Conservatism

Donald Trump: It Doesn’t Get Better

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Donald Trump Obama ISIS

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There is no second, deeper layer to Donald Trump. Contrary to what we were promised by Trump’s apologists, what you see is what you get.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that when it comes to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign there is no higher gear after all, and there will be no pivot towards a more serious, substantial candidacy.

As the New York Times reports, this is as good as it gets:

Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.

In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.

He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.

But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.

He is routinely preoccupied with perceived slights, for example raging to aides after Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, in his re-election announcement, said he would stand up to the next president regardless of party. In a visit to Capitol Hill in early July, Mr. Trump bickered with two Republican senators who had not endorsed him; he needled Representative Peter T. King of New York for having taken donations from him over the years only to criticize him on television now.

And Mr. Trump has begun to acknowledge to associates and even in public that he might lose. In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, he said he was prepared to face defeat.

“I’ll just keep doing the same thing I’m doing right now,” he said. “And at the end, it’s either going to work, or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice, long vacation.”

Already the excuses are being made – Trump roars to his supporters that the only way he can possibly lose the election is if Hillary Clinton cheats, thus helping to ensure that the stench of his candidacy will live on in bitterness and distrust even after November when he has flounced back to Mar-a-Lago.

Not that Trump’s advisers are brimming full of their own wisdom:

Charles R. Black Jr., an influential Republican lobbyist supporting Mr. Trump, said the campaign was in a continuing struggle to tame him.

“He has three or four good days and then makes another gaffe,” Mr. Black said. “Hopefully, he can have some more good days.” Of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Mr. Black said, “They think he is making progress in terms of being able to make set speeches and not take the bait on every attack somebody makes on him.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers now hope to steady him by pairing him on the trail with familiar, more seasoned figures — people he views as peers and enjoys spending time with, like former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.

Oh good. So lots more pictures of Donald Trump being introduced by an increasingly doddery-looking Grandpa Simpson Rudolph Giuliani, with his frightened shouting about someone taking away his America, played to a soundtrack of Mike Huckabee’s Christian social conservatism. That’ll really persuade wavering Democrats and America’s undecided middle.

But it’s okay – Donald Trump’s family have a hand on the campaign tiller:

Mr. Trump’s reliance on his family has only grown more pronounced. Mr. Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who has no background in politics, has expanded his role: He now has broad oversight over areas including the campaign’s budget, messaging and strategy, with the power to approve spending. Mr. Trump has also continued to seek advice from Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager whom Mr. Trump ousted in June at his children’s urging.

At this rate it is only a matter of time before Trump announces that Ivanka is his pick for Secretary of Defence. Why not, at this point?

And so the man who recently bragged that he could be “so presidential” that it would make us all bored is proving beyond all doubt that he can do no such thing. Donald Trump does not have a more serious side. The oafish blowhard who takes pride in being simultaneously ignorant and needlessly offensive wasn’t putting on a clever act specifically designed to capture the GOP nomination – that’s just who he is.

It’s not that Trump chooses not to surprise everyone and confound expectations by playing the policy wonk and actually taking the time to read up on issues before running his mouth off on live television – it’s that he is physically incapable of being a mature, intellectually curious potential leader, even if he wanted to be. And even when despairing aides hold their make-or-break “interventions” in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow, Trump simply smiles and nods, and two days later he is off the Teleprompter again, picking another unwinnable fight or pursuing one of his many personal vendettas.

So more of the same then, from now until November. The Republicans had better hope that there is an entire army of low-information, first time voters willing to put on pants and leave the couch for the first time in 30 years to vote for their man, because otherwise Hillary Clinton will be taking the oath of office on January 20th.

 

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Donald Trump, The Republican Fringe And Their ‘Second Amendment Remedies’

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Donald Trump is not the first politician to invoke the Second Amendment as a potential tool for remedying grievances

From all of the media outrage, one would think that Donald Trump is the first major political candidate to ever hint at encouraging an armed uprising – that we are somehow in entirely unprecedented territory for a major party candidate to talk this way.

