RUTHFULLY YOURS

Only The Simpsons got it right: not a single pundit or political scientist guessed that Donald Trump had the ghost of a chance at the Republican nomination, yet there he stood tonight in Indiana with a trail of corpses behind him and a clear road ahead of him. Welcome to the Zero Sum World, where you have to lose for me to win. The facts have been recited often enough: real median household income is still 8% below the 1999 high water mark, real GDP is 10% below the long-term trendline, 10% fewer Americans own their own homes than in 2007, more business have closed since the 2008 crash than opened, and the jobs on offer mainly involve changing bedpans and flipping burgers.

Republican voters bought Trump’s message that the wicked Chinese and the feckless Mexicans have stolen jobs and wealth that rightfully belonged to Americans, and that he, Donald Trump, with his world-class negotiating skills, would go out and get them back.

Don’t hold your breath.

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There’s nothing to negotiate, no pie to re-divide, no Chinese hoard to bring home. World exports are down by 12% year-on-year in terms of price and dead flat in terms of volume, something that happens during recessions. The world economy is dead in the water. The US economy grew at an annual rate of just half a percent during the first quarter, which is a recession in all but name. Japan shrank, and Europe grew by 1.6% (and has only just regained its overall output level of 2007). China is growing, but too slowly to move the needle elsewhere.

The trouble is that everyone already has had the same idea as Mr. Trump. The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have imposed negative interest rates on their money markets. If you buy a 10-year Japanese government bond or a 5-year German government bond, you get back less than you paid for it: you pay the government to hold your money. When it costs money to save, financial markets lose their reason to exist. The Europeans and Japanese have done this to try to keep their currencies cheap and get a bit more of the stagnant volume of world trade. Now that the Federal Reserve has backed off from raising interest rates in the face of uniformly depressing economic data, the dollar is falling, despite the best efforts of the Europeans and Japanese to cheapen their currencies.

Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly. And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz’s wife. And on and on.

Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero. Zilch.

Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade, given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling? Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or Republican.

The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed adverbs like “finally” and “at last” to characterize each of the latest outrages likely to end Trump’s campaign. Trump broke his promise about releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the public were a lender that he was conning.

Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the experts about a “turning point” in his fate. How many times has someone on a Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, “Trump has gone too far this time” — without defining “too far”?

These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead followed by upticks in Trump’s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump should be and is through — a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, “Make America Mexico Again.”

The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times.

Violence emanating from Trump supporters buttresses a false narrative that many within the establishment media wish to propagate; namely that Trump’s immigration and border policies are laced with racist undertones. The issue is not framed within the context of securing borders, protecting U.S. citizens from crime and terrorism and curtailing an already overburdened entitlement system for illegals. Rather, Trump’s opponents and their allies in the media have succeeded in framing the issue as one involving racial divisiveness and incitement.

That narrative, displayed over and over again in print as well as social media has succeeded in fueling extreme left-wing violence at Trump rallies far outweighing the violence exhibited by a very limited number of Trump supporters. Yet violence by Trump supporters is still given prominence despite its limited scope and scale. Isolated incidents involving violence at Trump gatherings are given disproportionate coverage far beyond their importance.

Consider the side-by-side contrast of media coverage in two separate instances of violence at Trump rallies. On March 10, a 78-year old senior citizen punched an anti-Trump demonstrator in the face at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The action was inexcusable and the perpetrator was arrested and rightfully charged with misdemeanor assault while his victim required no medical attention.

On Thursday and Friday, a large unruly mob of anti-Trump hooligans, some of whom displayed Mexican flags, assembled at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California where a pro-Trump rally was held. The mob quickly resorted to violence, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, ransacking police cars and attacking policemen. One bystander, who had the misfortune of wearing a Trump T-shirt was slugged in the face, knocked to the ground and required several unsightly stitches to close his wound. Several police cars were damaged and a police horse was injured. The resulting damage will reportedly cost the fairgrounds tens of thousands of dollars.

When it was announced that Harriet Tubman would displace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, there were two sets of dramatically different reactions among Republicans on social media.

One group passed around links to a National Review piece celebrating the decision to “tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.”

“If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares?” it asked.

Much of the Republican base, the other group, cared. Donald Trump noticed and denounced the move as “pure political correctness”.

Political correctness is the defining element of the culture war today. It’s also one of the driving forces of Trump’s candidacy. Republicans and conservatives who ignore the backlash to it do so at their own peril.

When the left exploited the Charleston church shooting to begin a purge of Confederate flags that extended all the way into reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, Republicans failed to defy the lynch mobs and even cheered the takedowns, some of which took place under Republican governors, as progress. Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican, announced recently that state flags in the Capitol featuring confederate insignia will be taken down due to the “controversy surrounding Confederate imagery”. The “controversy” is another term for the left’s manufactured political correctness.

There are legitimate positions on both sides when it comes to the Confederate flag, but the historical debate is not the issue. Just as it doesn’t matter very much that Harriet Tubman was a Republican. It matters far more that both moves were driven by the social media mobs of political correctness.

