So, where did Donald Trump learn his distinctive and bizarre political style of crude, unlimited aggression? Who taught Donald to how to throw his opponents off their stride by confusing them by breaking all the rules?

Olivia Nuzzi says that The Donald learned how to win by being a complete ******* from the master, flamboyant attorney and anti-communist attack dog (who exposed commies with Joe McCarthy and sent Ethel Rosenberg to the chair) the Left’s all-time ultimate bête noire Roy Cohn.

Donald Trump’s brash and bullying style was learned at the heel of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most infamous lawyers.

They met at Le Club, a private disco on the Upper East Side frequented by Jackie Kennedy, Al Pacino, and Diana Ross, according to Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron. Donald Trump, the young developer, quickly amassing a fortune in New York real estate and Roy Cohn, America’s most loathed yet socially successful defense attorney who had vaulted to infamy in the 1950s while serving as legal counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The friendship they forged would provide the foundation for Trump’s eventual presidential campaign. And in hindsight, it serves as a tool for understanding Donald Trump the Candidate, whose bumper sticker-averse declarations—undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists”; Senator John McCain is “not a war hero”—have both led him to the top of the Republican primary polls and mistakenly convinced many that he is a puzzle unworthy of solving. It may appear that way, but Trump isn’t just spouting off insults like a malfunctioning sprinkler system—he’s mimicking what he learned some 40 years ago.

A longtime friend of Trump’s who was introduced to the candidate by Cohn told me it’s a shame that Cohn’s not alive to see the chaos his protégé has wrought.

“He would have just loved what’s going on right now,” the friend said. “Roy liked upsetting the establishment.”

Read the whole thing.

Well, what do you know? Maybe Donald Trump really does have a certain kind of conservative roots, after all.

Tom Nichols blames the Left for the rise of Trump.

By assailing sensible conservatives as sexists, racists, and imbeciles, they paved the way for a jackass who embodies their worst fears.

The American left created Donald Trump.

When I say “the left,” I do not mean the Democratic Party—or, solely the Democratic Party. Rather, the pestilence that is the Trump campaign is the result of a conglomeration of political, academic, media, and cultural elites who for decades have tried to act as the arbiters of acceptable public debate and shut down any political expression from Americans with whom they disagree. They, more than anyone else, created Donald Trump’s candidacy and the increasingly hideous movement he now leads. …

It’s pointless to try to explain Trump in terms of political platforms because Trump himself is too stupid and too incoherent to have any kind of consistent political views about anything beyond hating minorities and immigrants. Nuclear weapons? “With nuclear, the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Drugs? “That whole heroin thing, I tell you what, we gotta get that whole thing under control.” A random word generation program could do better.

To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump. …

Today, … we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike. This form of political correctness is distinctly illiberal; indeed, it is not liberalism at all but Maoism circa the Cultural Revolution.

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. Any incorrect position, any expression of the constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job. (Just ask Brendan Eich.) There is a huge vacuum left by this leftist attack on speech, and Trump is filling it.

Read the whole thing.

Washington Post editorialist Catherine Rampell has the story.

On Saturday, two members of Bowdoin College’s student government will face impeachment proceedings. What heinous transgression did they commit? Theft, plagiarism, sexual assault?

Nope. They attended a party where some guests wore tiny sombreros.

Two weeks ago, some students threw a birthday party for a friend. The email invitation read: “the theme is tequila, so do with that what you may. We’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that :).” The invitation — sent by a student of Colombian descent, which may or may not be relevant here — advertised games, music, cups and “other things that are conducive to a fun night.”

Those “other things” included the miniature sombreros, several inches in diameter. And when photos of attendees wearing those mini-sombreros showed up on social media, students and administrators went ballistic.

College administrators sent multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an “investigation” into a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.”

