Of Time and Trump

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time.

Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates on his schedule. In each one, we will see a geometric increase in attacks on Trump — all the more so if Carson or Kasich, or both, drop out, and the allotted debate time is split just three ways.

For the first time in the already too long series of debates, candidates descended to Trump’s brash style of street fighting. And they wounded him — not enough to seriously injure his candidacy, but enough for us to see how more of the same certainly might (and how more far earlier might have done so already).

The problem for Trump is not just that he cannot score points on ideas and so he monotonously strikes back with ad hominem slurs, but also that, off the cuff and in passing, he is capable of saying almost anything. Over two hours, those anythings — especially when they are windows into his past and his present values — finally add up.

So far Trump’s supporters have put up with his hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and unhinged statements — as if all that is felt to be a small price for hearing him pulverize Washington careerists, media flunkies, hypocritical grandees, and Republican sellouts. Americans are sick and tired of Black Lives Matter careerists and abject racists calling them racists, of wealthy apartheid liberals lecturing them about their white-privileged middle-class status, of crony green capitalists with huge carbon footprints, of hypocritical multimillionaire Malibu scolds, of the media hectoring the 52 percent who pay income taxes and canonizing the 48 percent who do not, of illegal aliens laying down to them a set of ultimatums while praising the country they were glad to leave and ankle-biting the one they want to stay in, of elites worrying more about the feelings of Islamic radicals than the terrorism that jihadists commit, and of our elected representatives borrowing more money for more government programs that make things far worse for everybody except those who run them.

If it is a choice between Washington Republicans’ sober and judicious tinkering and tsk-tsking on the one hand, and raw unadulterated anger on the other, the so-called base will choose the latter every time. The furious and fed-up may not like Trump’s cruelty, but the array of targets that he crudely lashes back at — John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Jeb Bush, the Pope, Vicente Fox — in their various ways themselves often are unpopular. When Vicente Fox cusses at Trump, when the Pope slyly questions his Christianity, when Megyn Kelly flirtatiously winks to her audience, when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat jokes about a possible Trump assassination, when the Chinese say they don’t welcome the idea of a Trump presidency, when a few screwball British members of Parliament dream of denying Trump entry into Britain — all of them only win Trump even more acclaim from hoi polloi.

In contrast, to a Trump supporter, the only real sin is a liberal and mean-spirited Trump. In the last debate Trump did not deny that he supported and gave money to John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 — and that he wanted a sitting Republican president, George W. Bush, impeached. That put him with the Michael Moore/Code Pink crowd. He said the same sort of thing in the previous debate when he suggested that Bush had cooked up the WMD threat to mislead Americans. He seemed a neo-Truther — in the manner of his earlier Obama-birther days — when he talked about what Bush should have known and done prior to 9/11.

Trump still thinks that Planned Parenthood is mostly a noble women’s health collective whose chief activities are diagnostic testing and medical referral for things like cancer, when it is in fact far more concerned with teenage contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, and, in good Margaret Sanger fashion, advocating and facilitating abortion — and its related dark trafficking in fetal tissues — without leaving budgetary footprints of just that. Trump’s idea of fixing Obamacare is a sort of Trumpcare, more efficiently run but equally intrusive. Trump’s notion of smaller government is suing more people for criticizing big names, and allowing the rich to confiscate other people’s property for “economic development.”

In the South Carolina debate, Trump loudly proclaimed that, while Saddam Hussein was “a bad guy,” nonetheless “he killed terrorists.” In fact, Saddam’s pre-invasion Iraq was a sanctuary for most of the world’s worst terrorists, from Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the engineers of the 1993 attempted World Trade Center bombing. Whom Saddam actually did kill was one million of his own people. Praising thugs like Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi is tricky business for Trump supporters: understandable if your crude point is that it is not worth our blood and treasure to knock off these rogues only to get chaos as a reward; creepy if you hint at a bit of admiration for their anti-American, murderous, taking-care-of-business personas.

