RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is not a details guy. From his checkered experience in business, he draws this lesson: “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.”

Question: Who thinks that Donald Trump actually has read the paper?

Asked at a town-hall meeting (which isn’t actually a town-hall meeting, but we insist on calling these dog-and-pony shows that and pretending that they are) to list the top three priorities of the federal government, Trump responded: “Security, security, and security.” That the candidate was stalling for time while his political mind, honed to the fine edge of an old butter knife, ran through the possibilities was to be expected. We are used to his filibustering by now. He was right to identify security as the overriding concern of the U.S. government.

The federal enterprise was created to handle those tasks that are by their nature interstate or national: War, relations with foreign powers, international and interstate trade, immigration, and relations between the states are the reasons it exists. A superior power is required to solve problems that cannot be adjudicated by a single state, such as cooking up an excuse for why Texas must be forced to honor your Massachusetts-issued same-sex-marriage license while Massachusetts has no reciprocal obligation to honor your Texas-issued concealed-carry permit, despite the pesky fact of gun rights actually being right there in the Constitution and all. All right, maybe not the best example. The federal government is necessary because it alone can create and execute a program under which “aid” to foreign governments is laundered back into the pockets of campaign contributors through military-procurement rules. Okay, not a great example, either. But the federal government does something useful, of that we are assured. It’s not like all those thousands of federal factota hived up in Washington do nothing but sit around and masturbate to Internet porn all day.

But the Trumpkin view of all Trumpkin enterprises is expansive, demanding superlatives. And so Trump expanded. Other top federal duties, he declared, included “health care, education . . . and then you can go on from there.” Go on to where? “Housing, providing great neighborhoods.” Anderson Cooper, tasked with the necessary duty of reminding Trump that this contradicts everything he said until five minutes ago, asked: “Aren’t you against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to devolve to states?” Sure, Trump said, but — see if you can make anything of this — we must consider the “concept of the country.” (If that sounds like a cheesy theme hotel, well . . . ) And: “The concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country.” Indeed. Likewise, he rejects the notion of a federally run health-care system, advocating instead a “private” system that is . . . federally run, or, in Trump’s phrasing, led by the federal government, in case you for some reason believe that “led by” and “run by” mean different things when the federal government is involved — which is to say, if you are a credulous rube.

With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, there’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Here’s Bill Clinton in Spokane, Wash., making the pitch for his wife last week: “But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that . . . ”

The awful legacy of the last eight years? That’d be a strange thing for any Democrat to say, but it’s particularly odd given that Hillary Clinton has made it abundantly clear that she’s running for a third Barack Obama term.

Last year, she loved telling voters that she wasn’t running as a continuation of Obama. But that was before Bernie Sanders ignited a left-wing populist backlash against the status quo. Unable to get to Sanders’s left — understandable, given that it would require embracing Bolshevism — Clinton was forced to defend the administration she worked for.

Also, as has been widely reported and dissected, Clinton’s strategists concluded months ago that she had no choice but to embrace Obama and his policies, because Obama is popular with precisely the voters Clinton needs in order to assemble a winning coalition. These voters may think the country is on the wrong track, but they don’t blame Obama for it.

That’s one reason why Team Clinton has charged, sometimes hysterically, that Sanders is somehow attacking the president when he says, for instance, that Obamacare doesn’t go far enough. The Clintonistas touted the fact that Sanders blurbed a book by left-wing writer Bill Press critical of Obama as if it were a confession of treason.

But now comes the former president attacking the Obama record head-on. The Spokane speech wasn’t a fluke. Bill has also taken to explaining that the real reason this election is so crazy is that “80 percent of the American people haven’t gotten a pay raise since the crash.”

No doubt he wouldn’t put all the blame on Obama, but that’s some odd messaging for a campaign looking to run on “four more years.”

Donald Trump argues that America’s problem is that it has sent its wealth overseas. Exactly the opposite is the case: America’s problem is that the world’s wealth came to America, and bought subprime mortgages. At the peak of the housing bubble America imported capital each year equivalent to 6% of GDP. Everyone from China’s central bank to Arab sovereign wealth funds to German provincial-government banks bought American mortgage debt until the housing bubble crashed. Virtually all of the world’s available savings came to the United States.

