RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald J. Trump thus far has not shown that he has the level-headedness to be president. He has no political ideology and could just as well govern to the left of Hillary Clinton as to the right of her. Yet his sloppy way of speaking has earned him equally sloppy, over-the-top analogies — to Mussolini, Hitler, George Wallace, and a host of other populist and racist demagogues.

But is he uniquely dangerous, ignorant, or cruel in terms of either distant or recent American presidential history?

I don’t think so.

There are many ways to assess Trump. The debates and rallies give us glimpses of his ill-preparedness (at least in comparison to his rivals). So far his vision has not transcended banalities and generalities. He seems to have no team of respected advisers, at least not yet. Indeed, at this point, advising Trump apparently would be a career-killer in the Boston–New York–Washington corridor. No one quite knows who talks to him on foreign policy. He is an empty slate onto which millions write their hopes and dreams, as “Make America great again” channels the empty “Hope and Change.”

Those are grounds enough for rejecting him. But what we don’t need is high talk about Trump as something uniquely sinister, a villain without precedent in American electoral history or indeed public life. That is simply demonstrably false. Trump thrives despite, not because of, his crudity, and largely because of anger at Barack Obama’s divisive and polarizing governance and sermonizing — and the Republican party’s habitual consideration of trade issues, debt, immigration, and education largely from the vantage point of either abstraction or privilege.

Take Trump’s worst, most repugnant rhetoric, and there will always pop up a parallel worse — and often from the lips of the heroes of those who are blasting Trump as singularly foul. He crudely brags of his past infidelities and sexual conquests — reminding us that he has an affinity with JFK and Bill Clinton (is it worse to boast or to lie about such sins?). Whether he would attempt to match either man’s sexual gymnastics while in the Oval Office is, I think, doubtful. I don’t believe the Trump jet so far has followed Bill Clinton south to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual fantasy island. Is Clinton ostracized by the liberal media or pundit class because of his fawning over and cavorting with a convicted sex offender? Should Harvard have rejected Epstein’s cash?

Donald Trump, who denies that his provocative and sometimes profane rhetoric (particularly against Muslims_ has anything to do with violence and protests at his University of Illinois-Chicago rally, once blamed conservative activist Pamela Geller for provoking an attempted armed assault by – wait for it – unnecessarily provoking Muslims.

As Gideon Resnick noted last December in the Daily Beast, pre-candidate Trump was not as passionately concerned with Pamela Geller’s First Amendment free speech rights as he now is about his own:

On May 4 of this year, Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has enough problems without publicity seekers going out and openly mocking religion in order to provoke attacks and death. BE SMART.”

His declaration was in response to the news that two men attempted to shoot up the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, during a “Draw the Prophet” event organized by Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI).

Geller and her group, which has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “anti-Muslim hate group,” defended her First Amendment rights in the face of violence.

“Freedom of speech is under violent assault here,” Geller defiantly said at the time.

Donald Trump, the presidential candidate, would seemingly agree—he’s spoken a great deal about “political correctness” and his belief that free speech is under attack. But pre-candidate Donald Trump apparently felt otherwise.

“It looks like she’s just taunting everybody. What is she doing?” he told Fox & Friends. “Drawing Mohammed and it looks like she’s actually taunting people. You know, I’m one that believes in free speech, probably more than she does. But what’s the purpose of this?”

Pamela Geller “taunted” Muslims, said the man who is himself accused of taunting Muslims by banning all immigration until he figures things out The purpose of the Garland event, Mr., Trump, was to exercise her free speech rights which, under the U.S. Constitution if not Sharia law, are not punishable by death. Trump, who openly and generically mocks Islam and has threatened protesters with physical violence, says he is innocent of incitement while Geller was guilty. Geller merely sponsored a cartoon contest. Her supporter did not punch an African-American at her event nor manhandle a female reporter as his campaign manager is accused of doing to Michelle Fields.