This is what Donald Trump actually said earlier this week:

“Hillary wants to abolish – essentially abolish – the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick – if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump’s apologists, including the increasingly unbearable Rudy Giuliani, leapt to their man’s defence, insisting that Trump was referring to the unified power of pro-2A lobbying efforts and the combined political might of gun owners. This is – how best to put it – a bold faced lie. If Trump was speaking about political activism he wouldn’t have said “maybe there is”. He would have issued a much stronger, more ringing call to arms, and probably specifically name checked the National Rifle Association while doing so.

Everybody knows that the NRA and allied Second Amendment supporters can muster a strong political campaign in support of gun rights – Trump’s “maybe” clearly refers to something else, something left unsaid but which no serious person can reasonably doubt (whether the suggested target is Hillary Clinton or her judicial picks).

It is sad to see Tim Stanley, whose American political commentary is usually so on the money, accepting this weakest of excuses:

Second, some people seem to want to condemn Trump for things he did not say. This is unnecessary: there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike him without having to make more up. Trump did not say, for instance, that gun rights people should shoot Hillary Clinton to save the Constitution – he actually said that second amendment fans should lobby her to stop her unbalancing the Supreme Court.

Nope. No no no. That isn’t what Trump said at all (ironic, considering the thrust of Stanley’s point was criticising people who put words into the mouths of political candidates). If Trump wanted to make the point that Tim Stanley makes, he could have uttered words to that very effect. But he didn’t. We can be charitable and assume that Trump was joking when he made his comments, but what we cannot do is pretend that he meant something innocuous when the ominous suggestion was clearly left hanging open.

Besides which, Donald Trump knew exactly how his remarks would be interpreted and picked up by the media. He doesn’t find himself topping the news headlines every day by some quirk of chance – he deliberately says things and does things, knowing that they will be interpreted a certain way while still leaving himself just enough wriggle room to claim plausible deniability.

In this parallel universe, Trump didn’t mean to suggest that Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly was menstruating when he talked about “blood coming out of her…wherever”, he was going to say “nose” but couldn’t be bothered to finish his own sentence. He wasn’t really imitating a disabled reporter, he was just indulging in general mockery. This remark is just the latest in a litany of similar under-the-radar provocations.

But does this latest statement from Trump amount to “fighting words”, or a clear call to violence? No – and those authoritarian critics shrieking for Trump to be interrogated by the FBI (as though he is seriously hatching assassination plots) or thrown in prison need to go away and take a good long look at themselves. One can (and should) defend Trump’s technical right to skirt the line between passionate rhetoric and dog whistle politics while still abhorring his behaviour; not everything we despise should automatically be illegal.

(Reading online comments, one is also struck by the number of people who openly yearned for somebody to assassinate Donald Trump who are now clutching their pearls at Trump’s own casual allusion to violence).

Besides, the Republicans have form when it comes to this type of behaviour. This is why the current GOP elites who reach for the smelling salts every time Donald Trump says something inflammatory have no right to be shocked, because they are guilty of presiding over the dramatic increase in GOP craziness over the past eight years, mistakenly thinking that whipping people into an unthinking frenzy would offer them a short cut back to power.

Case in point, here is former Republican senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, fighting a tough senate race against Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid, playing to the Tea Party crowd back in 2010:

 

This is what Sharron Angle says about the Democratic-controlled Senate and her opponent Harry Reid:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. In fact you know, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years. I hope that’s not where we are going, but, you know, if this, this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? And I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out. 

What Trump is saying is nothing new, and nothing surprising about the morally debased Republican Party.

The only difference is that six years ago, they were funding and supporting a senatorial candidate in Nevada whom the majority of people nationwide and worldwide were paying no attention to. Now their ultra high-profile presidential nominee is saying the same things and they suddenly find it uncomfortable. Why? Because the GOP is willing to indulge in scummy behaviour when they think that nobody will notice, but get visibly upset when they are caught doing the same thing in the media glare of a presidential election.

So has this episode taught us anything new about Donald Trump, about the Republican Party or about this presidential election? No, it has not. We already knew that Donald Trump is a man who believes that any publicity, including (or especially) the screeching condemnation of the establishment media, is good publicity. We already knew that the Republican Party routinely trawls for votes by pretending that the Second Amendment itself is teetering on some kind of precipice when it clearly is not. And we already knew that this depressing presidential election comes down to a question of temperament.