Culture wars are not about actual historical facts, but a tribal conflict over culture between clashing groups. This is a conflict in which it mattered a great deal that northeastern elites were lining up to get $400 tickets to see Hamilton, a hip-hop musical praised by many of the same Republicans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. That New York theater trend led to Southerner Andrew Jackson being displaced on the currency instead of New York’s own Alexander Hamilton.

Some conservatives would argue that Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party while Hamilton, a longtime foe of its political forebears, would likely have aligned with the modern Republican Party. And like Tubman on the $20 bill, they would be completely missing the forest for the factoid.

Susan Mulcahy remembers the 1980s, when she was writing for and editing the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column:

Trump seemed an ideal subject for us, as apt a symbol of the gaudy 1980s as a Christian Lacroix pouf skirt—and just as shiny and inflated. Lacroix at least used excellent materials. Trump turned out to be the king of ersatz. Not just fake, but false. He lied about everything, with gusto. But that was not immediately apparent. Not to me, anyway.

…

It should be simple to write about publicity hounds, and often it is, because they’ll do anything to earn the attention they crave. Trump had a different way of doing things. He wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, “Good morning,” you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it. Nixon, who was shopping for a condo the day he met with Trump, may have had issues with credibility in his time, but over Trump, I’d have believed him any day. Trump was such a pretender he even used to fake being his own spokesman, as I learned recently, though I never heard from the faux flack he called John Barron. My Trump items came from all over the place—never Trump himself—and when I called to check on something, he usually lied to me directly.

Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump, and extended even to mundane matters.

Read the whole thing, although this next bit is far more depressing than any of Trump’s endless lies: CONTINUE AT SITE

A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head and says: ‘I know just what you mean.’ ”

The joke is supposed to be about life in Czechoslovakia under communism, circa 1977. It conveys exactly what I feel about the moral and mental state of the Republican Party, circa 2016.

Last week, Donald Trump delivered his big foreign-policy speech, built around the theme of “America First.” The term seems to have been planted in his brain by New York Times reporter David Sanger, who asked the Republican front-runner in late March whether it was fair to sum up his foreign policy as “something of an ‘America First’ kind of approach.”

Trump: “Correct, okay? That’s fine.”

Sanger: “Okay? Am I describing this correctly here?”

Trump: “I’ll tell you—you’re getting close. . . . I’m not an isolationist, but I am ‘America First.’ So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’ ”

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase? Did anyone in his inner circle advise him that it might be unwise to associate himself with a movement whose principal aim was to prevent the United States from helping Winston Churchill fight the Nazis during the Battle of the Atlantic? Once he learned of it—assuming he did—was he at least privately embarrassed? Or was he that much more pleased with himself?

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering. Either Mr. Trump stumbled upon his worldview through a dense fog of historical ignorance. Or he is seriously attempting to resurrect the most disastrous and discredited strain of American foreign policy for a new generation of American ignoramuses.

And now he’s about to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assuming a win in Tuesday’s Indiana primary. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 campaign that Donald Trump, who has run as the immigration scourge, is actually the amnesty candidate.

Trump has expressly vowed to give legal status to millions of illegal aliens. For any other candidate, such a promise would have been the campaign death knell. To compare, John Kasich, who is openly pro-amnesty, has lost 38 of 39 primaries (the sole exception being his own state) and has never been a plausible contestant. When it comes to Trump, however, it seems that the all-important amnesty fine-print of his immigration position has been overlooked, no doubt due to his consciously controversial rhetoric: his fixation about building a wall on the Mexican border, his oft-repeated commitment to mass-deportation of illegal aliens, his disparaging comments about Mexicans, and his proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration.

Yet, Trump is the amnesty candidate. What’s more, the amnesty component of his immigration plan is the only one that has a realistic chance of happening….

To read the rest click here, or paste the following in your browser:

https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2016/05/02/where-would-trump-be-if-he-had-run-as-what-he-is-the-amnesty-candidate/

George Will, writing in the Washington Post yesterday, said that if Donald Trump is nominated conservatives should help him lose all fifty states. Will wrote that they should do this in order to “…reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.”

Will is wrong, appallingly so. That’s obvious to anyone who values our national security more than the identity of the Republican Party.

The simple fact is that if Trump were to lose to Hillary Clinton, the nation would be doomed to four or eight years of governance by a person who is unfit to be president by any measure. Mrs. Clinton’s connivance with President Obama produced the most damaging foreign policy since Lyndon Johnson waded into Vietnam. That policy is Hillary’s proudest (and only) achievement. Her handling of our most closely guarded secrets, making them vulnerable to interception by every foreign government and terrorist group, is unforgivable as is her comprehensive corruption.

We know the rest. Hillary would pack the Supreme Court with more Kagans and Sotomayors. I’m told that Trump will soon announce a list of possible Supreme Court nominees that will please conservatives. Let’s hope he does.