Donald J. Trump has a strange and unhealthy fascination with the “strength” of those who pummel, terrorize, and kill people. At the Miami Republican debate, he stood by comments in support of the Communist Chinese dictatorship for killing protesters during a “riot,” and he praised the leading killer in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, for being “strong.” Despite these shocking assertions, Trump was seen by some in the media as turning in a respectable or even “presidential” performance. At least he didn’t talk about his body parts or use obscenities.

Once again, according to Trump’s leading media cheerleader, the Drudge Report, the New York businessman won the debate. Drudge said he got 63 percent in an online survey, versus 24 percent for Senator Ted Cruz.

It seemed bizarre to me. But in a matter-of-fact manner, moderator Jake Tapper noted that Trump has been criticized for “praising authoritarian dictators.” He quoted [1] Trump as saying about China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it, then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

Despite the clear meaning of his words, Trump lamely replied, “That doesn’t mean I was endorsing that.” He added, “I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Ohio Governor John Kasich had the Reaganite response. He said, “I think that the Chinese government butchered those kids. And when that guy stood in front—that young man stood in front of that tank, we ought to build a statue of him over here when he faced down the Chinese government.” He was referring to the famous picture of a pro-democracy demonstrator standing in front of a Chinese tank.

The estimates [2] of the dead in Tiananmen Square range from several hundred to more than 2,000.

I am a conservative who believes in government. Government is a requisite for a functioning, civil society, but it should be limited. It has responsibility for the safety of its citizens and it is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights. I revere the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They are the foundations on which our nation was built. I believe in property rights and the rule of law. Pertinent to today, I believe in the Electoral College, as an institution to help thwart the rise of demagogues. I believe in equality of opportunity, while understanding that outcomes will never be equal.

I believe that a job is critical to self-respect and that most jobs come from the private sector. Initiative, innovation and creativity are characteristics government should encourage. I believe fiscal prudence is necessary in government and I believe if we promise something we should be able to deliver it. I believe government has a responsibility for the aged, infirm, indigent and those unable to care for themselves. But I also believe that government is wrong when it crosses the Rubicon from providing help to those in need to exchanging favors for votes, which increases dependency at the cost of personal accountability.

I believe in the importance of family and the value of traditional marriage; though I respect those who have chosen different paths. I believe children are better off when raised in a two-parent household and that government should promote such family formations. It is hard for me to believe that life does not begin at conception, but I also understand that there can be mitigating circumstances warranting abortion – rare, one would hope, but including rape, incest and deformed fetuses. I believe government has a duty to provide a high school education for everyone, and that its responsibility is to students, not unions. I believe in civility, honor and mutual respect. I believe morality is absolute, not relative. For example, honor killings, sexual slavery and female genital mutilations, in any culture, are wrong. They have no place in civilized society and perpetrators should be punished. I believe religion is principally a matter between an individual and their God. I believe that God resides in each of us. Just as I will not force my religion on anyone else, I don’t want someone else’s forced on me.

I believe that equality before the law is fundamental to a fair and democratic society – that no one is above the law, no matter the political power they or their friends may have, nor the wealth they or their friends may possess. I recognize that we can never do away with cronyism – that from time immemorial some men and women have attached themselves to those with great wealth or who exert great power. But I also believe that our laws and courts should be vigilant against those who abuse their positions. I recognize that there are bad people in every profession and that hatred and racism are not the sole purview of one class, race, or political party, and that society has a responsibility to flush them out. I believe that ninety-nine percent of law enforcement personnel are good people doing a difficult and dangerous job and deserve our support.

Donald Trump cannot quite decide what he thinks about the H-1B visa program, under which certain high-skilled foreign workers are permitted to work in the United States. Silicon Valley executives love it, and Silicon Valley worker bees hate it, charging that it is used to undercut domestic wages.

Because Donald Trump is a man who knows nothing about almost anything, his mind (as John B. Anderson once said of Jimmy Carter) is “like a seat cushion that bears the imprint of the last person who sat in it.” In the last debate, Trump decided, out of nowhere, that he was reversing his formerly restrictive view of the H-1B visa program, that our high-tech businesses needed those foreign workers, the domestic supply being insufficient. About five minutes later, having been informed that abruptly reversing himself on his key issue was bound to cost him a few votes — one suspects that Ann Coulter was on the verge of tears or worse — Trump announced that he was reversing his reversal.