And that question is as follows: Do the American people want as their leader and as the commander-in-chief of their mighty armed forces somebody willing to jokingly hint that “Second Amendment people” should take unspecified action against his political opponent (who, let’s face it, is so centrist and focus group led that she would never dream of touching the Second Amendment as long as there are votes to be lost by doing so) in order to protect their gun rights from a largely nonexistent threat?

In these highly charged times, when somebody not so smart and not in on the joke could easily miss the nuance and take the political rhetoric very literally, is suggesting that “maybe there is” something that Second Amendment people can do to protect their rights from a nonexistent threat a responsible way for a presidential candidate to behave?

Nobody is suggesting that the Donald Trump or the Republican Party actually want a lone wolf Second Amendment fanatic to take the defence of the Constitution into their own hands and start taking pot shots at Hillary Clinton or her potential judicial nominees. But the Republican Party does have a tawdry recent history of trawling for votes among people  who would heartily approve of such a course of action – always with just wiggle room in the comments to allow plausible deniability when called out.

At this point, nobody expects any better from Trump himself. But some of those politicians and commentators now leaping to his defence have reputations which presumably they would like to maintain beyond this presidential election cycle.

They should think on that the next time Donald Trump says or does something appalling.

 

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This Weak Conservative Government Refuses To Get Tough With The Unions

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Southern Rail Isnt Working

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When even staunch New Labour grandee and columnist John McTernan thinks the Tories are behaving like a weaker version of the Labour Party, British conservatism is in real trouble

As the RMT union’s strike on Southern Rail enters its third consecutive day, inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of commuters while a dithering Tory-lite government watches on, wringing its hands, former New Labour political adviser John McTernan uses his Telegraph column to tear into the Conservative Party.

McTernan writes:

We are in the middle of a five-day rail strike on Southern Rail. Commuters are being massively disrupted. And this is just the latest stage in a dispute in which the Luddite RMT union has made it clear that it is fully committed to fighting against the future.

What about the Government? Where are they in this dispute. It is a crystallisation if all their key themes: investment, modernisation, innovation and productivity. But they are silent.

Well not quite. What we have actually seen is the resignation of the then rail minister Claire Perry, who said:  “I am often ashamed to be the Rail Minister.” And so she should have been – just for her pathetic capitulation to the RMT. This, of course, is just what you would have expected from a Miliband government; but this is a Tory government, with a majority.

There is a famous scene in The West Wing episode about President Bartlet appointing a member of the Supreme Court. He meets Justice Joseph Crouch, whose retirement creates the vacancy, and is angrily addressed by Crouch: “I wanted to retire five years ago. Five years. But I waited for a Democrat. Instead I got you.” The Southern Rail dispute is just like that. Commuters in the Home Counties could be forgiven for thinking: “I waited 23 years for a majority Tory government. Instead I got you.” Where are the core Tory values? Where is the support for management’s right to manage?

This is utterly stunning criticism – shocking not only because it is self-evidently true (the Conservatives in government are a shadow of their glorious best under Margaret Thatcher) but because they are now so bad at governing in a conservative fashion that it has fallen to a former New Labour apparatchik to set them straight.

Why on earth has it fallen to a Labour Party grandee to inveigh against the more militant trades union? Where is the useless europhile Greg Clark, supposedly Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy during this whole dispute? Where is Chris Grayling, Transport Secretary? Have they all taken lessons from their new boss in the art of disappearing and avoiding the media during scandals affecting their ministerial briefs?

This criticism is particularly damning:

Where are the core Tory values? Where is the support for management’s right to manage?

Where indeed. This blog has wondered the same thing, as the Tories in government behaved like centralising statists, presided over an unprecedented weakening of our national defence, dithered over the housing crisis, failed to get to grips with the nation’s finances, alienated principled conservatives, and as the leader of a supposedly eurosceptic party did all he could to cheat his way to victory for the Remain camp in the EU referendum. Where are the core Tory values?