The world used to believe in the United States. America was the world’s only superpower back in the mid-2000s. The American consumer looked like a perpetual-motion machine. Housing prices had risen for fifty years in succession. American economic growth was steady. And American investment banks manufactured synthetic AAA-rated securities that paid more than banks’ cost of funds. They seemed safe as houses.

We saw the same thing in Southeast Asia in 1996 or Mexico, Argentina in 1999, Turkey in 2010 and countless other third-world economies: massive capital imports push up local asset values and make the locals feel rich, until the bubble pops. Americans watched their home prices appreciate by 10%-15% a year between 1996 and 2006. As money poured in (and the current account deficit widened) home prices rose.

Liberal actress Susan Sarandon is an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter, but that doesn’t mean she’s wedded to the Democratic Party. In fact, she recently suggested that it would be better for Sanders’ cause of “revolution” if Donald Trump were to win the presidential election in November.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday night, Sarandon made an odd kind of endorsement for Trump. Hayes asked if Sarandon would “really” consider voting for Trump over Hillary.

“Really,” Sarandon said, adding that “some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode.” Asked if she thinks that’s “dangerous,” she replied, “It’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, threats to women’s rights and think you can’t do something huge to turn that around.”

“I think, in certain quarters, there’s growing concern that the folks that are into Bernie Sanders have come to despise Hillary Clinton or reject Hillary Clinton and that should she be the nominee, which is as yet undetermined, they will walk away,” Hayes noted.

“That’s a legitimate concern,” Sarandon replied, adding that Sanders supporters would be unwilling to back Clinton in November “because they’re very passionate and principled.”

She insisted that Clinton does not believe in the things Sanders stands for. “What would make you think that when she gets in, she’s going to suddenly go against the people that have given her millions and millions of dollars?” Clinton “accepted money for all of those people. She doesn’t even want to fight for a $15 minimum wage. So these are people that have not come out before. So why would we think they’re going to come out now for her, you know?”

Trumpery is an archaic word for fraud, taken from the French tromper, to deceive somebody. Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of his rogue Autolycus, who boasts of defrauding the gullible with his worthless trinkets: “Ha, ha! What a fool Honesty is! And Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery . . .” (A Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene IV.)

The dictionary definition of Trumpery is threefold:

1. Worthless thing: Often something showy that seems appealing at first glance.
2. Nonsense: Empty or ridiculous talk.
3. Deception: The deceiving of somebody, or schemes conceived for the purpose of deceiving.

In all three senses, “Trumpery” denotes the bill of goods that Donald Trump is seeking to sell to America. The subject of this essay, indeed, is not Trump the man, but the meaning of Trumpery. Millions of words have been devoted to the political, psychological and satirical dissection of the Donald, but far fewer to the cultural phenomenon of Trumpery. What we are witnessing is more than the rise of an individual, mesmerising though he may be, not only to Americans, but to the entire free world. Trumpery is the cult of a personality, certainly, but it is also the ascendancy of a cast of mind, a climate of opinion, a broadly-based sociological fact. Never before have we witnessed such a prodigious confidence trick perpetrated on the most powerful and prosperous people on the planet. The free world looks on in bewilderment at the prospective triumph of Trumpery in the land that gave us pragmatism.

Trumpery is the revenge of the rejected in more ways than one. Though Trump himself disclaims ideology, he is in fact one of the “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air” evoked by Keynes: they “are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. More by osmosis than by design, he has picked up the ideas of Reagan’s former communications director, Pat Buchanan, and his “paleoconservatives”. Buchanan ran three times for the presidency between 1992 and 2000, but he fell out with mainstream Republicans, while relishing the notoriety provoked by his thinly-disguised anti-Semitism. The paleocons’ ideology of “nativism, protectionism and isolationism” was dismissed in 1996 as “a philosophical corpse” by Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative Washington Post columnist. Now the paleocons are back with a vengeance, in the guise of Trumpery. Conspiracy theorists, kooks and crazies of all kinds flock to the Donald’s banners, from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. But so, too, do millions of decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Americans, oblivious of Trumpery’s dubious, even nefarious pedigree.