In 2012 Trump blasted Mitt Romney’s notion of self-deportation as “mean” and “crazy”; in the South Carolina debate, he lauded just that approach as the cornerstone of his immigration policy. If voters are reminded clearly enough that a protectionist and immigration hawk hired illegal aliens and outsourced his product-line production to China, they will become accustomed to not liking it.

Trump is a smear addict. He is most riveting when ridiculing critics, but he must understand that slurs are his addiction. And one thing about addictions is that they eventually require greater doses to remain effective, even as they prove unsustainable both to the health of the addict and to the well-being of those around him.

So Trump needs to wrap up the primary race quickly, and with it the public occasions of his just being Trump. In the last debate, Cruz and Rubio ended an exchange or two with a snappy putdown, but Trump did so monotonously. Finally Trump’s same old, same old repartee of “Be quiet,” “You liar,” “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “Give me a break,” “You lose on everything,” “You’re a lousy businessman,” “He lied this time. He lied — 100 percent, 100 percent,” “You don’t know much. . . . You don’t know much. . . . You’re the basket case” gets, well, boring.

Trump needs to finish the last four debates in the fashion he did all the others except the last — and thereby delay, delay, delay audits of his integrity and ethics. He does not want to discuss his tax returns in the next two weeks precisely because it is likely that they will utterly destroy his three greatest boasts: He’s a “winner” because of his massive $10 billion worth; he works on behalf of vets and little guys, as is demonstrated by his “tremendous” philanthropy; he is a genuine populist who pays the same percentage on his income as does the carpet installer and the DMV clerk.

Nor does Trump want to make depositions in an ongoing civil suit about the alleged “waste, fraud, and abuse” at Trump University — any more than Hillary does about her actions as secretary of state. Currently, Trump boasts that he has almost no staff and not much of a budget; he will need both when the tsunami of opposition research finally washes over him.

But if Trump can snag the nomination in March or early April, and with it the machinery of the Republican establishment, then he will get airbrushed with endorsements and big money, as he turns his invective toward Hillary Clinton. An array of friendly party experts will comb his past to provide the usual contextualizations, half-truth defenses, and excuses of the sort Hillary has mastered in the last 20 years to explain away her serial lying and hypocrisies. In other words, get Trump through March with a hold on the nomination, and then his glaring flaws and abysmal record are reduced to “He may be a bastard but he’s our bastard,” or “Hillary does even worse stuff.”

In contrast, Rubio and Cruz must fight a rear-guard battle to draw the nomination out, pricking Trump with thousands of tiny bleeds without making a single gaffe of the sort that has plagued both. They must remind Trump enthusiasts ad nauseam that their leader was until very recently a pro-abortion John Kerry liberal. Trump’s populism is in part a meaner version of Ross Perot’s, and in part a more liberal combination of Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rubio and Cruz need to survive long enough to get Kasich and Carson out of the race, and then start seeing 33 percent/33 percent/33 percent polls, which will work against Trump by leading to the obvious corollary that 33 + 33 > 33.

Trump has to wrap up these primaries so that when his supporters finally tire of his smears and untruths, when the Clinton slime machine thinks it’s time to ignore Sanders and start on Trump, and when his tax returns and an array of lawsuits hit the fan, he is not just Trump the flash-in-the-pan expendable buffoon, but the Honorable Donald J. Trump, Republican nominee for president of the United States.

If he cannot secure the nomination early this spring, it will likely go to Cruz or Rubio.

The Way Back from Liberalism

By Matt Patterson

Friday, February 26, 2016

The inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is perfectly explicable if you accept the following: The Republican party has failed.

Since the New Deal, there have been six Republican presidents. But Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes all failed to stop the growth of government. In fact, most of the Republican presidents since FDR have been willing and enthusiastic co-conspirators in the care and overfeeding of our government behemoth.

The federal government has now taken over one-sixth of the U.S. economy and stands in direct or indirect control of the entire health and finance sectors. The government knows who you are, where you live, and how much you make, and it can take whatever it wants from your paycheck before you even see it, thanks to the original Big Brother, Social Security.

Let us remember, the Founding Fathers set the Colonies ablaze over the most trifling of taxes. Indeed, the men who founded our republic were perfectly willing to die — and kill — over far, far lesser offenses than the modern American suffers daily.