A Thatcherite government would have stood boldly on the side of consumers over producers, and thus would have been unafraid to plant its flag squarely in the same corner as Southern Rail’s unfortunate commuters. And unlike the Cameron approach to industrial disputes (seemingly applying maximum pressure on businesses to capitulate to union demands, as seen with the London Tube strikes) a Thatcherite government would have recognised the offensive absurdity of the union demands and unashamedly sided against them.

Needless to say, we do not have a Thatcherite government – despite all of the ingredients being in place for another properly ideological right wing government to flourish. The left-wing opposition is hopelessly divided. The Conservatives are under new leadership for the first time in a decade. Boundary review looks set to help the Tories by correcting decades-old biases in favour of Labour, potentially gifting the Tories tens of additional seats. All of these factors stand ready and waiting to be exploited by a radical Conservative government which understands that it has a duty to do more than hold power for the sake of it.

And yet at every turn, the Tories triangulate and tack to the centre. They did so under coalition government (when they had a modicum of an excuse) and they continue to do so now, when they have none. Right now, there is effectively no opposition. A conservative government right now could make a fair stab at privatising pensions and the NHS, and still not be forced out of office so long as the Corbynite and centrist wings of the Labour Party continue their childish tussle for power. The political landscape is ripe for a radical conservative reduction and reshaping of the state, yet there is almost zero evidence that Theresa May’s government intends to attempt any such bold enterprise.

And for what? Will being a centrist clone of New Labour win the Tories any new fans? Of course not. The swivel-eyed Left have long ago convinced themselves that all Tories are “evil” and “vermin”, no matter what they actually do in government.

https://twitter.com/MomentumRugby/status/763072811627872256

We shall win no new fans by trying to adopt the cuddly persona of a young Tony Blair. We will never be liked. Therefore we should focus on being effective, without giving a second thought to winning over the admiration and votes of people who have been raised since birth to despise us. That’s what Margaret Thatcher taught us. And that is the lesson which we seem determined to cast aside in our feverish pursuit of the focus group’s favour.

John McTernan’s quote from The West Wing is very apt. Many conservatives have indeed been waiting for years – since Margaret Thatcher was forced from office, in fact – for another strong Tory leader; somebody committed to conservative, small government principles and willing to fight for them.

Conservatives waited thirteen long years of New Labour government only to get David Cameron. We then endured six years of Cameronism before being presented with the authoritarian Theresa May, foisted on the party in the confused wake of the EU referendum. And whatever electoral success Theresa May enjoys, she may well end up being every bit as much of an ideological disappointment as her predecessor.

But maybe this criticism is premature. Maybe the autumn Conservative Party conference will give birth to a conservative policy platform actually worth voting for. And to be fair to the new prime minister, even Margaret Thatcher bottled her first confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers, staging a tactical retreat before coming back to finish the job in 1984-85.

But right now, British conservatives are in the ludicrous and humiliating position of being upbraided by a Labour Party grandee – someone from the party of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith, for heaven’s sake – for being insufficiently dedicated to conservative principles.

And when it falls to Tony Blair’s right hand man to tell the Tories how to get tough with the unions, something is clearly rotten with the state of British conservatism.

 

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Paul Ryan Must Disassociate Himself From Donald Trump And Allow Other Republicans To Do The Same

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Donald Trump - Paul Ryan - GOP - Republican Party - 2

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The Republican Party created Donald Trump. Then they were conquered by Donald Trump. Then they embraced Donald Trump. Now they own Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and every wretched thing that goes with it

Apparently Paul Ryan, feeling understandably spurned by Donald Trump’s haughty refusal to endorse his primary re-election campaign and pushed to despair by the GOP nominee’s decision to get into an unwinnable mud fight with grieving gold star parents, is now trying to create some distance between himself and his party’s emotionally unstable nominee.

From The Hill:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday warned that his endorsement of Donald Trump shouldn’t be seen as a blank check.

“If I hear things that I think are wrong, I’m not going to sit by and say nothing, because I think I have a duty as a Republican leader to defend Republican principles and our party’s brand if I think they’re being distorted,” Ryan told Green Bay’s WTAQ radio.

