By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
If there was a good reason to distrust presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, it had to do with his views on abortion. Not his
position per se — as difficult as it is to understand the pro-choice tendency,
there are people of good faith on both sides of the abortion question — but the
fact that he arrived at that position so late in life and at a moment when his
change of heart was politically convenient. Even if we assume that this was not
simple cowardly political calculation, as in the matter of Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Barack Obama’s evolving views on gay marriage, the situation must give
us pause: If a man hasn’t figured out what he believes about abortion by the
age of 50 — after having been a father, a governor, a business leader, and an
influential figure in an important religious congregation — it may be the case
that he is not ready for the responsibilities of the presidency.
Donald Trump is looking at 70 candles on his next
birthday cake, and his mind is, when it comes to the issues relevant to a
Republican presidential candidate, unsettled.
If you are looking for a good reason to quit the
Republican party (as I did some years ago), you can start with the company you
are obliged to keep in the GOP: At the moment, about one in five Republicans
are rallying to the daft banner of Donald Trump, heir to a splendid real-estate
fortune and reality-show grotesque, who is a longtime supporter of, among other
Democratic potentates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains, for the moment, the
candidate against whom the Republican nominee presumably will run. (Herself’s
struggles are for the moment only an amusement, though they may someday prove
to be serious.)
Trump has moved between the parties a number of times,
but on the issues he is at home with the party of his good friend Chuck
Schumer: He is pro-abortion, he has proposed punitive taxes on the wealthy, he
favors a Canadian-style government health-care monopoly, etc. A lifelong crony
capitalist, he is an enthusiastic partisan of the thieving Kelo regime, under
which government can seize private property in the name of “economic development”
— for instance, throwing retirees out of their paid-for homes to make room for
a casino-hotel with a large “T” on the façade. Until the day before yesterday,
he took an indulgent view toward normalizing the status of illegal immigrants,
perhaps mindful of the fact that Trump Tower was built in part by
illegal-immigrant labor and that one of his associates was in fact jailed over
the matter.
For the moment, Trump’s leading critic in the Republican
field is former Texas governor Rick Perry, whose most famous public utterance
is “Oops!” but who is Cicero next to Trump, Hyperion to a satyr. That Trump and
Perry are received roughly as equals on the national stage is absurd, but
politics thrives on absurdity. Perry has, to put it plainly, the best record of
any modern American governor. Trump has celebrity and a knack for getting out
in front of a parade, in this case ghoulishly grandstanding upon the corpse of
Kathryn Steinle, a telegenic young white woman who was murdered by Francisco
Sanchez, a Mexican illegal who had been deported five times and who apparently
used a gun belonging to a federal agent in the killing. Trump has not offered
even the outline of a serious program for stanching the flow of illegal
immigrants, but he makes authoritative grunting sounds in the general direction
of the southern border, which apparently is sufficient for one in five
Republican voters. While the border crisis is indeed a national emergency,
Trump makes it less likely rather than more likely that the federal power will
be roused to do its duty, a fact to which Trump’s camp apparently is
indifferent. It has fallen to the newly professorial Perry to instruct these
idiot children, while the other candidate from Texas, Senator Ted Cruz, has
mainly engaged in a sad me-too appeal to the Trump element. The contrast is
telling, and is a reminder that Senator Cruz, for all his many attractive
qualities, is a tyro.
The Trumpkins insist that this isn’t about Trump but
about the perfidious Republican establishment, which is insufficiently
committed to the conservative project. Fair enough. But what of Trump’s
commitment? Being at the precipice of his eighth decade walking this good green
earth, Trump has had a good long while to establish himself as a leader on —
something. He isn’t a full-spectrum conservative, but he seems to have
conservative-ish instincts on a few issues. What has he done with them? There
are many modes of leadership available to the adventurous billionaire: Sheldon
Adelson, the casino magnate who is the less famous and more competent version
of Trump, is directly involved in campaigns, while Charles and David Koch have
engaged in electoral politics and done the long-term (and probably more
consequential) work of nurturing a stable of institutions dedicated to
advancing the cause of liberty, and Bill Gates has put his billions behind his
priorities. Trump has made some political donations — to Herself, to Harry
Reid, to Nancy Pelosi, to Schumer — and his defense is that these were purely
self-serving acts of influence-purchasing rather than expressions of genuine
principle. There is no corpus of Trump work on any issue of any significance;
on his keystone issue, illegal immigration, he has not even managed to deliver
a substantive speech, a deficiency no doubt rooted in his revealed inability to
voice a complete sentence.
Donald Trump, who inherited a real-estate empire worth
hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, has had every opportunity to
involve himself in the consequential questions of his time. He has been a very
public figure for decades, with a great deal of time, money, celebrity, business
connections, and other resources to put in the service of something that
matters. Seventy years in, and his curriculum vitae is remarkably light on
public issues for a man who would be president. One would think that a life
spent in public might inspire at least a smidgen of concern about the wide
world. He might have had any sort of life he chose, and Trump chose a clown’s
life. There is no shortage of opportunities for engagement, but there is only
one thing that matters to Trump, and his presidential campaign, like everything
else he has done in his seven decades, serves only that end.
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