No, Trump Isn’t Actually Better than Hillary

By David French

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Those of us who’ve pledged that we will never, ever vote for Donald Trump always get the same response: “You’d put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office instead?” Clinton’s name is spoken like an epithet, as if it’s unthinkable that any conservative would take any single action that could facilitate her election. I will not, under any circumstances, vote for Clinton, but I also do not believe that Trump would make a better president. Not because Clinton isn’t as bad as you think, but because Trump is worse than you imagine.

There’s no real difference in character between the two. They lie as easily as they breathe: habitually, transparently, shamelessly. Hillary lies like a lawyer, always parsing her words to provide a legal escape route. Trump lies like a thug, contradicting himself with each successive breath and daring anyone to call him on it. They both seek to destroy their political opponents, and they’d probably both wield the levers of power to do so and to reward their friends. In other words, they’re both fundamentally corrupt.

We know what we’ll get from Clinton when it comes to foreign policy. She’s an internationalist interventionist with more muscular instincts than Barack Obama and less resolve than George W. Bush. She voted for the Iraq invasion but then went wobbly as the war dragged on. She backed the surge in Afghanistan, advocated intervention in Libya, and was famously more skeptical of the Arab Spring than Obama. Her “reset” with Russia was a disaster, but she’ll broadly back American allies, maintain our stewardship of NATO, and keep our other international commitments.

Trump’s foreign policy, insofar as he has a coherent foreign policy, is by contrast an entire casserole of crazy. At various points in the campaign, he’s promised that he’d order the military to commit war crimes by torturing terrorists and killing their families; he’s called our core alliances in question; he’s pledged to remain neutral in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; and he’s switched anti-ISIS strategies so many times that no one has the slightest clue what he’d do. This is a man who has on multiple occasions endorsed a “bomb them all and take their oil” strategy for fixing the war-torn Middle East. He’d alienate every Muslim ally America has, including the Kurds, and he’s still completely mystified by the most basic defense concepts. The entire world would be less secure with his finger on the button.

On trade, Clinton will almost certainly be superior to Trump. Trump pledges to “win” through punitive tariffs that would increase the price of consumer goods and trigger trade wars, but he gives little indication that he understands the economics of trade, the reality of the American economy, or even the truth about American manufacturing. (It is not, in fact, disappearing.) Clinton, by contrast, would probably maintain the trade-policy status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American families.

The Clinton and Trump tax plans are both miserable. Clinton offers the standard Democratic package of tax increases for the rich and vastly increased spending, while Trump’s tax cuts would blast a hole in the budget, adding as much debt as Obama did — without the burden of a historic recession. Clinton’s plan would probably slow economic growth, but would be closer to revenue-neutral. Trump’s plan would spur more growth but would also increase the national debt by up to $10 trillion. Pick your poison.

But what about the areas where Trump fans argue that he’d clearly be better than Clinton? On abortion, immigration, and judges, we know what she’d do — protect Planned Parenthood, try to enact a path to citizenship, and appoint the standard-issue leftist legal technocrats to the bench.

How much better would Trump be? It’s impossible to know if his recent pro-life conversion is genuine, but it can’t be a good sign that he still refuses to denounce Planned Parenthood, consistently using Democratic talking points to praise the nation’s largest abortion provider. On immigration — aside from that big, beautiful wall, which is a pipe dream at best — he’s all over the place. And his corporate record indicates that he’s exactly the kind of “jobs Americans won’t do” legal-immigration and touchback-amnesty advocate who would be all too willing to open the door so wide that no one would have to scale the wall.

As for judges, the indications are similarly ominous. He praises his far-left sister and promises to nominate men and women whom everyone will like. But not everyone likes true conservatives. In reality, he’ll probably nominate friends and cronies — people who’ve said nice things about him. The best-case scenario is that he’ll delegate lower-court judicial nominations to home-state senators, simply adopting their recommendations. He’d probably be better than Hillary, but not by much.

He’d also probably be better than Hillary on the Second Amendment. There is at least a chance that he’d nominate a Supreme Court justice who wouldn’t vote for the repeal of the individual right to keep and bear arms, and it’s doubtful that he’d initiate any meaningful gun-control measures. But who knows what he might negotiate in the heat of the moment? Any position he takes — most definitely including all of the “conservative” stances he’s adopted since launching his campaign — could be discarded at a moment’s notice if it became politically inconvenient. It’s impossible to know what he actually believes, if he actually believes anything.