Asked whether there are situations that could cause him to withdraw his support of Trump for president, Ryan responded, “of course there are.”

“I’m not going to get into the speculation or hypotheticals. None of these things are ever blank checks. That goes with any situation in any kind of race. But right now, he won the thing fair and square,” Ryan said.

One can understand the impulse within Paul Ryan to engage in these dignity-saving manoeuvrings. But he should not be allowed to get away with them. Any Republican who threw their arms around Donald Trump or who spoke in his favour at the at the Republican National Convention has inextricably yoked their political souls to that most profoundly unconservative of candidates. And having made their bed with Trump they must now be lashed to it, even as that bed careens down a hill and over the edge of a cliff.

I like Paul Ryan. His blend of ideological zeal (he used to make his interns read Atlas Shrugged) and governing pragmatism appeals to this blog. He isn’t perfect, but he makes the statist, Coke Zero Conservatives in charge of Britain look like Vladimir Lenin.

But you don’t mess around with a systemic threat like Donald Trump. This blog is not against populists in general – heck, I even voted UKIP in the 2015 general election in despair at the socialist Conservatives and in grudging admiration of Nigel Farage’s political courage (if not his more offensive statements). But Donald Trump is no Nigel Farage. Trump has no history (or interest) in public service. Trump is supremely indifferent about policy matters. And if you thought that UKIP’s stubborn belief that leaving the EU would make everything wonderful was simplistic, it becomes the very picture of nuance compared to Donald Trump’s one-dimensional plan to Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan decided to hitch his wagon to the Trump train. True, he did not create Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate Edition – that dubious honour lies with Republicans like Mitch McConnell who helped set the Republicans’ implacable tone of opposition to President Obama, and to the crazier/birther element of the Tea Party who legitimised the hysterical conspiracy theorising in which Donald Trump specialises. But faced with a victorious Trump in the GOP primaries, Paul Ryan bestowed the Republican Party’s official seal of honour on Trump, bestowing on him the imprimatur which allows Trump to claim with a straight face to speak for American conservatives.

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is having none of Paul Ryan’s evasions either:

1. If he has to constantly step forward protect the GOP “brand,” Trump is therefore a threat to it. Ryan acknowledges Trump has been distorting the party’s principles. Ryan’s ongoing support thus contradicts his stated intent to protect the GOP.

2. If attacking a Gold Star family, inviting Russia to meddle in our election and launching a racist attack on a federal judge are not grounds for pulling support, it is fair to ask if Ryan has any “red line.” It’s not a hypothetical; it’s a statement of his current principles.

3. Winning “fair and square” has nothing to do with Ryan’s continued support. As he said, things can change, and Trump surely has gotten worse since he sewed up the nomination. Moreover, it is Ryan’s obligation to provide voters with his own, independent judgment. That’s what all elected officials should do, but it seems a basic requirement for leaders.

4. Ryan’s continued support for Trump in order to provide cover for his members (“defend Republicans”), which one can surmise is one reason he continues this excruciating contortionist act, is deeply misguided. Trump is losing nationally by a lot. He’s losing in critical states where there are at-risk members of Congress. Rather than tying their fate and the fate of his majority to Trump, Ryan should be telling every member that we are in extraordinary times, when endorsing the presidential candidate is not a requirement of being a Republican in good standing.

And concludes:

It’s very likely Ryan and other Republicans thought they’d tepidly nominate Trump, keep the election close and thereby save some GOP seats. It has turned out differently, as Trump has repeatedly embarrassed the party and attempted to humiliate Ryan and other leaders. You cannot fine-tune the electorate such that you can bank on losing but not by too much. In the case of Trump, once the American people get a look behind the curtain and recognize what they are dealing with, a runaway election becomes entirely possible. Support for Trump then becomes an anchor around the ankles of Republicans — not to mention a source of nonstop intellectual and ethical stress for Ryan. Perhaps in the weeks to come, he will see that.

Paul Ryan’s dilemma is a microcosm of the entire establishment Republican Party’s dilemma. Do they denounce their own presidential candidate and squander whatever slim chance they have of winning the White House (assuming they actually want to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office)? Or do they squander what intellectual and moral credibility they have left and stand by their man?

