By George Will
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
“There’s an old
adage about a vat of wine standing next to a vat of sewage. Add a cup of wine
to the sewage, and it is still sewage. But add a cup of sewage to the wine, and
it is no longer wine but sewage. Is this what Donald Trump has done to our
politics?”
— Martha Bayles, in
the Claremont Review of Books
Yes, as Republicans should remember when their convention
opens in less than a month, on the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s
disparagement of John McCain as unheroic because he was “captured.” McCain was
captured (with a broken leg and two broken arms) when North Vietnamese shot
down his plane. He chose extra years of torture, refusing to leave when his
torturers wanted to release him because he was an admiral’s son.
Trump says, however, that he, too, has been “very brave”
by ignoring the danger of venereal disease during his sexual adventures: “It is
a dangerous world out there — it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the
Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam, I feel like a great and very brave
soldier.” He was serious; irony is not in this narcissist’s repertoire. And
there is a reason why Britain’s staid Economist
magazine refers to Trump’s “look of a roué
gone to seed.”
“Every republic,” writes Charles Kesler, professor of
government at Claremont McKenna College, “eventually faces what might be called
the Weimar problem.” It arrives when a nation’s civic culture has become so
debased that the nation no longer has “the virtues necessary to sustain
republican government.” Do not dwell on what came after the Weimar republic. But
do consider the sufficiency of virtue that the Constitution’s Framers
presupposed.
Kesler recalls that James Madison’s notes on the
Constitutional Convention contain this from the July 17, 1787, debate on the
proposal to have presidents chosen by Congress: Rather than making the
president a “creature of the legislature,” Gouverneur Morris favored election
by the people. Rejecting the criticism that the people will be “uninformed,” he
said: “They will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character or
services; some man . . . of continental reputation.”
In Trump, Republicans have someone whose reputation is
continental only in being broadly known. He illustrates Daniel Boorstin’s
definition of a celebrity as someone well-known for his well-knownness. It will
be wonderful if Trump tries to translate notoriety into fulfillment of his vow
— as carefully considered as anything else about his candidacy — to carry New
York and California. He should be taunted into putting his meager campaign
funds where his ample mouth is. Every dime or day he squanders on those states
will contribute to a redemptive outcome, a defeat so humiliating — so
continental — that even Republicans will be edified by it.
Trump’s campaign has less cash ($1.3 million) than some
congressional candidates have, so Republican donors have never been more
important than they are at this moment. They can save their party by not aiding
its nominee.
Events already have called his bluff about funding
himself and thereby being uniquely his own man. His wealth is insufficient.
Only he knows what he is hiding by being the first presidential nominee in two
generations not to release his tax returns. It is reasonable to assume that the
returns would refute many of his assertions about his net worth, his
charitableness, and his supposed business wizardry. They might also reveal some
awkwardly small tax payments.
If his fear of speculation about his secrecy becomes
greater than his fear of embarrassment from what he is being secretive about,
he will release the returns. He should attach to them a copy of his University
of Pennsylvania transcript, to confirm his claim that he got the “highest
grades possible.” There are skeptics.
Various Republican moral contortionists continue their
semantic somersaults about “supporting” but not “endorsing” Trump. In
Cleveland, they will point him toward the highest elective office in a country
they profess to love but that he calls “a hellhole.” When asked in a 1990 Playboy interview about his historical
role models, he mentioned Winston Churchill but enthused about others who led
“the ultimate life”:
“I’ve always thought that Louis B. Mayer led the ultimate
life, that Flo Ziegfeld led the ultimate life, that men like Darryl Zanuck and
Harry Cohn did some creative and beautiful things. The ultimate job for me
would have been running MGM in the ’30s and ’40s — pre-television.” Yes, that
job, not the one he seeks.
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