RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was easy to dismiss him as the blowhard with the bouffant, the vulgarian whose bellicose manner could appeal only to the dim and angry. What his detractors failed to see — or, if they did, to acknowledge — is that China, borders and Muslim immigration are issues that very much needed to be raised
This little note comes as a response to my friend and regular Quadrant contributor James Allan, whose piece in the latest Spectator Australia takes Donald Trump to task for his personality and lack of credentials as a movement conservative. Jim isn’t alone in these charges, which also have been made rather grandly by National Review, the most influential US journal of conservative opinion. All are criticisms I understand and ones I’ve made myself.

I don’t blame anyone for thinking that way, especially when they’re not witnessing American politics up close and firsthand, as am I. Back home once more in my native land, I am thinking that way, and it’s why my opinion has changed. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not on the Trump train by any means — but it’s become impossible to ignore the mogul’s serious appeal to voters, not just as ‘an outsider’, a man who vows to throw a wrench into the machine, but for the priorities and anxieties he raises.

Attacks on Trump’s conservative credentials usually cite comments from years gone by about abortion and healthcare. Without going into those points too deeply, we can say quite confidently that those aren’t positions weighing heavily on the average Trump voter. They’re neither driving nor hindering his campaign. Rather, Trump is running on three issues: trade inequality, immigration, and the question of Islam’s compatibility with the West.

Never mind that Trump donated to the Clinton Foundation, the power couple’s all-purpose slush fund. Forget that he hailed Hillary when she was Secretary of State. What this pompadoured contradiction offers is an alternative — not a good one, to be sure, but that is beside the point

I had long believed Donald Trump to be no better than a blowhard capable of attracting fans but not votes. How wrong I was, as his victory in New Hampshire attests. But conventional wisdom and precedent offer little guidance to what comes next. With US voters even more irritable than I could have imagined, it is apparent that standards of consistency, logic and substance expected of every other Republican candidate just don’t apply to Donald Trump.

Never mind that this pompadoured contradiction has donated to the Clinton Foundation, the power couple’s all-purpose slush fund. Never mind that he praised Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. Who among his “conservative” supporters cares that his position on health care is similar to that of the socialist Bernie Sanders, who thrashed Hillary in New Hampshire. And where was Trump in 2013 when Ted Cruz, along with Senator Jeff Sessions, led the fight against amnesty for illegal aliens?

One has to see Donald Trump as a cultural phenomenon, rather than as a conventional political candidate. Back in 2012, the likes of Trump would have been laughed out of the Republican race; indeed, his promulgation of “birther” conspiracy theories about Obama rendered him a non-starter in the primaries of that year. Back then, Trump was not taken seriously precisely because the Republican base naively believed the party’s establishment would effectively oppose Obama’s attempted radical transformation of the United States. There was no perceived need nor appetite for a candidate bent on summoning the pitchforks and flaming brands of popular revolt.

Today, though, given what is widely perceived to have been the total failure of the congressional GOP leadership, voters have latched on to the candidate promising “creative” political destruction: he will tear it all down and build something allegedly better in its place, although just what Trumpism’s shining new world will look like is anyone’s guess. Interestingly, his only coherent and practically articulated policy is the promise to halt Muslim immigration. It seems that, while voters may or may not be prepared to swallow all manner of populist nonsense, they have a sharper awareness of the existential threat to the West and its values than do the political elites. The voters, in other words, may be stupid, but they are less stupid than the powers that be.
They are right, too, in accepting the oft-demonstrated truth that nothing can equal the stupidity of what passes for the Republican Party establishment. The three-cornered campaign of mutual destruction between Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie in New Hampshire has ensured that none can emerge as the standard bearer, as did Mitt Romney in 2012. Indeed, having quite probably destroyed Rubio’s candidature without any gain to his own, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has now withdrawn from the race. Bush staggers on to South Carolina, driven on by dynastic entitlement and having blown $35 million to secure no better than fourth place in New Hampshire.

Poor Hillary! It turns out that there is a price to being a lying hypocrite. That’s just so unfair. After all, Bill got away with posing as a feminist champion while assaulting, groping, and exploiting women for decades. But when Hillary tries to match Bernie Sanders on a comparable pose as anti-Wall Street, she gets herself in a no-win situation.

Goldman Sachs people are leaking out what she said in her $675,000 worth of three paid speeches, and it is now clear that releasing the transcripts of her talks will expose her hypocrisy. But of course, refusing to release them raises all sorts of worse suspicions. Shades of Nixon’s missing 13 minutes of tape.

Ben White of Politico reports on the leaks from Goldman:

She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.

“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”

At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton spoke about how it wasn’t just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what wasn’t.

“It was mostly basic stuff, small talk, chit-chat,” one person who attended that speech said. “But in this environment, it could be made to look really bad.”

My read is that Hillary will choose to continue to keep the transcripts secret, preferring to let people imagine what they will. She is so surrounded by sycophants and so contemptuous of those who criticize her that she is unaware of how damaging her secrecy will be.