Can the American people be trusted?
We’ll find out the Republican answer in a few hours, when their presidential contenders take the stage in Las Vegas for their first post-Paris, post-San Bernardino debate. It promises to be a boisterous night, given how they are already mixing it up offstage. Their challenge will be to get out from under the rhetoric of both President Obama and Donald Trump.
Mr. Obama does not trust the American people. We saw this earlier this month, when he used an Oval Office address about the carnage in San Bernardino to lecture the rest of us about tolerance. Once again he refused to call Islamist terror by its rightful name, perhaps because he is not sure how Americans he once described as clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” might react if he were to speak honestly.
Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.
Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.