RUTHFULLY YOURS

Susan Mulcahy remembers the 1980s, when she was writing for and editing the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column:

Trump seemed an ideal subject for us, as apt a symbol of the gaudy 1980s as a Christian Lacroix pouf skirt—and just as shiny and inflated. Lacroix at least used excellent materials. Trump turned out to be the king of ersatz. Not just fake, but false. He lied about everything, with gusto. But that was not immediately apparent. Not to me, anyway.

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It should be simple to write about publicity hounds, and often it is, because they’ll do anything to earn the attention they crave. Trump had a different way of doing things. He wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, “Good morning,” you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it. Nixon, who was shopping for a condo the day he met with Trump, may have had issues with credibility in his time, but over Trump, I’d have believed him any day. Trump was such a pretender he even used to fake being his own spokesman, as I learned recently, though I never heard from the faux flack he called John Barron. My Trump items came from all over the place—never Trump himself—and when I called to check on something, he usually lied to me directly.

Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump, and extended even to mundane matters.

Read the whole thing, although this next bit is far more depressing than any of Trump’s endless lies: CONTINUE AT SITE

A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head and says: ‘I know just what you mean.’ ”

The joke is supposed to be about life in Czechoslovakia under communism, circa 1977. It conveys exactly what I feel about the moral and mental state of the Republican Party, circa 2016.

Last week, Donald Trump delivered his big foreign-policy speech, built around the theme of “America First.” The term seems to have been planted in his brain by New York Times reporter David Sanger, who asked the Republican front-runner in late March whether it was fair to sum up his foreign policy as “something of an ‘America First’ kind of approach.”

Trump: “Correct, okay? That’s fine.”

Sanger: “Okay? Am I describing this correctly here?”

Trump: “I’ll tell you—you’re getting close. . . . I’m not an isolationist, but I am ‘America First.’ So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’ ”

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase? Did anyone in his inner circle advise him that it might be unwise to associate himself with a movement whose principal aim was to prevent the United States from helping Winston Churchill fight the Nazis during the Battle of the Atlantic? Once he learned of it—assuming he did—was he at least privately embarrassed? Or was he that much more pleased with himself?

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering. Either Mr. Trump stumbled upon his worldview through a dense fog of historical ignorance. Or he is seriously attempting to resurrect the most disastrous and discredited strain of American foreign policy for a new generation of American ignoramuses.

And now he’s about to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assuming a win in Tuesday’s Indiana primary. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 campaign that Donald Trump, who has run as the immigration scourge, is actually the amnesty candidate.

Trump has expressly vowed to give legal status to millions of illegal aliens. For any other candidate, such a promise would have been the campaign death knell. To compare, John Kasich, who is openly pro-amnesty, has lost 38 of 39 primaries (the sole exception being his own state) and has never been a plausible contestant. When it comes to Trump, however, it seems that the all-important amnesty fine-print of his immigration position has been overlooked, no doubt due to his consciously controversial rhetoric: his fixation about building a wall on the Mexican border, his oft-repeated commitment to mass-deportation of illegal aliens, his disparaging comments about Mexicans, and his proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration.

Yet, Trump is the amnesty candidate. What’s more, the amnesty component of his immigration plan is the only one that has a realistic chance of happening….

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George Will, writing in the Washington Post yesterday, said that if Donald Trump is nominated conservatives should help him lose all fifty states. Will wrote that they should do this in order to “…reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.”

Will is wrong, appallingly so. That’s obvious to anyone who values our national security more than the identity of the Republican Party.

The simple fact is that if Trump were to lose to Hillary Clinton, the nation would be doomed to four or eight years of governance by a person who is unfit to be president by any measure. Mrs. Clinton’s connivance with President Obama produced the most damaging foreign policy since Lyndon Johnson waded into Vietnam. That policy is Hillary’s proudest (and only) achievement. Her handling of our most closely guarded secrets, making them vulnerable to interception by every foreign government and terrorist group, is unforgivable as is her comprehensive corruption.

We know the rest. Hillary would pack the Supreme Court with more Kagans and Sotomayors. I’m told that Trump will soon announce a list of possible Supreme Court nominees that will please conservatives. Let’s hope he does.

It’s unimaginable that any of us would work for Hillary against Trump, even those of us who have been sharply critical of him. It’s time to accept that, unless something really strange happens, Trump will be the Republican nominee this year. Therefore it’s our duty to help educate him.

Trump is a businessman so he sees national security and foreign policy only from that perspective. He’s unfamiliar with how national security and foreign policy must be managed to the nation’s benefit. He doesn’t know how to pull the levers of American power to move the world. So we have to help him learn. Some of the people I know and trust are trying to influence him on these matters as evidenced in his foreign policy speech last Wednesday.