Long before Trumpery actually has a chance to take the White House by storm, however, the blame game has begun. In the dock, indicted by friend and foe alike, is the Establishment. It is revealing that 21st-century Americans, of all people, should have latched onto this word, popularised in the 1950s by Henry Fairlie as a catch-all phrase to characterise the English ruling class — the antithesis, supposedly, of democracy in the America he later embraced. Sometimes this term is qualified, as in “the Republican Establishment”, but often it is used in a more general sense to indicate the ruling elites — social, economic and cultural — whose arrogance, greed and incompetence are blamed for the rise of Trumpery. The Establishment, it seems, is everything that Trumpery is not. It is rich, educated and cosmopolitan; the followers of Trump are poor, ignorant and nativist. Establishment Americans mostly live on the East or West coasts in colonies of globalised urbanity such as New York, Washington, San Francisco or Seattle. Trumpery flourishes in the contemptuously nicknamed “flyover states”, the struggling, small-town communities that are looked down on by the elites from a great height.

Democrat billionaire, now a born-again “conservative” Republican, whose presidential campaign seems to have caught fire like no other. As he wends his way across the republic in a private jet, drawing record crowds, trampling on all the sacred pieties of American politics, he spreads fear and trembling among the political and chattering classes. From the Left, Village Voice columnist Lucien Truscott IV accuses Trump of practising a kind of “toy fascism” which, however, he claims, is bleeding into “one of the classic tactics of real fascism, com[ing] up with fake problems and then present[ing] fake solutions.” The Right has been no less categorical. Days before the first caucuses in Iowa, National Review, flagship journal of the respectable Right, summoned 22 of the most distinguished American conservatives to explain why Trump was not an appropriate person to be the Republican presidential candidate. Its ideological sister journal, The Weekly Standard, was even more emphatic. In a bitter article entitled “The Nominee We Deserve?”, Stephen F. Hayes asks the question, “Do Republicans deserve to lose? . . . The Republican frontrunner is a longtime liberal whose worldview might best be described as an amalgam of pop-culture progressivism and vulgar nationalism . . . He’s a narcissist and a huckster, an opportunist who . . . over the past several decades . . . was often funding the other side.” The fact that each of these accusations is correct seems not to matter at all to the voters in Republican primaries.

Although in the Iowa caucuses — the first in the nation — he was edged out by Senator Ted Cruz and followed at an uncomfortably close margin by Senator Marco Rubio, Trump subsequently went on to further victories in New Hampshire and then in states as diverse as Michigan, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Hawaii and Mississippi. In Nevada he even did well among Hispanic voters. He won North Carolina and Missouri, not to mention delegate-rich Illinois and Senator Marco Rubio’s Florida (causing the latter to end his candidacy). It is becoming increasing clear that no other candidate, not even Ted Cruz, the darling of Evangelicals, and Governor John Kasich, who won the key swing state of Ohio, can knock him out of the box. In the meantime, Trump has won endorsements from retiring candidates New Jersey governor Chris Christie and neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson.

It is true that in many of these contests Trump has not won a clear majority, but that may be due more than anything else to the fact that there were several other candidates on the ballot. He may indeed go to the Republican presidential convention with the largest number of delegates, but still fall short of the number needed to seize the prize. Theoretically this calls for a brokered convention, which is not an unusual event in the history of the Republican party. President Warren G. Harding was nominated in 1920 only after 102 ballots (no misprint). In the days when Americans were accustomed to politicians deciding on a candidate in the proverbial “smoke-filled room”, voters accepted their party’s choice. But in the age of the populist primary, involving scores of millions of voters across the country, the voice of the people will not easily be denied.

Political junkies got a glimpse of the fall general-election campaign this week: Hillary Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA, announced it had reserved $70 million of television advertising in seven battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia. This ad blitz could begin before the mid-July GOP convention, if the Republican race is settled.

The group’s director, Guy Cecil, says that the PAC has $45 million in cash and $49 million in pledges, money it will spend to define the GOP nominee early, well before Labor Day.

Priorities USA hasn’t needed to spend much money on the Democratic primary contest. Sen. Bernie Sanders has attacked Mrs. Clinton as insufficiently left wing and shied away from her character and scandals. She has successfully parried his assaults by mimicking his left-wing rhetoric on Wall Street, student loans and giving voters “free” stuff.

