump a fair trial, given Trump’s well-publicized closed-borders advocacy.

Most of America was understandably outraged: Trump had belittled a sitting federal judge. Trump had impugned his Mexican ancestry. Trump had offered a dangerous vision of jurisprudence in which ethnic ancestry necessarily manifests itself in chauvinism and prejudice against the Other.

Trump was certainly crude, but on closer analysis of his disparagements he had blundered into at least a few legitimate issues. Was it not the Left that had always made Trump’s point about ethnicity being inseparable from ideology (most infamously Justice Sotomayor in her ruminations about how a “wise Latina” would reach better conclusions than intrinsically less capable white males, and how ethnic heritage necessarily must affect the vantage point of jurists — racialist themes Sotomayor returned to this week in her Utah v. Strieff dissent, which has been characterized as a “Black Lives Matter” manifesto)? Had not Barack Obama himself apologized (“Yeah, he’s a white guy . . . sorry.”) for nominating a white male judge to the Supreme Court, as if Merrick Garland’s appearance were something logically inseparable from his thought?

Paul Ryan’s Treason The GOP must represent its voters. Daniel Greenfield

In an awkward interview with the Huffington Post, House Speaker Paul Ryan threatened to sue Donald Trump if he were to ban Muslim immigration or build a border wall with Mexico. Considering the current track record of suing Obama over abuses of power, this is little more than a confession of impotence.

And yet it’s deeply troubling that a top Republican is willing to go to such lengths to fight for Muslim migration or for that matter illegal immigration in general.

Paul Ryan insists that he will continue to “speak up in defense of our principles, in defense of not just our party’s principles, but our country’s principles”, but it’s telling that these principles seem to involve illegal immigration and Muslim migration.

Since when are either of these representative of our party’s principles or our country’s principles?

And yet they are indeed core principles for Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan had complained that a Muslim ban was, “not reflective of our principles not just as a party but as a country.” Like Obama, Ryan speaks of “our principles” without actually referencing specifics. While a constitutional conservative, speaks in terms of the Constitution, Ryan uses the “values” language of the left which references no laws, only general sentiments attributed to no specific law or document.

Though Paul Ryan claims that he wants to maintain the traditional separation of powers, and quotes the exact basis for it, he seems reluctant to do so when he claims that a Muslim ban would be wrong. Ryan knows quite well that his opposition to a Muslim migration ban is not based on the law. Like his support for illegal alien amnesty, it is based on the values construct of the left and not on the Constitution.

Trump’s Pro-Growth Path to Victory After 16 years of malaise, voters are responding to his call to make America competitive again. By Donald L. Luskin

“Call Mr. Trump a know-nothing if you must. But after 16 years in the new U.S. millennium of malaise, voters are responding to his diagnosis that something has gone unexpectedly wrong with trade, and his proposals to make America more dynamic in order to adapt. Don’t forget the last know-nothing who came along and showed America how to pull out of a malaise, with an agenda quite similar to Mr. Trump’s, to cut taxes and slash regulations on businesses and energy. His name was Ronald Reagan.”

Can Donald Trump make America grow again? His record-breaking number of GOP primary voters—more than 13 million—seem to think so. And Americans overall strongly prefer Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton on the economy, and on employment and jobs, according to Gallup’s latest polling.

But according to the orthodoxy of the economically sophisticated on both the left and the right, Mr. Trump’s signature agenda—his hostility to global trade, especially with China and Mexico—is antigrowth know-nothing protectionism. More trade is axiomatically better than less, say the sophisticates, and Mr. Trump is tempting the angry masses into a suicidal trade war.

Yet consider the potentially axiom-breaking speed and magnitude of the rise of U.S. trade with China after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. By 2015, compared with 2000, American trade with China (adjusted for inflation) almost tripled to a $577 billion annual rate, and now represents 3.2% of U.S. gross domestic product. CONTINUE AT SITE

Blaming Trump Obama insinuates that “Islamophobic speech” causes terrorism. Deborah Weiss

Shortly after the Orlando attack, which left 49 dead and 53 others wounded, I predicted on my Facebook page that “despite the fact that the shooter pledged his allegiance to ISIS before launching fire, the FBI will spend weeks searching in vain for a motive. Experts will hypothesize that the shooter was disaffected, bored, insane or unemployed. It will be anything except Islamic terrorism. The whole thing will be a big mystery.” I further added,

In no time at all, the President, the government agencies and the media will be lumping in ‘homophobia’ with “Islamophobia”, and “hate”, “extremism”, “terrorism” and “violence” like they are all the same thing. Shortly thereafter (or perhaps simultaneously) the emphasis will be the hate, not Islamist ideology, and because right wingers are so hateful, the focus will be on right wing extremists who “hate” and are “Islamophobic.” And of course, Trump will be thrown in there somewhere.

