RUTHFULLY YOURS

An ocean of conventional wisdom is telling us that an independent conservative candidate, should one emerge, will go nowhere fast. But a short while ago, an ocean of conventional wisdom was telling us that Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket violated the basic laws of the universe. This is plainly a moment in American politics in which the extraordinary can happen.

Here are five reasons why the #NeverTrump movement might provide the only serious competition to the Democrats this November — and could even siphon off a few who are themselves looking for an alternative:

The greatest asset of the #NeverTrump movement is Trump himself. It has become obvious by now to almost all that the GOP presumptive nominee cannot change his spots. Trump promised that after knocking out John Kasich and Ted Cruz, he would tone down his act. “I will be so presidential,” he pledged, “you will be so bored.” But his antics continue — the insults, the tweets, the recycling of tabloid trash that might endear him to his die-hard supporters but mystify or repel almost everyone else. Either Trump does not know what the concept of “presidential” means or, more likely, he is inextricably stuck inside the same cartoonish character he has been all his life.
During the primaries, Trump’s Republican adversaries mostly held fire, trembling in fear lest they offend Trump voters. Typical was Cruz, who only unloaded on his tormentor on the day he pulled out of the race. Hillary Clinton (assuming she will be the Democratic nominee) will not be so constrained, and neither will her surrogates. Indeed, the Democrats are already having a field day auditioning a cornucopia of ridiculous and offensive pronouncements generated by Trump over decades. To be sure, these negative attacks will do nothing to dampen the fervor of Trump’s fans. But they will inevitably have a discernible effect on everyone else.
Then there’s the news media. They were relatively gentle to Trump in the primaries when there were 17 GOP targets to scrutinize. Now there is only one Republican standing, and journalists everywhere are entering the operating room suiting up for a vivisection. In 2012, mild, moderate, respectable, sane Mitt Romney got a taste of what it means to be under the journalistic knife in a general election. The liberal press is now going to cut out Trump’s liver, fry it up and eat it out of a taco bowl.

Which brings us to Trump’s taxes. He says he cannot release any of his returns from the past decade because they are all under audit. According to tax professionals, that is almost certainly either a fib, a falsehood, or a lie, and in any case is hardly a reason why they cannot be made public. Whatever Trump is trying to conceal, the news drumbeat to release the returns will now grow louder and more insistent. Eventually, it will reach a volume that will cause political pain.
A parallel deficit of substance, yet much more important, goes for policy. The proposals Trump has put forward appear to be based almost entirely upon imaginary thinking. His plan to reduce the national debt to zero in eight years while leaving entitlement spending untouched is about as realistic as manufacturing gold out of seawater. His promise to create a deportation force to ship out America’s 11 million undocumented aliens is no more feasible. Trump got away with this and more in the primaries. In the general election, he will be held by journalists and by his opponents to a standard that he shows no signs of being able to meet.

“The Reagan horse left the 2016 conservative barn many months ago, and it is coming to be time to pause and assess whether we are really left with only two bad choices — or with a bad Trump and a far, far worse Clinton. If it is the latter, then it is an easy choice in November.”

I watched Donald Trump serially blast apart all my preferred candidates — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — as if for sport they were sent up in succession as clay pigeons. And now the November Rubicon — vote for Donald Trump, or stay home and de facto vote for Hillary Clinton — is uncomfortably close. Most of the arguments pro and con have been aired ad nauseam.

The choice is difficult for principled conservatives, because no sooner should they decide to vote for Trump than Trump will surely say something outrageous, cruel, or crude that would ostensibly now have their imprimatur on it. And note, this matters to conservatives much more than it does to liberals. Few Obama supporters at Harvard or the Ford Foundation or the New York Times worried much in 2008 that their candidate had dismissed his own generous grandmother as a “typical white person” or that he tried to get away with airbrushing out the obscene Reverend Wright and mythologized his close friendships with reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger.

Aside from his dubious political loyalties, Trump persists in being mean-spirited. He seems uninformed on many of the issues, especially those in foreign policy; he changes positions, contradicts himself within a single speech, and uses little more than three adjectives (tremendous, great, and huge). But the problem with many of these complaints is that they apply equally to both the current president and the other would-be next president. When Hillary Clinton, playing to the green vote, bragged that she would put miners out of work, and then, when confronted with an out-of-work miner, backtracked and lied about her earlier boast, we had a refined version of Trump’s storytelling. The Clinton Foundation’s skullduggery and Hillary’s e-mail shenanigans seem to trump the Trump University con — and involve greater harm to the nation. Her combination of greedy Wall Street, for-profit schmoozing and paint-by-the-numbers progressivism is repulsive.