That can only mean that conservative thinkers have failed to make the case to Americans that government is not the answer to our problems. Politicians of both parties know this, and so merely and justifiably give the people what they want.

Strategically speaking, the failure stems from two disastrous abdications. First, and particularly devastating, starting in the late 1960s conservatives surrendered academia wholesale to liberals, who are now in virtually total control of the education of our children, from kindergarten to university.

Second, the Right completely abandoned entertainment and the arts, which are often wrongly viewed by conservatives as frivolities, diversions to pass the time, something to look down upon. But it has always been through art that ideas, both large and small, both profane and sacred, are spread and absorbed.

Liberals, on the other hand, lost no time in making the most of their extraordinary coups in education and the arts. They knew the value of what they had captured.

Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals moved from academia into a cloistered think-tank world where people who already agree with one another write papers and give talks for their colleagues, while the rest of the nation goes to the movies and downloads favorite songs and shows — which contain the ideas and values of the liberals who made them.

It wasn’t always thus. Our greatest political figure was an artist who understood the power of his medium and its ability to shape thought. He used his knowledge of stagecraft and the psychological acumen his profession gave him to outwit his counterparts in the Soviet Union.

Reagan may be our last great politician, and our last great thinker. His long career as an artist was instrumental in preparing him for both roles. And yet, how many young conservatives these days long for a career onstage or onscreen? How many young conservatives long to be, and are encouraged to be, painters, novelists, poets, filmmakers, comedians? Instead, young conservatives flock to the Imperial Capital in droves looking to score internships at think tanks, in conservative media, and on Capitol Hill. The lucky ones will get jobs in these places — and change the culture not one little bit.

But imagine if a young conservative stays in her home state upon graduation and writes short fiction revealing the evils of Big Government in a new and entertaining way.

Perhaps our hypothetical young conservative will suffer a lifetime of impoverishment, as most writers do. But if she dedicates her life to her art and produces something beautiful in her course, she will be worth 10,000 D.C. interns.

Reagan was an artist. Not a great one, as he would have been the first to admit. But that is hardly the point. Reagan understood intellectually and intuitively that art shapes belief systems in ways both obvious and subtle. And he was quite open about his actor’s training and its usefulness to him in a myriad of ways. Once, when he was asked how an actor could be president, Reagan responded that he didn’t see how anyone could be president without that training.

The point is this: Those trained to express themselves in artistic media are trained necessarily to communicate feelings and ideas, to move emotions from one heart to another, to transmit ideas from one brain to another, via a page, a screen, a canvas.

Smart politicians have always known this. When a young Roman named Octavian became the first emperor a couple of decades before the birth of Christ, this ruthless political genius immediately began co-opting Rome’s great writers for the imperial cause.

Octavian, whom history knows as Augustus, knew that his new regime needed the hearts and minds of the people, and knew that the best and fastest way to those hearts was poetry. Hence, the poet Virgil was commissioned to write an epic history of Rome, culminating in the glorious and heaven-sanctioned rule of the Caesars. The result was the Aeneid, one of the great imaginative achievements of all time.

Today there is a veritable cottage industry of conservatives complaining about American culture.

If a fraction of these complainers ever decided to make something besides a blog post or a television rant, they would do more good for the culture than they could possibly imagine. Don’t like the quality of Hollywood films? Go to film school. And — even more important — encourage your children to do likewise.

It is the same with education. How many young politically active conservatives want to be kindergarten teachers or university professors? To ask the question is to answer it. And why not? True, there is no money in the gig, and yet, few professions are as rewarding as teaching. And few do more to shape the future.

So conservatives go to business school, or join the Washington D.C. career conveyor belt, becoming yet another cog in the vast machine that is grinding the blood from our people. For liberals it is the exact opposite. Liberal artists and educators pass their love for these noble pursuits on to their children and their students.

Pick up any textbook in any grade school in this country and you will find it loaded with liberal assumptions, myths, and lies. Conservative parents complain about this, but what do they expect? The teachers and administrators are all liberals for one very important reason: Liberals value education as a way of life. And they are right to do so.