It didn’t take long to prove my prediction true.

During his speech following the Orlando jihadist attack, President Obama intimated that Islamophobic speech used by Donald Trump and other Republicans is the cause of terrorist attacks. Pointing his finger at “politicians who tweet” and are “loose and sloppy” with their language, the president asserted that “this kind of mindset is dangerous. Look where it gets us.” Criticizing those who criticize him for refusing to use the phrase “Radical Islam,” President Obama insisted that “there’s no magic to the phrase Radical Islam. It’s a political talking point. It’s not a strategy.” He went on to say that “arguing about labels has all just been partisan rhetoric in the fight against extremist groups.”

Democratic presidential hopeful, Hilary Clinton, mirrored the President’s language almost verbatim, prompting a CNN reporter to ask Josh Ernest, White House spinmeister. whether the talking points were coordinated. Though he denied it, the similarity is hard to deny. Clinton proclaimed that Donald Trump thinks there are “magic words, once uttered [which] will stop terrorist from coming after us. Trump, as usual, is obsessed with name-calling….. It matters what we do more than what we say.”

ISIS is on the rise, Islamic terrorist groups have been gaining ground worldwide, Islamist ideology is spreading in the West, and ISIS-inspired attacks have arrived on the shores in the Free World including America. Ignoring these facts, the president insisted that America is safer than it was eight years ago. Yet, just days later, CIA Director John Brennan testified to the contrary, asserting that America is facing the biggest threat to national security that we have seen in years.

Down the Memory Hole: In 2008 Obama campaign booted 3 newspapers off his campaign plane By Thomas Lifson

The mainstream media have been hysterical this week in their response to Donald Trump’s revocation of the Washington Post’s campaign press credentials in response to coverage and headlines so unfair that the paper went back and changed them. Yet those same media outlets remained silent in 2008 when the Obama presidential campaign booted 3 major newspapers that had been writing unfavorably about the campaign off its press plane. Joe Concha of Mediaite remembers what happened 8 years ago, and contrasts the media response in the two instances:

The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls going into election day. And in a preview of how petulant he would be act as Commander-in-Chief as it pertains to his treatment of the press, Barack Obama decided he didn’t like what three newspapers were writing about him, so he kicked its reporters off his campaign plane.

As Concha points out, the Obama campaign claimed that there sinply wasn;t enough space, instead of being honest, as Trump has been, about the unfavorable coverage being the rootof the matter. Somehow, on the Obama plane there was room for Glamour, Ebony, and Jet, but no room for the Dallas Morning News, New York Post or Washington Times.

The contrast in the treatment of Trump and Obama is stunning:

Chris Cillizza in 2016 on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: “Barring reporters from public events because you disagree with what they write is a dangerous precedent.”

Chris Cillizza in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Slate in 2016 on Trump’s decision: Trump’s Washington Post revocation “marks an unprecedented escalation in his war” against media.

Slate in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Politics, Not Personalities, Will Likely Determine the Presidential Election The candidates may be unconventional, but their political agendas fall along a conventional divide. By Victor Davis Hanson

At first glance, 2016 sizes up as no other election year in American history.

For more than 30 years, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been high-profile and controversial celebrities. Both have been plagued by scandals and are viewed negatively by millions of voters. Clinton is facing possible federal indictment; Trump is being sued over Trump University.

If elected, Clinton would be first female president in U.S. history. If Trump prevails, he would be the first president to assume office without having held a political or cabinet office or a high military rank.

Yet the race still could prove more conventional than unorthodox.

Trump is considered uniquely crude. But take some of our most iconic political figures and one can find comparable extremist rhetoric.