There were a lot of good points Trump made in that speech and some not so good. Let’s take them in the order he made them.

Trump’s adoption of the “America First” slogan is unfortunate. Though it has a good ring to it, the slogan is freighted with the history of the isolationist “America Firsters” of the 1930s. (That movement lasted until three days after Pearl Harbor.) A potential president needs to be aware of that kind of history and avoid connecting himself to it. Insertion of two letters to make it “Americans First” might help.

In “Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Problem – And Ours,” James Kirchik at Tablet points out a revealing (Kirchik calls it “revolutionary”) statement made by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders last week at the Brooklyn Democratic debate prior to his loss in the New York primary. “As somebody who is 100 percent pro-Israel,” Sanders declared, “we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.”

As someone who claims to be “100 percent pro-Israel,” perhaps Sanders should demand instead that the so-called Palestinian people begin to treat Israeli Jews with respect and dignity. These are the same Palestinians who overwhelmingly favor a one-state solution that includes the genocide of the Jewish people (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). These are the Palestinians currently targeting Jews with knives and cars in a vicious new intifada. The same Palestinians who name streets after Jew-killing martyrs and launch fireworks to celebrate the murders of Jews.

The Vermont socialist had more to say in defense of the Palestinians:

Sanders added that Israel’s response to Hamas rocket attacks in 2014 was “disproportionate,” that “we are going to have to say that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is not right all of the time,” and took a swipe at his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, scolding her for having “barely mentioned the Palestinians” in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Let us first consider the common, ridiculous complaint Sanders is regurgitating about Israel’s supposed use of “disproportionate force” when dealing with Arab terrorists. No sovereign state in the history of the world except Israel has ever been scolded for responding to repeated attacks on its homeland with “disproportionate force.” No military would even consider such an ineffective strategy as the use of “proportionate force.” When your country is attacked – particularly if it is a tiny strip of land surrounded by enemies obsessed with wiping you from the face of the earth – you don’t respond to a measured, perfectly balanced degree; you respond with overwhelming force not only to put an end to the threat, but to make your enemy rue the day it had ever even contemplated attacking you, and to make everyone else think twice about considering it themselves. The notion that “disproportionate force” is somehow immoral (at least, when Israel is presumed guilty of it) is nothing more than a media strategy invented by the anti-Israel left to divert attention from Palestinian Jew-hatred and to keep the spotlight of the world’s disapproval focused on the Israeli military instead.

The US presidential election this year will not be about whoever wins. It will be about the preventable rise of Donald Trump, and the crisis of the American political institutions his candidacy represents.

In the early 1990s, when the old political order of Italy collapsed trailing the fall of the Soviet Empire, media tycoon–cum-showman Silvio Berlusconi emerged. For the next two decades he was the symptom of or cure for Italian tribulations, depending on your side of the parliamentary aisle. The country was bitterly divided about him and his leadership, something that further complicated all national issues.

Many of the problems of Italy and the European Union, of which Italy is an economic linchpin, rest with Berlusconi and those 20 years of political rifts. The country is yet to emerge from those divisions.

A similar event of very different nature happened in Thailand, likewise a political linchpin of Southeast Asia. It occurred after the 1997 financial crisis that swept the region like a typhoon. Thaksin Shinawatra took power and put forward widespread reforms that the king ultimately felt were undermining his position and power. He and the army stopped Thaksin and set Thailand on a reverse course in history. Now Myanmar, for decades the primary specimen of a rogue military regime, is moving boldly to democracy while neighboring Thailand, for decades a shining example of freedom in the region, is moving toward democracy—setting electoral rules with the sole purpose of preventing Thaksin’s return to power. Unlike Europe, South East Asia is not bound but a united currency, so the area can more easily leave Thailand behind.

The solutions the two men offered were different but both were wild cards emerging in a moment of huge social and political disruption.

Donald Trump may be in many ways the present American version of Berlusconi or, perhaps, of Thaksin. He loves to flaunt his wealth, appeals to populist rhetoric, is keen on histrionics, and receives a similarly divisive response from the public.
Months ago, when many were basically laughing about Trump, Angelo Codevillawarned that Trump was the sign of a deep crisis in American politics.

Now it is clear that Trump might be the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential election or, at least, he will play an important part in the choice of the Republican candidate. It is already a huge victory for Trump, and concrete evidence of the crisis Codevilla warned about.

From Gilbert and Sullivan “Iolanthe”

When in that House M.P.s divide, If they’ve a brain and cerebellum, too,They’ve got to leave that brain outside,And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.