As with art and culture, education is something that is made. The stunning failure of conservatives to see the value in making and contributing to art and education is perhaps the primary cause of our current politically debased condition.

My advice to conservatives: Make something. Fiction, verse, art, film. Make something beautiful that justifies its own existence, and, if you love liberty, that love will automatically become a part of that justification, whether obvious or not.

And whether obvious or not, that love will seep through the words or images, and may just stain some other heart.

It is the only way back.

From Obama to Trump

By Ross Douthat

Saturday, February 27, 2016

The spectacle of the Republican Party’s Trumpian meltdown has inspired a mix of glee and fear among liberals — glee over their rivals’ self-immolation, and fear that what arises from the destruction will be worse.

What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.

Such a recognition wouldn’t require letting the Republican Party off the hook. The Trump uprising is first and foremost a Republican and conservative problem: There would be no Trumpism if George W. Bush’s presidency hadn’t cratered, no Trumpism if the party hadn’t alternated between stoking and ignoring working-class grievances, no Trump as front-runner if the party leadership and his rivals had committed fully to stopping him before now.

But Trumpism is also a creature of the late Obama era, irrupting after eight years when a charismatic liberal president has dominated the cultural landscape and set the agenda for national debates. President Obama didn’t give us Trump in any kind of Machiavellian or deliberate fashion. But it isn’t an accident that this is the way the Obama era ends — with a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.

First, the reality TV element in Trump’s campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008. Presidential politics has long had an escalating celebrity component, a cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time. But the first Obama campaign raised the bar. The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric, the Great Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and Will.i.am music video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance — it was presidential politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie’s Oscar campaign.

And it worked. But because it worked, now we have the nearly-inevitable next step: presidential politics as a season of “Survivor” or, well, “The Apprentice,” with the same celebrity factor as Obama’s ’08 run, but with his campaign’s high-middlebrow pretensions stripped away. If Obama proved that you can run a presidential campaign as an aspirational cult of personality, in which a Sarah Silverman endorsement counts for as much as a governor or congressman’s support, Trump is proving that you don’t need Silverman to shout “the Aristocrats!” and have people eat it up.

He’s also proving, in his bullying, overpromising style, that voters are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial presidency — which is also a trend that Obama’s choices have accelerated. Having once campaigned against his predecessor’s power grabs, the current president has expanded executive authority along almost every dimension: launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress.

In the process, he’s cut the legs from under principled liberal critiques of executive power, and weakened the American left’s role as a bulwark against Caesarism. Which makes it altogether fitting — if deeply unfortunate — that his reward is the rise of a right-wing Caesarist whose authoritarian style and outrageous promises makes George W. Bush look like Cato the Younger.

And that Caesarist, crucially, is rallying a constituency that once swung between the parties, but that the Obama White House has spent the last eight years slowly writing off. Trump’s strongest supporters aren’t archconservatives; they’re white working-class voters, especially in the Rust Belt and coal country, who traditionally leaned Democratic and still favor a strong welfare state.

These voters had been drifting away from the Democratic Party since the 1970s, but Obama has made moves that effectively slam the door on them: His energy policies, his immigration gambits, his gun control push, his shift to offense on same-sex marriage and abortion. It was possible to be a culturally conservative skeptic of mass immigration in the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. Not so anymore.

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Of course this process has been a two-way street, as bigotry inclined some of these voters against Obama from the start, or encouraged them to think the worst of him eventually. And political coalitions shift all the time: There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Obama White House’s decision that a more ethnically diverse and thoroughgoingly liberal coalition held more promise than continued efforts to keep Reagan Democrats in the fold. (Though Democrats in Congress and statehouses might be forgiven for doubting the decision.)

But liberalism still needs to reckon with the consequences. As in Europe, when the left gives up on nationalism and lets part of its old working class base float away, the result is a hard-pressed constituency unmoored from either party, and nursing well-grounded feelings of betrayal.

Hence Marine Le Pen and the nationalist parties of Europe. And hence, now, Donald Trump.