It’s unimaginable that any of us would work for Hillary against Trump, even those of us who have been sharply critical of him. It’s time to accept that, unless something really strange happens, Trump will be the Republican nominee this year. Therefore it’s our duty to help educate him.

Trump is a businessman so he sees national security and foreign policy only from that perspective. He’s unfamiliar with how national security and foreign policy must be managed to the nation’s benefit. He doesn’t know how to pull the levers of American power to move the world. So we have to help him learn. Some of the people I know and trust are trying to influence him on these matters as evidenced in his foreign policy speech last Wednesday.

There were a lot of good points Trump made in that speech and some not so good. Let’s take them in the order he made them.

Trump’s adoption of the “America First” slogan is unfortunate. Though it has a good ring to it, the slogan is freighted with the history of the isolationist “America Firsters” of the 1930s. (That movement lasted until three days after Pearl Harbor.) A potential president needs to be aware of that kind of history and avoid connecting himself to it. Insertion of two letters to make it “Americans First” might help.

In “Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Problem – And Ours,” James Kirchik at Tablet points out a revealing (Kirchik calls it “revolutionary”) statement made by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders last week at the Brooklyn Democratic debate prior to his loss in the New York primary. “As somebody who is 100 percent pro-Israel,” Sanders declared, “we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.”

As someone who claims to be “100 percent pro-Israel,” perhaps Sanders should demand instead that the so-called Palestinian people begin to treat Israeli Jews with respect and dignity. These are the same Palestinians who overwhelmingly favor a one-state solution that includes the genocide of the Jewish people (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). These are the Palestinians currently targeting Jews with knives and cars in a vicious new intifada. The same Palestinians who name streets after Jew-killing martyrs and launch fireworks to celebrate the murders of Jews.

The Vermont socialist had more to say in defense of the Palestinians:

Sanders added that Israel’s response to Hamas rocket attacks in 2014 was “disproportionate,” that “we are going to have to say that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is not right all of the time,” and took a swipe at his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, scolding her for having “barely mentioned the Palestinians” in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Let us first consider the common, ridiculous complaint Sanders is regurgitating about Israel’s supposed use of “disproportionate force” when dealing with Arab terrorists. No sovereign state in the history of the world except Israel has ever been scolded for responding to repeated attacks on its homeland with “disproportionate force.” No military would even consider such an ineffective strategy as the use of “proportionate force.” When your country is attacked – particularly if it is a tiny strip of land surrounded by enemies obsessed with wiping you from the face of the earth – you don’t respond to a measured, perfectly balanced degree; you respond with overwhelming force not only to put an end to the threat, but to make your enemy rue the day it had ever even contemplated attacking you, and to make everyone else think twice about considering it themselves. The notion that “disproportionate force” is somehow immoral (at least, when Israel is presumed guilty of it) is nothing more than a media strategy invented by the anti-Israel left to divert attention from Palestinian Jew-hatred and to keep the spotlight of the world’s disapproval focused on the Israeli military instead.

The US presidential election this year will not be about whoever wins. It will be about the preventable rise of Donald Trump, and the crisis of the American political institutions his candidacy represents.

In the early 1990s, when the old political order of Italy collapsed trailing the fall of the Soviet Empire, media tycoon–cum-showman Silvio Berlusconi emerged. For the next two decades he was the symptom of or cure for Italian tribulations, depending on your side of the parliamentary aisle. The country was bitterly divided about him and his leadership, something that further complicated all national issues.

Many of the problems of Italy and the European Union, of which Italy is an economic linchpin, rest with Berlusconi and those 20 years of political rifts. The country is yet to emerge from those divisions.

A similar event of very different nature happened in Thailand, likewise a political linchpin of Southeast Asia. It occurred after the 1997 financial crisis that swept the region like a typhoon. Thaksin Shinawatra took power and put forward widespread reforms that the king ultimately felt were undermining his position and power. He and the army stopped Thaksin and set Thailand on a reverse course in history. Now Myanmar, for decades the primary specimen of a rogue military regime, is moving boldly to democracy while neighboring Thailand, for decades a shining example of freedom in the region, is moving toward democracy—setting electoral rules with the sole purpose of preventing Thaksin’s return to power. Unlike Europe, South East Asia is not bound but a united currency, so the area can more easily leave Thailand behind.

The solutions the two men offered were different but both were wild cards emerging in a moment of huge social and political disruption.

Donald Trump may be in many ways the present American version of Berlusconi or, perhaps, of Thaksin. He loves to flaunt his wealth, appeals to populist rhetoric, is keen on histrionics, and receives a similarly divisive response from the public.
Months ago, when many were basically laughing about Trump, Angelo Codevillawarned that Trump was the sign of a deep crisis in American politics.

Now it is clear that Trump might be the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential election or, at least, he will play an important part in the choice of the Republican candidate. It is already a huge victory for Trump, and concrete evidence of the crisis Codevilla warned about.