But virtually everything we do know about Trump is negative. He lies. He traffics in far-left conspiracy theories. He incites violence. He surrounds himself with thugs, cronies, and fools. He’s ignorant of the most basic realities of national security, foreign policy, and global economics. He has a decades-long record of corruption and a decades-long record of liberalism. In arguing that he’s better than Clinton, his supporters now ask us to trust his current “conservative” incarnation and disregard that record. We don’t really know how he’ll handle immigration, trade, ISIS, abortion, or judges. But trust him. He’ll do better.

Yes, Trump has praised single-payer health care during this election, but trust him. He’ll do better than Obamacare. Yes, Trump has advocated touchback amnesty and increased legal immigration, but trust him. He’ll protect American workers. Yes, Trump has supported abortion-on-demand and gun control, but trust him. He’s changed. Yes, Trump has written large checks to leftist politicians, but trust him. He’ll fight them as president. Yes, his campaign team lives in the gutter, but trust him. He’ll appoint good people.

Hillary Clinton is the most beatable likely Democratic nominee since John Kerry, and the GOP is poised to nominate the one man least likely to beat her, and the one man who would be just as bad in the White House. I don’t vote for despicable people. I don’t vote for leftists. And I will never, ever, vote for Donald Trump. He’s no better than she is.

Trump Has No Clue What American Government Is All About

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Donald Trump is not a details guy. From his checkered experience in business, he draws this lesson: “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.”

Question: Who thinks that Donald Trump actually has read the paper?

Asked at a town-hall meeting (which isn’t actually a town-hall meeting, but we insist on calling these dog-and-pony shows that and pretending that they are) to list the top three priorities of the federal government, Trump responded: “Security, security, and security.” That the candidate was stalling for time while his political mind, honed to the fine edge of an old butter knife, ran through the possibilities was to be expected. We are used to his filibustering by now. He was right to identify security as the overriding concern of the U.S. government.

The federal enterprise was created to handle those tasks that are by their nature interstate or national: War, relations with foreign powers, international and interstate trade, immigration, and relations between the states are the reasons it exists. A superior power is required to solve problems that cannot be adjudicated by a single state, such as cooking up an excuse for why Texas must be forced to honor your Massachusetts-issued same-sex-marriage license while Massachusetts has no reciprocal obligation to honor your Texas-issued concealed-carry permit, despite the pesky fact of gun rights actually being right there in the Constitution and all. All right, maybe not the best example. The federal government is necessary because it alone can create and execute a program under which “aid” to foreign governments is laundered back into the pockets of campaign contributors through military-procurement rules. Okay, not a great example, either. But the federal government does something useful, of that we are assured. It’s not like all those thousands of federal factota hived up in Washington do nothing but sit around and masturbate to Internet porn all day.

But the Trumpkin view of all Trumpkin enterprises is expansive, demanding superlatives. And so Trump expanded. Other top federal duties, he declared, included “health care, education . . . and then you can go on from there.” Go on to where? “Housing, providing great neighborhoods.” Anderson Cooper, tasked with the necessary duty of reminding Trump that this contradicts everything he said until five minutes ago, asked: “Aren’t you against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to devolve to states?” Sure, Trump said, but — see if you can make anything of this — we must consider the “concept of the country.” (If that sounds like a cheesy theme hotel, well . . . ) And: “The concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country.” Indeed. Likewise, he rejects the notion of a federally run health-care system, advocating instead a “private” system that is . . . federally run, or, in Trump’s phrasing, led by the federal government, in case you for some reason believe that “led by” and “run by” mean different things when the federal government is involved — which is to say, if you are a credulous rube.

One would think that a real-estate man from New York City would have some appreciation of what kind of “great neighborhoods” are created by federal policy, but one suspects that Trump is mainly unfamiliar with those parts of New York between Central Park North and Yankee Stadium.

Trump, who until recently supported a Canadian-style government-monopoly health-care system, says that the answer is in competition. He’s partly right about that, but the idea that there is going to be robust competition — strong enough to drive down prices and increase quality — under a system led by the federal government is, forgive me for noticing, exactly the thinking that produced the so-called Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare regime that Trump professes to disdain.

Yes, professes: His political donations helped sustain the Democratic politicians who created it. Maybe you believe he is in earnest. Maybe you are a credulous rube. You can believe that a guy whose preferred health-care policy was somewhat to the left of the French model suddenly became a born-again Friedmanite in his seventh decade walking this good green Earth, in much the same way that you can believe that a man who had no moral reservations about the commercial vivisection of human children for the purpose of accommodating sexual convenience suddenly embraced Mother Teresa’s view of abortion at approximately the same politically convenient moment.