He is the Republican Party’s monster, yes. But what he represents is also part of the Obama legacy — a nemesis for liberal follies as well as conservative corruptions, and a threat to both traditions for many years to come.

An Open Letter to Super Tuesday Voters

By David French

Monday, February 29, 2016

John Adams was right. “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.” On Tuesday, you have an opportunity to demonstrate the character of the American people. In our nation’s most religious region — in the party where most of the Christian voters are concentrated — it is now up to you to demonstrate that your commitment to character and integrity and truth itself is more important to you than your rage and frustration. And that means rejecting Donald Trump.

The only thing that you can trust about Trump is his willingness to say and do whatever he needs to gain and hold power. Do you think that he’s strong on illegal immigration — that you can trust him to build a wall, to preserve our nation’s borders, and to protect American workers? This is his principal issue, but he’s a hypocrite. He’s hired foreign workers rather than Americans, he’s hired illegal aliens at his construction projects, and he’s in favor of touch-back amnesty — in which vast numbers of illegal aliens will be granted lawful status if they just leave and come back.

If you are a Christian voter, you cannot possibly believe that Trump will protect life. He actually said during a Republican debate that Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things.” Yet Planned Parenthood engages in the mass murder of unborn children, killing hundreds of thousands of babies each and every year. Trump has pledged to keep sending them the millions of taxpayer dollars that help keep that vile organization alive.

Moreover, Trump would subvert the honor of the American military. He has said repeatedly that he would use the awesome power of the American armed forces to kill terrorists’ families. The American warrior is trained to protect innocent women and children from the world’s most evil men. Seal Team Six is not a mafia hit squad, primed to assassinate eight-year-olds and their mothers at schools and playgrounds.

He knows absolutely nothing about military strategy. He openly admires strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and he even complimented Saddam Hussein as a man who “killed terrorists.” Hussein was a terrorist. He funded a deadly suicide-bombing campaign against Israel, sheltered the world’s most wanted jihadists, supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and tried to kill President George H. W. Bush. Indeed, Hussein’s polices and program of “Islamization” laid the groundwork for ISIS.

Ominously, Trump has gathered behind him a swarm of white supremacists and assorted online racists — people who are known for flooding the comment boards and Twitter feeds of dissenting writers with the most vile forms of racial bigotry and hatred, attacking even children as “mud people” or “monkeys.” Yet Trump has played a double game — sometimes denouncing white supremacists, sometimes equivocating, and sometimes even retweeting white supremacists and fascist propaganda.

Trump is not only unrepentant about his many affairs, he’s bragged that “beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names.”

America is facing its Romans 1 moment. Claiming to be wise, we are becoming fools. Millions of Americans admire Trump not because he is good but merely because he is “strong” or he’ll “kick ass” (to quote one Trump supporter I talked to last week). But here are some words the Apostle Paul used to describe the citizens of a godless age: “insolent,” “haughty,” “boastful,” “faithless,” “heartless,” and “ruthless.” These words read like a Trump personality profile. Moreover, the great sins of that age included not just indulging in those vices but also “giving approval to those who practice them.”

There was a time when I was more amused than appalled by Trump. There was a time when I believed that his disregard for political correctness could have some positive side effects. Those days are long past. The crucible of the campaign has revealed him to be petty, malicious, and vindictive. He isn’t as bad as his critics feared — he’s worse. But the most disturbing thing isn’t that Trump exists — cruel and ambitious charlatans will always be among us — it’s that millions of Americans are embracing him because of his cruelty, because of his malice.

If Trump prevails, we will be left with both great American political parties celebrating and exalting people who personify the worst of values. The Democrats, of course, offer no moral refuge. Hillary Clinton’s personal corruption is matched only by her boundless ambition, and she is completely committed to not just preserving the atrocity of abortion on demand but subsidizing it with taxpayer dollars.

I began by quoting one Founding Father. Let me end by quoting another. Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Trump is running not for president of a constitutional republic but to be the strongman of a failing state. A virtuous people would stop him in his tracks. But are we a virtuous people? Tuesday will help tell the answer.