It is natural that Trump is of two minds on the question. There is the third Mrs. Trump to consider.

Donald Trump, a man whose sexual insecurities are such that he feels the need to reassure the republic that his tiny little fingers are not proportional to his genitals — Lincoln versus Douglas this ain’t — and to boast in his memoirs about his sex life (“Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘Can you believe what I am getting?’”), invested in beauty pageants and a modeling agency. If you are thinking that sounds like a pretty transparent ploy to put himself in the company of economically subordinate women, the fact is that his third/current wife is a former client of the Trump modeling agency, a Slovene by the name of Melanija Knavs, known to the world now as Melania Trump. The third/current Mrs. Trump came to these United States on an H-1B visa.

Being married to Donald Trump is, as it turns out, another temporary job Americans just won’t do.

Given Trump’s habitual disregard for the law and for basic decency in his business affairs, it will come as no surprise that there is evidence coming to light that Trump Model Management is a serial abuser of the H-1B visa program, that it lied to modeling recruits overseas about their earnings in the United States while raiding such wages as they did earn with undisclosed fees (the structural parallels with prostitution-trafficking rings are too obvious to belabor), and, more to the point as a criminal question, lied to U.S. immigration authorities about those wages, too.

The curious case of Donald Trump vs. Riots Inc. puts us in mind of Henry Kissinger’s assessment of the Iran–Iraq War: It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.

Instead, the loss is being suffered by the United States and its political institutions.

Politics-by-riot, and politics-by-threat-of-riot, is unworthy of the oldest and finest democratic republic on earth. Politics-by-assault isn’t just a crime, though such crimes should be robustly prosecuted: It is an attack on the institutions that make American self-governance possible as much as an attack on individual speakers or protesters. Among those institutions are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. The Bill of Rights guarantees protection of those rights from government encroachment, but they also must be defended from mob-ocracy, which we have seen more than enough of in the past year, from Ferguson to Washington.

Donald Trump canceled a rally in Chicago after protests that were intended to pressure him into doing so. Which is to say, protests that were not oriented toward political expression but toward its suppression. If you have any doubt of that, consider that the protesters chanted “We stopped Trump!” after they succeeded in out-bullying the big bully of Fifth Avenue. Trump, for his part, played the martyr — a cynical posture for a man who fantasizes in public about using the law to punish journalists who displease him. A protester disrupted a planned Trump event in Ohio and later described his goal as to “take his podium away from him and take his mic away from him.” Another act of protest oriented not toward political expression but toward its suppression. That protester has been charged with disorderly conduct, and the evidence is plain enough that he should be convicted.

Trump — Saddam Hussein to the ayatollahs of political correctness on the other side — is of course far from blameless in all this. That is not to say that Trump’s irresponsible, wild-eyed, and meat-headed rhetoric, which has included explicit calls for violence against his critics, is responsible for having provoked the protests. Rather, Trump’s rhetoric has been unworthy of a presidential candidate — and unworthy of an American — in and of itself.

The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally in Chicago on Friday was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas.

Even so, it is a particularly poisonous assault on the American body politic that imperils the nation’s most important free institution – the ballot.

“The meticulously orchestrated #Chicago assault on our free election process is as unAmerican as it gets,” tweeted actor James Woods. “It is a dangerous precedent.”

This so-called protest, and the disruptions at subsequent Trump events over the weekend, were not spontaneous, organic demonstrations. The usual culprits were involved behind the scenes. The George Soros-funded organizers of the riot at the University of Illinois at Chicago relied on the same fascistic tactics the Left has been perfecting for decades – including claiming to be peaceful and pro-democracy even as they use violence to disrupt the democratic process.

Activists associated with MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, all of which have been embraced by Democrats and funded by radical speculator George Soros, participated in shutting down the Trump campaign event. Soros recently also launched a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada through a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The title is a characteristic misdirection since Trump supports immigration that is legal. It’s the invasion of illegals who have not been vetted and are filling America’s welfare rolls and jails that is the problem.