As California governor, Ronald Reagan once said of University of California at Berkeley protesters, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and forced her family to distribute food to the poor, Reagan quipped, “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”

Barack Obama has scoffed this his own grandmother was a “typical white person,” called on his supporters to “get in their face” of his opponents, invoked a variation of the phrase “bring a gun to a knife fight” in an attempt to fire up supporters during his first presidential campaign, and compared his own bad bowling to the supposed competition level of the Special Olympics.

“Never Trump” Republicans swear they will not vote for Trump. Bernie Sanders’s frustrated followers say they could not envision voting for Clinton. But by November, the majority in both parties will probably support their nominees.True, both candidates are notorious flip-floppers and opportunists who seem to lack deeply held beliefs. But for now, Clinton is pledged to the progressive wing of the Democratic party and has largely repudiated many of the centrist agenda items of her husband Bill Clinton’s 1990s administration. And Trump, for all his contradictions, is, at least for the moment, far more conservative than Clinton. Neither Trump nor Clinton is viewed by the other side as a centrist.Why? For all the flaws of both presidential candidates — Trump is an undisciplined political amateur, Clinton a compromised and scripted establishmentarian — they will still advance political agendas that are markedly at odds and represent radically different views of America’s proper future.

Trump is a Jacksonian nationalist who likely would choose America’s friends and enemies solely on the basis of perceived national interests. Clinton presumably would continue Obama’s lead-from-behind foreign policy. Trump would be blunt about the connection between terrorism and radical Islam. Clinton likely would mimic Obama’s policy of not referring to Islam at all in such a context.

Suffering From Trumphobia? Get Over It Before the 1980 election, Reagan’s opponents said he would ignite a nuclear holocaust. Didn’t happen. By Edward N. Luttwak

FROM MARCH 2016
Unlike the fear of Islam, which is a rational response to Islamist violence across the world, the fear of Donald Trump really is a phobia. There is a precedent for this: the panicked Reaganphobia that preceded the 1980 election. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a member of the John Birch Society—whose essential creed was “Better Dead Than Red.” He therefore rejected “mutual assured destruction,” the bedrock strategy of the liberal consensus to guarantee coexistence by nuclear deterrence. Reagan, it was said, believed in “counterforce,” that is in a disarming first strike to win a nuclear war.

Mr. Trump irritates many with his vulgarities but Reagan was insistently depicted as a threat to human survival, so that most of the columnists and editorial writers of the quality press reluctantly called for Jimmy Carter’s re-election, despite the clamorous failures of his hopelessly irresolute administration. In Europe there was no reluctance. In London, Paris and Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, the re-election of Jimmy Carter was seen as a necessity to keep the bomb-thrower Reagan out of the White House, and well away from the nuclear button.

So many eminent people, including W. Averell Harriman, adviser to five U.S. presidents and chief negotiator of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, asserted that Reagan wanted to start a nuclear war that the KGB went on maximum alert from inauguration day for more than two years, forcing its officers around the world to take shifts on 24-hour watches of all U.S. strategic air bases to detect the telltale simultaneous launchings of a nuclear first strike.

In 1983, two years into his first term, Reagan did send U.S. troops into action to fight a war . . . in tiny Grenada, whose 133 square miles was the only territory that Reagan invaded in eight years. As for nuclear weapons, Reagan horrified his advisers at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev with his eagerness for nuclear disarmament, thereby disclosing that he didn’t even believe in strike-back, let alone in attacking first. He wanted ballistic-missile defenses, not ballistic missiles.

Mr. Trump’s lack of good manners may be disconcerting, but as president his foreign policies are unlikely to deviate from standard conservative norms. He would only disappoint those who believe that the U.S. should send troops to Syria to somehow end a barbaric civil war, or send troops to Libya to miraculously disarm militias, or send troops back to Iraq to preserve its Iran-dominated government, or send more troops back to Afghanistan where the Taliban are winning because of the government’s incapacity and corruption.

President Trump would do none of the above. He will send troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, while refusing to intervene in Libya or Syria, or anywhere else in the Muslim world, where U.S. troops are invariably attacked by those they are seeking to protect. Real conservatives want to conserve blood and treasure, not expend them lavishly to pursue ambitious political schemes.