In these unprecedented times, this blog believes that Republican politicians should have absolutely no compunction about abandoning a presidential candidate who offers at best a grotesque pastiche of conservatism, and disassociating themselves from Donald Trump. If it leads to a grassroots backlash and future GOP primary battles, so be it. The poison coursing through the Republican Party must be drawn one way or another. Best do it now. And assuming a Clinton victory in November, they will have every chance of a Republican landslide in the 2018 midterms and retaking the White House in 2020.

At present, however, most Republicans seem to be operating under the assumption that Trump is a nightmarish aberration, and that things will simply go back to normal once he has left the scene. This is not so. Trumpism will require defeating, not by condescending attacks on his supporters or with barrels of Koch money, but rather by the patient and charismatic advancing of the small government principles which represent the GOP at its best.

Here’s the rub, though: only those Republicans untainted by association with Donald Trump’s experiment in angry, illiterate populism will have the credibility to do the rebuilding. Paul Ryan should have been one of the rebuilders. He may just still qualify, if – and it is a big “if” – he puts his responsibility to the country ahead of his responsibility to guide the GOP’s short term electoral success.

But right now, the Speaker of the House is awkwardly straddling two sides, displeasing both the loyal Trumpists and the principled conservatives-in-exile. If Paul Ryan is to fulfil his potential he needs to stop being arbitrator-in-chief between the Republican Party’s warring factions, pick a side and become a belated profile in courage instead.

 

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Donald Trump: Thin-Skinned, Childish Egomaniac Or Underestimated Political Genius? I Think We Have Our Answer

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Ghazala Khan - DNC - Donald Trump

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There are populist politicians, and then there are petty egomaniacs with borderline personality disorders. Donald Trump is the latter.

Donald Trump is either a completely dangerous and unpredictable loose cannon or he is the most gifted and fearless political strategist to come along in a century. Those are the only possibly explanations for Trump’s bizarre, sometimes refreshing but usually appallingly crass behaviour over the course of the presidential campaign so far.

But with every passing day, the accumulated evidence suggests that in Donald Trump we are dealing not with a malevolent genius but rather a loose cannon candidate, out of his depth and flying by the seat of his pants.

At a time when Trump most needs to pivot toward the wider electorate after the Republican National Convention, why else deliberately bring on five consecutive days of wrenchingly bad press coverage by picking a fight with the grieving gold star parents of a fallen Muslim American military hero? Why the constant, juvenile need to have the last word with every single public argument he gets into, no matter the prominence (or lack of prominence) of his adversary?

Robert Kagan asks the same question in the Washington Post:

Many of Trump’s supporters admire him for his bold challenge to political correctness. But his political incorrectness may be only an unintended side effect of his malady. Some of the insults he fires back at his critics are politically incorrect: the racist and misogynist taunts. But others are just childish: making fun of someone’s height, or suggesting that someone’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. It’s not really politically incorrect to say that a prisoner of war is not a hero because he got captured. It’s just a way of saying, I don’t care if you’re a war hero. You criticized me and now I’ve got to hit you. Trump’s insults are scattershot — only sometimes touching the raw racist and xenophobic nerves in society. The most important fact is that he is unable to control his responses to criticism. He must double down every time, even if it means digging himself deeper and deeper into the hole.

Imagine such a person as president. What we have seen in the Trump campaign is not only a clever method of stirring up the anger in people. It is also a personality defect that has had the effect of stirring up anger. And because it is a defect and not a tactic, it would continue to affect Trump’s behavior in the White House. It would determine how he dealt with other nations. It would determine how he dealt with critics at home. It would determine how he governed, how he executed the laws, how he instructed the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies under his command, how he dealt with the press, how he dealt with the opposition party and how he handled dissent within his own party. His personality defect would be the dominating factor in his presidency, just as it has been the dominating factor in his campaign. His ultimately self-destructive tendencies would play out on the biggest stage in the world, with consequences at home and abroad that one can barely begin to imagine. It would make him the closest thing the United States has ever had to a dictator, but a dictator with a dangerously unstable temperament that neither he nor anyone else can control.