Among the extremist groups involved in disrupting the Trump rally in Chicago were the revolutionary communist organization ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), National Council of La Raza (“the Race”), and the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Rights Reform. President Obama’s unrepentant terrorist collaborator Bill Ayers, who was one of the leaders of Days of Rage the precursor riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, also showed up to stir the pot.

Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro have tendered their resignations to the management at Breitbart.com over the site’s handling of the Corey Lewandowski/Michelle Fields imbroglio, Rosie Gray and McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed News reported late Sunday night. And more resignations are likely in the coming days and weeks, according to their report.

Fields and Shapiro join Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella, who left the company on Friday, citing as his reason the website’s inadequate handling of Donald Trump’s campaign manager’s alleged assault on Fields last week.

Bardella told CNN’s Don Lemon on Saturday that he thought the website has been “looking for a reason to disprove something” even though the evidence strongly supports Fields’ version of the story. When Lemon asked Bardella if he thought Breitbart was lying, he bluntly answered, “Yes, I am.”

BuzzFeed reports that Fields and Shapiro informed Breitbart’s chairman, Steve Bannon, of their decisions Sunday night.

“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”

A Trump administration may well see needed reforms left undone and unneeded populist measures promoted. As this most unlikely of candidates draws closer to the GOP’s nomination, one thing is certain: Whatever the mogul’s flaws, and they are many, he is less dangerous than Hillary

ships riggedBeing a great aficionado of Patrick O’Brien’s tales of the Georgian Royal Navy, I beg the reader’s indulgence of my using a metaphor from that era. Imagine the American Right to be in the position of a Royal Navy captain of the Napoleonic Wars era, who has found himself trapped in a narrow strait of water blocked at one end by a strong French fleet, and at the other by a large ship which he recognizes as belonging to an infamous and eccentric buccaneer. Escape might still be possible by skirting past the pirate, but is growing more improbable by the moment. The crew, so loyal and steadfast in the past, is becoming spooked. Some are even jumping overboard and swimming toward the pirate vessel, hoping to join him, and the corpulent purser has absconded with a ship’s boat, rowing in the pirate’s direction.

The choices are grim. To surrender to the French is an appalling prospect, meaning four or even eight years in a prison hulk. However, the pirate is so eccentric and unpredictable that he might just kill you for surrendering to him. You call a council of war with your remaining officers and hear their opinions. One counsels that you take to the remaining boats and set the ship on fire, rather than surrender her to either. That would deny the ship to your enemies but leave you adrift and helpless. You might indeed make your way to shore and slowly, painfully use salvaged supplies to build a new ship, but that is uncertain, and would certainly leave you stranded for a long time.

Pity those poor Americans in this presidential election year. In one corner, the bizarre figure of Donald Trump. In the other, the woman who excused her husband’s sexual predations, achieved nothing in the Senate and made cowardice her guide as Secretary of State. Some choice, eh?

Listening to one of Hillary Clinton’s stump speeches as she pursues the Democrats’ presidential nomination, you could be forgiven for suspecting that, taken at her word, she has been personally responsible for the liberation of women. In truth, her vapid and dismissive response to Bill Clinton’s history of abusive affairs likely set the women’s movement back many years. Hillary’s citing of a fabled “vast right-wing conspiracy” somehow, according to a compliant press corps, made Bill’s appalling history seem a mere side issue, all the allegations presented as no more than mere excuses to bring him down. Lies under oath, innovative uses for cigars and interns — even rape if you accept the word of at least two alleged victims and the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote of having spoken at length to a third.

But none of this bothered Mrs Clinton, who has continued to present herself as the essence and hope of womanhood’s advancement. What she ignores are the key advances that have made life better for women and enabled them to take up opportunities previously un-achievable or forbidden. Legislation for compulsory school education for all children in the late 19th Century arguably opened the way. Those educated women would grow up to demand the vote, more control of money, and less back-breaking domestic drudgery.