She has also received invaluable help from the Democratic Party’s aristocrats, its 712 unelected superdelegates. About 15.4 million Democratic primary voters have cast ballots so far, 58% for Mrs. Clinton to 42% for Sen. Sanders. Yet the superdelegates who have endorsed to date break 469 for Hillary to 29 for Bernie, or 94% to 6%.

If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, Priorities USA promises to go after his bankruptcies and business failures, his misogynistic remarks, his character flaws and divisive comments. Mr. Cecil warns that the attacks on Mr. Trump so far are “a drop in the bucket” compared with what his super PAC will spend. The Donald has provided lots of material to work with.

Conventional wisdom is that these attacks on Mr. Trump in the Republican contest have so far failed. But they have likely limited the former reality television host’s upward movement and could cost him Tuesday’s primary in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker has endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz and the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC has run a barrage of ads. CONTINUE AT SITE

David Brooks’ New York Times column of March 18, “No, Not Trump, Not Ever,” got half the story. The second half should read, “No, Not Hillary, Not Ever.” The fact is voters will likely be faced with a “catch 22” choice. Deciding to not vote, as many I suspect will, is in itself a decision, as William James once reminded us: “When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”

While mainstream media takes glee in pointing out the weaknesses and inanities in Donald Trump’s outbursts, they have whitewashed Hillary Clinton. They view her as flawed, but tout her experience as Secretary of State, a U.S. Senator and as one half of the Bill Clinton Presidency. However, in a recent YouGov poll, Hillary was seen as the least honest and most untrustworthy of all candidates, Republican or Democratic. A mere 9% consider her honest. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, 60% of Republicans are “embarrassed” by their party’s presidential campaign, while only 13% of Democrats are. That tells me Republicans are more honest, realistic and forthcoming than their Democrat counterparts.

Implied in Trump’s favorable poll numbers is an unfavorable view toward Washington’s establishment. Hillary, as a Washington fixture, has a different problem. She’s a bad person. Nevertheless, mainstream media has forgiven her serial lies, her corrupt – and frankly illegal – activities: from cattle futures to Whitewater to Travelgate to her current e-mail travails. They have ignored the fact that the world became more dangerous when she was Secretary of State. They have not fully investigated the Clinton Foundation, which failed to make disclosures about its sources and uses of funds, and have left unanswered questions as to whether there were quid pro quos regarding donations made and favorable deals received by foreign governments. The Clinton’s leveraged their political successes into personal wealth. How different they are from Harry Truman who once wrote: “…the office of the president…doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” Tell that to the lessors of the Lincoln bedroom.

His lack of character and moral reprobation aside (and his 3rd wife for First Lady!), he is no free market conservative or even a constitutionalist.

Trump supported Obama’s bailout of the auto industry and Stimulus program, government limits on executive pay, he favors big unions and tiered compensation, he agrees with government “takings” or eminent domain (he praised Kelo!), etc. He’s definitely not a champion of the free market with those views! (See my article on Kelo at American Thinker! The founders would be rolling over in their graves).

Trump favors suppressing speech and made several comments during the campaign about having the power to sue the press and stymie the critics. When the Club for Growth criticized his constantly changing taxation plans, he threatened them with a “cease and desist” notice. This is NOT a constitutionalist!

Add to the list that Trump is opposed to badly needed Medicare reform and prefers the disastrous Canadian-style universal healthcare plan. (This is why Canadians are sneaking over the border for medical care)! Plus, he agrees with the prosecution of “hate crimes” when we have adequate criminal laws in place that apply to everyone and don’t need to create privileged groups of victims. The law applies equally to everyone.

There’s so much more – flip-flopping on illegal immigration and H-1bs/H-2bs, praising myriad Communist leaders, off shore manufacturing, being “neutral” on Israel, etc.

Of course, no presidential candidate is perfect in all ways and on all issues. However, Trump is not presidential material in so many ways. Three A- polls (rated for past accuracy and survey design by FiveThirtyEight) predicted Trump losing against Hillary 9-13% and Cruz running dead even.