Like any good caricaturist, Private Willis exaggerates, but in exaggerating reveals something essential. When we step into the topsy-turvy world of Gilbert and Sullivan, we are not only taking a holiday from the pedestrian concerns of everyday life: we are also entering a world in which those concerns are accurately, if comically, anatomised.

The great matter concentrating the attention of New Yorkers these days—and not only New Yorkers—is the 2016 presidential primary. The prospect of hanging in a fortnight, Dr Johnson remarked, does wonders to concentrate the mind. The New York primary, with a prize of ninety-five delegates to the Republican National Convention in July, takes place just about a fortnight from the moment I write. At stake is not the fate of a single neck, but the collective noggin of the United States. And as one looks around, one wonders whether the topsy-turvy extravaganza of this primary is any more absurd than the world dramatised by Gilbert and Sullivan.

In one corner we have an unreconstructed Stalinist battling an as-yet-unconvicted felon whose campaign focuses heavily on “women’s issues” but whose philandering husband almost destroyed his presidency and put an entire generation off cigars when his dalliance with a White House intern became the talk of the town. Whatever you can say about Bill Clinton from the waist up, in the other direction he ostentatiously embraces Strephon’s mortality. Looking over the receipts of the Clinton Foundation or contemplating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees—between them, they’ve raked in more than $153 million since 2001—one longs to enlist them to join in Iolanthe’s March of the Peers (“Bow, bow ye lower middle classes …”).

But of course the real show this season is the Donald Trump Cavalcade. In Iolanthe, the Queen of the Fairies engineers Strephon’s ascension from piping shepherd to powerful MP. Through the intercession of the fairies,

Every bill and every measure
That may gratify his pleasure,
Though your fury it arouses,
Shall be passed by both your Houses!

Explains one fairy: “We influence the members, and compel them to vote just as he wishes them to.” “It’s our system,” says another. “It shortens the debates.”

If Donald Trump were to be believed (in Latin, that would be a contrary-to-fact conditional), he would be like Strephon, magically enlisting hoi polloi (that’s Greek) to catapult him to a position of irresistible eminence. The Mexicans would pay for a wall along America’s Southern border. The Chinese would stop making all the things American workers want but wouldn’t be able to afford if they were manufactured in the United States. The Iranians would buy their missiles from the United States and when they discovered they did not work as advertised, Trump would tell them that was just too bad and he had already cashed the cheque.

It’s counterintuitive, but we’re beginning to wonder if all of those protesters showing up at Donald Trump rallies aren’t secret supporters. They couldn’t possibly be doing more to persuade millions of Republicans to vote for him, if only to defend the right to free speech and association.

The protests are picking up in volume and disruption as the candidates campaign in California ahead of the June 7 primary. Protesters blocked traffic, punched vehicles and cursed Trump supporters in Costa Mesa Thursday, and hundreds blocked the entrance to the GOP convention in Burlingame on Friday. About two dozen people tried to rush barriers near the Hyatt Regency, and Mr. Trump and his aides had to get out of their cars and walk into the convention.
“I think it’s going to get worse if he gets the nomination and is the front-runner. I think it’s going to escalate,” Luis Serrano, an organizer with California Immigration Youth Justice Alliance, told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re going to keep showing up and standing against the actions and the hate Donald Trump is creating.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Abedin handles everything for her boss, from classified emails to booking hair appointments and answering her cellphone.

In 1996, two young, ambitious women worked at the Clinton White House. One was assigned to the West Wing—the presidential wing—and became known for her stained blue Gap dress, a sordid manifestation of Bill Clinton’s baser appetites. The other served in the East Wing, where the first lady’s offices are situated. This is the story of the second one, whose selfless servility and uncanny knack for predicting what the boss wants have put her closer than almost anyone to the most powerful woman in American politics.

For most of the past 20 years, Huma Mahmood Abedin, now a vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has served as Clinton’s “body-woman”—basically a glorified lady’s maid. But she has also expanded her role and now monitors all access to Clinton. According to her many fans in Hillaryland, Abedin possesses a skill set that cannot be taught: the emotional intelligence to keep big-ego VIPs and other “clutches” (in the argot of Washington, civilians and celebs who overstay their face time with the boss) at bay without making them angry. Also, she wields a black-belt organizing talent that enables her to toggle between directing classified emails to the right people, keeping an eye on how weather is affecting the D.C.-LaGuardia shuttles and knowing which donors need a photo op—all while monitoring Clinton’s meals and hair appointments and cellphone. The perpetually lipsticked and soigné Abedin is elegant and gentle—qualities Clinton sometimes lacks—but also relentlessly obedient, a quality her boss treasures.