Trump’s cluelessness about the nuclear triad is a lowbrow version of Barack Obama’s ignorance, whether seeking to Hispanicize the Falklands into the Maldives (wrong exotic-sounding, politically correct foreign archipelago, Mr. President), or mispronouncing “corpsman,” or riffing about those Austrian-speaking Austrians; or perhaps of Hillary Clinton’s flat-out lie about the causes of Benghazi, hours after she had learned the truth. I don’t think reset, Libya, Benghazi, red lines to Assad, step-over lines to Putin, and deadlines to Iran attest to Clinton’s foreign-policy savvy. It is easy to be appalled by crude ignorance, but in some ways it is more appalling to hear ignorance layered and veneered with liberal pieties and snobbery. The choice in 2016 is not just between Trump, the supposed foreign-policy dunce, and an untruthful former secretary of state, but is also a matter of how you prefer your obtuseness — raw or cooked? Who has done the greater damage to the nation: would-be novelist and Obama insider Ben Rhodes, who boasted about out-conning the “Blob” D.C. establishment, or bare-knuckles Trumpster Corey Lewandowski?

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

The conservatives who have declared war on the primary victor are displaying a myopia that could be deadly in November when Trump will lead Republicans against a party that has divided the country, destroyed its borders, empowered its enemies and put 93 million Americans into dependency on the state. This reckless disregard for consequences is matched only by a blindness to what has made Trump the presumptive nominee. When he entered the Republican primaries a year ago Trump was given no chance of surviving even the first contest let alone becoming the Republican nominee. That was the view of all the experts, and especially those experts with the best records of prediction.

Trump – who had never held political office and had no experience in any political job – faced a field of sixteen tested political leaders, including nine governors and five senators from major states. Most of his political opponents were conservatives. During the primaries several hundred million dollars were spent in negative campaign ads – nastier and more personal than in any Republican primary in memory. At least 60,000 of those ads were aimed at Trump, attacking him as a fraud, a corporate predator, a not-so-closet liberal, an ally of Hillary Clinton, indistinguishable from Barack Obama, an ignoramus, and too crass to be president (Bill Clinton anyone?).

These negative ads were directed at Republican primary voters, a constituency well to the right of the party. These primary voters are a constituency that may be said to represent the heart of the conservative movement in America, and are generally more politically engaged and informed than most Republican voters. Trump won their support. He won by millions of votes – more votes from this conservative heartland than any Republican in primary history. To describe Trump as ignorant – as so many beltway intellectuals have – is merely to privilege book knowledge over real world knowledge, not an especially wise way to judge political leaders.

A chorus of detractors has attempted to dismiss Trump’s political victory as representing a mere plurality of primary voters, but how many candidates have won outright majorities among a field of seventeen, or five or even three? When the Republican primary contest was actually reduced to three, Trump beat the “true conservative,” Ted Cruz, with more than fifty percent of the votes. He did this in blue states and red states, and in virtually all precincts and among all Republican demographics. He clinched the nomination by beating Cruz with an outright majority in conservative Indiana.

In opposing the clear choice of the Republican primary electorate the “Never Trump” crowd is simply displaying their contempt for the most politically active Republican voters. This contempt was dramatically displayed during a CNN segment with Trump’s spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, and Bill Kristol, the self-appointed guru of a Third Party movement whose only result can be to split the Republican ticket and provide Hillary with her best shot at the presidency. Pierson urged Kristol to help unify the Party behind its presumptive nominee. Kristol grinned and answered her: “You want leaders to become followers.” Could there be a more arrogant response? By what authority does Bill Kristol regard himself as a leader? Trump has the confidence of millions of highly committed and generally conservative Republican voters. That makes him a leader. Who does Bill Kristol lead except a coterie of inside-the-beltway foreign policy interventionists, who supported the fiasco in Libya that opened the door to al-Qaeda and ISIS?

I have made my disdain for Trump loud and clear…..but….he won. He did not win by intimidation…there were no New Black Panthers standing thuggishly at the polls, as there were in 2008 and 2012. There were no votes cast by dead people as there were in 2008 and 2012. His victory was fair and square. I would urge conservative pundits and legislators that more good can be done by accepting the fact, and offering advice, foreign and domestic policy insights, and measured support. Nothing will be gained by becoming outlier conservatives with no input or influence. There are gifted and principled conservative legislators and pundits who can counsel Trump. They should do so.

It’s quite simple Hillary is worse.

And I have two words of advice for Sarah Palin, the Republican Barbara Boxer, ….just shut up! It is better to be presumed an idiot than to speak and remove all doubt. rsk

David Horowitz and Victor Davis Hanson nail it in the following columns.