This blog has no time for the hand-wringing identity politics critique, but Kagan is quite right on the important question of presidential temperament.

While there is nothing that can truly prepare someone for becoming the leader of a powerful country – let alone the most powerful country on Earth – it is possible to glean evidence of their suitability and competence by observing their behaviour during the long American presidential campaign. One of the ways that we knew Senator John McCain was not up to the job of being president was when a panicked McCain proposed a suspension of the presidential campaign during the height of the 2008 financial crisis, an act which he hoped would show gravitas but which actually revealed that the cranky old senator has trouble with multitasking.

Running for president typically involves spending over one year under close media scrutiny as a declared candidate, a gruelling constant cross-country travel schedule, developing a policy platform and seeing it ripped to shreds by the opposition and having one’s campaign hires pored over by commentators looking for any clue as to how the candidate might staff and run his future administration. And on all counts, Donald Trump has failed.

Donald Trump’s public history as a carnival barker fringe candidate goes back six years to when he took a life-consuming interest in Barack Obama’s birth certificate, choosing to position himself as a champion of the birther movement. But even since declaring his candidacy Trump has shown no interest in policy detail (the waffle on his campaign website doesn’t count), witnessed warfare break out among his campaign team (see the Corey Lewandowski/Paul Manafort feud), run dangerously low on cash and had is state ground game tested and found wanting. If this is how Trump manages his campaign, how on earth does he intend to run the world’s only remaining superpower?

Because when you put everything else aside, it ultimately comes down to temperament. One can fervently disagree with a president’s policy platform but still feel reassured that the country is in a safe pair of hands when the 3AM phone call comes. But if Donald Trump is president when the 3AM phone call comes, the world might not last long enough for you to hear about it on the breakfast news. Trump is happy to use the bully pulpit of his presidential campaign to pursue any petty grudge or vendetta, no matter the target and no matter how small. Does anybody seriously think that Trump has a hidden higher gear, a “presidential” switch he can flick when entering the Oval Office which would see his ignorant bombast replaced with something more statesmanlike?

This is why Donald Trump is not worth the risk, no matter how much one might hate the status quo and have just cause to be furious with the American political establishment. More than any other country, the question of who leads the most consequential nation on Earth really matters. If the American economy sneezes, the world economy catches a cold. If the American military machine is sent into action, the ramifications are felt many thousands of miles away. And this is simply not a brief which should be entrusted to man who suffers from what Robert Kagan calls (accurately, I believe) a grave “personality defect”.

And with his latest intervention in the presidential race, it is clear that President Obama agrees:

President Obama on Tuesday escalated his criticism of Donald Trump, calling him “unfit to serve as president,” as the Republican presidential nominee faced censure from members of both parties for disparaging the parents of a fallen army captain.

“The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job,” Obama said at the White House, during a news conference with the prime minister of Singapore.

[..] Reflecting on the novelty of his own remarks, Obama said his warning stands apart from his criticism of his own Republican presidential rivals, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with whom he disagreed on “certain policy issues” but whose qualifications and “basic decency” he didn’t dispute.

“And had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans . . . this is our president, and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense,” Obama said. “But that’s not the situation here.”

I won’t lie – there was a small part of me which enjoyed watching Donald Trump make short work of an incredibly weak GOP primary field in his race for the Republican nomination. In so many ways, the Republican Party have brought this dismal nadir upon themselves, and deserve to be consumed by the very forces of demagoguery which they helped unleash during eight years of hysterical opposition to Barack Obama.

But the joke is well and truly over now. Donald Trump must not be allowed to reach the Oval Office. This is no time for a presidential candidate who not only lacks any basic understanding of the issues, but who lacks even the curiosity to familiarise himself with matters of policy. This is no time for a presidential candidate so woefully ignorant and disrespectful of the United States Constitution.

And though many people (this blog included) are far from enthralled with the alternative to President Trump, this is no time to let any lingering distaste for Hillary Clinton see America take a reckless gamble with Mr. Make America Great Again.

 

Donald Trump - RNC - Republican National Convention - Cleveland - Nomination

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