RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, the most important thing to bear in mind — even more than classified information — is this: It was all about avoiding accountability.

It still is.

Mrs. Clinton did not set out to damage national security and compromise defense secrets, although she obviously had no compunction about doing so as necessary to serve her higher personal interests. For a generation, she has been a public person whose most intimate companion has been scandal. She knew her State Department stewardship would be no different. Her motive in designing a communication system that circumvented government recordkeeping and disclosure laws was to avoid a day of reckoning as she campaigned in 2016 for the power of the presidency she craves.

And that is where Loretta Lynch comes in.

That would be the same Loretta Lynch who came to prominence in 1999 by being appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York by none other than Mrs. Clinton’s husband. Loretta Lynch, who had a history of significant political contributions to Democratic-party candidates before President Obama reappointed her as U.S. Attorney for the EDNY in 2010, and then elevated her to U.S. attorney general in 2015. Loretta Lynch, who said in her confirmation hearings that she supports the Democratic president’s lawless executive actions and non-enforcement of federal law. Loretta Lynch, who very much likes being attorney general of the United States and would be well positioned to continue in that powerful post in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The known evidence that Mrs. Clinton committed federal crimes is abundant, perhaps even overwhelming. It is manifest that she lawlessly transmitted and stored classified information outside its secure system, and that she caused her underlings to do so. But remember, there is also the evidence that is unknown to the public — though it is being pored over by the FBI: the 32,000 e-mails Clinton refused to turn over to the State Department (which involved converting them to her private use) and attempted to destroy by trying to delete them (i.e., to wipe her private server clean).

As I’ve previously pointed out, the federal embezzlement statute makes it a felony to destroy government files or convert them to one’s private use. The FBI has reportedly been able to recover at least some and possibly all of the e-mails Clinton tried to erase. Unless you really believe that one of the busiest high officials in the U.S. government had time for 32,000 e-mails about yoga routines and Chelsea’s wedding dress, it is inevitable that some of those e-mails, probably a goodly portion, related to State Department business — i.e., they were government files.

With such neon indicators of serious wrongdoing, it seems highly likely that the FBI, which has reportedly devoted substantial time and resources to the investigation, will recommend prosecution. For all we know, that may have happened already. Once such a recommendation has been made, the ball is in the Justice Department’s court: It will be up to Attorney General Lynch — with whatever direction she gets from her boss, the president — to decide whether to indict Clinton.

An indictment would be devastating to the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in the November election. Thus, the conventional wisdom holds that Lynch will decline prosecution, which the executive branch has the unreviewable constitutional power to do, regardless of how damning the proof of crimes might be.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? And to be clear, I am not suggesting that Lynch will shock the world by approving an indictment against her party’s candidate for the presidency.

What if Loretta Lynch simply decides to . . . do nothing?

Thanks to e-pal J.Poller
Even Trump’s most trusted advisors didn’t expect him to fare this well.

Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it.

The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.

It pains me to say, but he is the presidential equivalent of Sanjaya on American Idol. President Trump would be President Sanjaya in terms of legitimacy and authority.

And I am now taking full responsibility for helping create this monster — and reaching out directly to those voters who, like me, wanted Trump to be the real deal.

My support for Trump began probably like yours did. Similar to so many other Americans, I was tired of the rhetoric in Washington. Negativity and stubbornness were at an all-time high, and the presidential prospects didn’t look promising.

In 2015, I fell in love with the idea of the protest candidate who was not bought by corporations. A man who sat in a Manhattan high-rise he had built, making waves as a straight talker with a business background, full of successes and failures, who wanted America to return to greatness.

I was sold.

Last summer, I signed on as the Communications Director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC.

It was still early in the Trump campaign, and we hit the ground running. His biggest competitor had more than $100 million in a Super PAC. The Jeb Bush deep pockets looked to be the biggest obstacle we faced. We seemed to be up against a steep challenge, especially since a big part of the appeal of a Trump candidacy was not being influenced by PAC money.

[READ: Donald Trump’s Hate Speech Is Breeding Violence and There Is More to Come]

After the first debate, I was more anxious than ever to support Trump. The exchange with Megyn Kelly was like manna from heaven for a communications director. She appeared like yet another reporter trying to kick out the guest who wasn’t invited to the party. At the time, I felt excited for the change to the debate he could bring. I began realizing the man really resonates with the masses and would bring people to the process who had never participated before.