Trump does not oppose big government. He believes that we simply haven’t been doing it right. Trumpism, like the “true Communism” beloved of Berkeley sophomores, has never been tried. Or so he thinks. Of course it has: in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in Venezuela — and here, under Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism” and the New Deal, which was little more than Wilsonian war socialism filtered through Franklin Roosevelt’s sense of noblesse oblige. Trump, who has no noblesse to oblige him, is constrained by no philosophy, no principle, and no real knowledge of our constitutional order. To admit that there is something that the federal government under Trump cannot do well is to admit that there is something Trump cannot do well, and Trump cannot endure the thought. Federally run health care? Sure, but it’ll be great this time around. A big ugly federal footprint in education? If you cannot trust Donald Trump and his third-grade reading skills to set education policy, who can you trust? And, of course, expect the classiest housing projects you’ve ever seen, because the government is going to build great neighborhoods.

The concept of the country is well-ordered liberty with the necessary evil of a federal government and a presidency that are severely limited in their scope and ambition by provisions written into the Constitution itself. The federal government has enumerated powers, and satisfying Donald Trump’s bloated and cancerous sense of the importance of his own ridiculous person is not one of them.

Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, March 31, 2016

China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic radicalism and hits back hard any time Muslim terrorists attack.

Given such severe backlash elsewhere, why do radical Islamists prefer to strike Europeans and Americans — from Paris and Brussels to Boston and San Bernardino?

No place has been more open to Muslim refugees than the United States and the European Union. Together they have accepted several million emigrants from the Middle East since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The EU and the U.S. lavish foreign-aid money on the Palestinians. America has offered a half-century of support to Jordan and Egypt. It is much easier to be a Muslim in Europe than a Christian in the Middle East.

Barack Obama started his presidency eager to win over the Muslim world. In a 2009 interview with Dubai-based TV news channel Al Arabiya, he emphasized that he has Muslim family members. Obama’s NASA director redefined the space agency’s “foremost” mission as Muslim outreach.

Obama has sought a closer relationship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan despite Erdogan’s Islamization of Turkey’s shaky democracy. In contrast, Obama alienated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the most steadfast friend America has in the Middle East.

Obama has publicly deferred to Muslim interests while abroad. He apologized to the Turkish parliament for a host of supposed past American sins — “some of our own darker periods in our history.” In symbolic fashion, Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The president’s Cairo speech mythologized Islamic contributions throughout history and downplayed Western achievement.

The Obama administration has in effect banned the use of the terms “jihadism” and “Islamic terrorism.” It prefers a host of euphemisms for Islamic terrorist acts, from “workplace violence” to “man-caused disasters.” CIA director John Brennan redefined jihad as a “holy struggle” of Islamic self-purification rather than a Koran-sanctioned campaign against infidels.

Obama granted theocratic Iran plenty of concessions in the agreement to restrict Iranian nuclear proliferation.

Despite all of that extraordinary presidential outreach, the West remains under constant terrorist threats and episodic attacks, often from Muslim youths who were offered sanctuary in places such as Belgium, France, Massachusetts, and California.

There are a number of reasons why jihadists prefer to target Westerners.

The West is wealthy, sensual, and liberal, and it offers the chance of global publicity to killers.

Muslim immigrants from the Middle East prefer the higher standard of living in Paris than the abject poverty at home. But they also hate how such affluence insidiously tempts their own religious fundamentalism. They do not praise Europe for its generosity, but rather blame it for its decadence.

The West is obsessed with mandated equality. The Muslim immigrant — who often arrives without education, language facility, or money — easily learns how to blame his relative poverty on his hosts. He is rarely reminded that not being relatively well off in Frankfurt or Boston is still far better than being unsafe and poor in Yemen or Chechnya.

America asks little of its immigrants. U.S. policies allow illegal entry en masse. America does not insist that newcomers learn English, and it largely prefers the trendy multicultural salad bowl to the time-tested assimilationist melting pot. As a result, there are entire communities where recent immigrants and their families prefer to guilt-trip, rather than show affinity toward, their adopted countries.

The West is also lax. A jihadist knows that he has a good chance of reentering the U.S. or Europe from the Middle East without detection. If he’s caught, the penalties are far less severe than they would be if he tried to start a terrorist cell in China or Russia. Extenuating claims of multicultural victimhood would not work in either autocracy.

Many Westerners are more scared of being labeled as illiberal or nativist than they are of being unsafe.

Islamic terrorists sense that Westerners are increasingly materialist rather than spiritual. Europeans in particular are becoming more secular. Their birthrates are declining. And they seem to believe more in satisfying their appetites than in finding transcendence through children and religion.

As a result, jihadists trust that they can cull a handful of Westerners every few weeks from an otherwise indifferent herd. Their only challenge is to keep the harvest of Westerners down to a few dozen and not to get greedy in their bloodlust.

Terrorists seem to believe that as long as they avoid another 9/11-like massacre, they can continue to take lives and insidiously weaken the West without awakening it from its morally indifferent slumber.

And they may be right.

At Emory, Campus Totalitarianism Has Arrived

By Robert Tracinski

Monday, March 28, 2016

Universities, once supposedly the great centers of American “liberalism,” have spent decades working their way toward becoming totalitarian monocultures in which only one approved set of political opinions is tolerated. And now they have arrived at their goal.

Last week at Emory University in Atlanta, person or persons unknown went around campus late one night chalking messages on sidewalks in support of Donald Trump for president. It’s an example of perfectly normal campus political activity during an election year, except that there is no such thing as normal life on a contemporary campus any more.

The usual suspects went berserk, with a coterie of protesters marching on the administration building and demanding a meeting with the university’s president, James Wagner, and that he denounce Trump and any pro-Trump students. As one protester complained, Trump “is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well.” Another declared that the administration is “supporting this rhetoric by not ending it.” Nothing less than full censorship will purge the university of the stain of Trumpism.

Instead of giving these students a good talking to about freedom of speech and the need to toughen up and get used to a world in which other people don’t share their political opinions, Wagner issued a pathetically mealy-mouthed statement, including this great evasion: “During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation. … [T]he students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.” He talks about what they “perceived” or the message they “heard,” without evaluating whether any of it was rational or defensible.

It’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with all of this, and the Emory protesters were subjected to fairly widespread ridicule, including from many on the left. The universality of the reaction indicates, thankfully, that we don’t need to waste a lot of time bothering to examine why the student protesters’ reaction is hysterical and illiberal. It is a commentary on the state of mainstream “liberalism,” however, that some people have felt the need to spill a lot of electrons parsing it out in excruciating detail, as if it were a deep and difficult question.

Which brings us to the only really interesting question: if this is so obviously ridiculous, why did it happen?

Take a look at the protesters’ main line of attack. Aiming their protest at the university administration, they shouted, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” And then consider Wagner’s response, which amounts to declaring that any feelings his students have must be automatically valid because they have them. (Or rather, any feelings they have are valid, if they represent the right campus pressure groups.)

All of this is exactly the template established last fall at the University of Missouri and Yale. At Mizzou, protesters got a university president fired for failing to grovel to them quickly enough; at Yale, they got a university official demoted for daring to mention such outrageous concepts as freedom of speech, tolerance of opposing views, and the university as an “intellectual space.”

If you want to know why Emory’s president didn’t shoot the protesters down immediately and give them a lecture about toughening up, that’s all you need to know. Student protesters on other campuses have already made an example of those who don’t kowtow to their will, and administrators know that when this happens, nobody is going to stand up for them.

Check out a cross-section of the reaction among Emory administrators, and see what I mean. It’s easy to laugh at the “special snowflakes” who whine about being traumatized by chalk. But there’s still some hope for these kids. Someday they will no longer be 19 years old, and many of them will go out into the real world and have a chance to grow up and learn better. What is not a joke is all the 50-year-old administrators who take the 19-year-olds seriously, and the grizzled professors who taught them whole theories about how the political speech of others is a threat that must be expunged.

And there’s one new twist that Emory gives us:

The University will review footage “up by the hospital [from] security cameras” to identify those who made the chalkings, Wagner told the protesters. He also added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process, while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.

It’s official: the campus is now a one-party surveillance state. If you support the wrong political candidate, the security apparatus of the university will be harnessed to unmask you and prosecute you for hooliganism. University totalitarianism has arrived.

As my readers know, I have no love for Trump or what he represents, and the most disturbing part of this story is how it fits into a wider story about the sick symbiosis developing between the authoritarian strains on both sides. If Trump wants to be a strongman threatening unfriendly newspapers with libel laws reshaped to make criticism of him a crime, then these campus protesters are the flip side. It reminds me of the way leftist protesters have begun targeting Trump rallies, deliberately baiting the sucker-punching brutes who are there to support Trump. This is happening because each side wants to be fighting the other, because the existence of the bad guys on the other side can be used to justify their own bad behavior.

But the universities have a 50-year head start in their slide into totalitarianism, and they have just taken a big leap downward in this race to the bottom.