That was inspiring to me.

It wasn’t long before every day I awoke to a buzzing phone and a shaking head because Trump had said something politically incorrect the night before. I have been around politics long enough to know that the other side will pounce on any and every opportunity to smear a candidate.

But something surprising and absolutely unexpected happened. Every other candidate misestimated the anger and outrage of the “silent majority” of Americans who are not a part of the liberal elite. So with each statement came a jump in the polls. Just when I thought we were finished, The Donald gained more popularity.

I don’t think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all.

He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver’s seat, and nothing else matters. The Donald does not fail. The Donald does not have any weakness. The Donald is his own biggest enemy.

A devastating terrorist attack in Pakistan targeting Christians occurred on Easter Sunday, and Trump’s response was to tweet, “Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead, 400 injured. I alone can solve.”

‘I alone can solve.”

Donald Trump, who can barely communicate in his native language, is the candidate of the social-media era, and the above sentiment — proffered to the electorate via Twitter in regard to Islamic terrorism — is in fact indicative of the breadth and depth of his thinking.

Trump is an example of the Stupid Psychopath Problem.

The Stupid Psychopath Problem does not plague stupid psychopaths exclusively, but they are most vulnerable to its seduction. I will leave it to the medical professionals to diagnose whatever it is that ails Trump psychiatrically; as for the stupid part, my belief is that you can learn a great deal about a person from the way he writes and speaks (my former students may recall that I am not an easy grader), and Trump’s use of language suggests very strongly that he is . . . very fortunate to have inherited a great deal of money and real estate. So dumb he thinks a manila folder is a Filipino contortionist. So dumb he thinks Tupac Shakur is a religious holiday for the “little short guys that wear yarmulkes” counting his money. Trump is like the ugly building in Chicago with his name on it: There’s a vacancy on the top floor.

The Stupid Psychopath Problem is the political distortion resulting from the fact that a great many people — some of them on barstools, some of them dangerously close to the levers of real power — believe that there are obvious, simple, straightforward solutions to complex problems such as the predations of the Islamic State or the woeful state of U.S. public finances, but that these solutions are not implemented because people in government are too soft, unwilling or unable to get tough and do what needs to be done.

Men such as Donald Trump, and a half a hundred million idiots just like him across the fruited plain, really believe that the reason we haven’t eliminated Islamic terrorism is that it never occurred to anybody in the federal government — including the people who run, e.g., the U.S. Special Operations Command — to get tough. These people imagine that the trained killers in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and the often ruthless men who oversee them in Washington, simply are not willing to do what it takes to win. What that means, these people have no idea, because they are unwilling to think very hard about these sorts of problems and generally have no experience themselves. Trump is famously a physical coward who lied to stay out of the military during the Vietnam war, and he knows nothing about foreign policy, national defense, or the workings of the military, which is why all we ever hear from him is “get tough” and “win.”

Back in January, I asked: “Why the Sudden Love Among Establishment Republicans for Donald Trump?” “It has,” I wrote, “been quite an experience — half amusing, half alarming — to behold the sudden transformation of Donald Trump from pariah to desperate hope of the Republican Party.”

In the weeks that have followed, more and more GOP-friendly pundits, functionaries, factota, courtiers, lackeys, lobbyists, consultants, and eminences grises have boarded the Trump Express. They explain, if pressed, that: a) Trump is inevitable and one has to get with the program; and/or b) the only alternative is Hillary Clinton, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?

I confess that I don’t find either rejoinder particularly convincing. In the first place, it is worth noting how frequently what we were assured was inevitable turns out to have been merely contingent, and being merely contingent, how often it fails to happen.

Trump may be the nominee. It is not, however, inevitable. I am not even convinced that it is likely.

And speaking of unlikely things, it is not at all clear to me that Hillary will be the nominee, either. Her supporters might not care that she blamed Benghazi on an internet video or that she endangered American national security by her cavalier disregard of communication protocols while secretary of state, but the FBI seems to be taking a different view of the matter. There is also the cognate issue of the pay-to-play processes of the Clinton Foundation, which have also attracted the FBI’s attention.