Partygoers ultimately were reprimanded or placed on “social probation,” and the hosts have been kicked out of their dorm, according to friends. (None of the disciplined students whom I contacted wanted to speak on the record; Bowdoin President Clayton Rose declined an interview and would not answer a general question about what kinds of disciplinary options are considered when students commit an “act of bias.”) …

Within days, the Bowdoin Student Government unanimously adopted a “statement of solidarity” to “[stand] by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and recommend that administrators “create a space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.”

The statement deemed the party an act of “cultural appropriation,” one that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe.” The effort to purge the two representatives who attended the party, via impeachment, soon followed.

Read the whole thing and be glad you went to college years ago, when the country was comparatively sane.

via GIPHY

In response to a little arm-twisting by Barack Obama’s radical-packed DOJ, Yale has adopted preposterously-expansive definitions of sexual misconduct stretching well beyond what the DOJ crazies demanded, created its own Inquisitorial system for sniffing out offenders, and has a bureaucracy publishing annual reports detailing the minutiae of the Sexual Reign of Terror at Yale.

I feel bound to remark: the atmosphere between girls and boys was a lot pleasanter and less stressful back in my day.

Minding the Campus: Yale’s Imaginary Crime Wave

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

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Warmism in Decline at Yale: Yale Closing Down “Climate & Energy Institute”

Thomas Lifson gloats:

Peak warmism has already hit and the global warming movement is now on its long glide path through loss of government funding, budget and hiring cuts, less media attention, on the way to unfashionability, embarrassment, and eventually obscurity, a historical footnote like phrenology.

The faces Chris Christie made at Donald Trump’s Tuesday press conference provoked lots of questioning commentary and also mockery.

Trump’s Latest Acquisition: Christie’s Soul:

Chris Christie seemed trapped in a nightmare at Trump’s press conference Tuesday night—and in a lot of ways, he was and it’s all his fault.

Chris Christie gazed up at the back of Donald Trump’s golden head in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom the evening of Super Tuesday. His mouth was slightly open. His brow was furrowed. His eyes were wide and uncertain, as if adjusting to the soft light of the crystal chandeliers that adorn his new world for the first time since Friday, when he shocked the political class and the members of his own inner circle by endorsing Trump’s candidacy. …

Trump told the cameras, confidently. “I’m a conservative, but I’m a commonsense conservative.”

Behind him, Christie seemed to shudder as his political career passed before his eyes. …

Christie’s mouth curled into a frown, and then it opened.

But all that escaped was dead air.

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Chris Christie Says Donald Trump Is Not Holding Him Hostage:

I don’t know what I was supposed to be doing,” Christie said. “I was standing there listening to him. All these armchair psychiatrists should give it a break. … He was answering questions from the national press corps, and I was listening. This is part of the hysteria of the people who oppose my Trump endorsement. They want to read anything into it that can be negative.”

“So no, I wasn’t being held hostage,” he added. “No, I wasn’t sitting up there thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'”

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“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for some cabinet or judicial appointment, Christie?”

— paraphrasing Thomas More to Richard Rich in Man For All Seasons.

Trump supporters talk as if it’s in the bag, but they are basing that belief on news announcements that “Trump Has Won” this primary or that. In reality, Trump has only come in ahead with a plurality in several primaries. His opponents again and again got the majority of the votes. Trump is still very likely to arrive at the convention with more delegates than any other candidate, but not with a majority, not with enough to gain the nomination. All the other Republicans need to do to defeat Trump is to unite behind one other candidate.

Of course, when that happens, Donald Trump is going to scream and cry that he was robbed and it was all so terribly unfair. And then he’ll go and run third party, delivering the election to Hillary. I would say that the fact that we can predict that, that is, most probably, the way that Donald Trump will react establishes that we all recognize that Trump habitually lies; that Trump invariably takes the most self-indulgent, self-flattering view of reality; that Trump is not any kind of loyal conservative or Republican; and that, when his own personal agenda conflicts with the best interests of the country, we think that Trump could be predicted to do the selfish, unpatriotic thing.

So, tell me, except as some kind of middle-finger-in-the-air gesture of Nihilism, how can any of you possibly justify supporting someone like Donald Trump?

Christopher Taylor has pessimistic things to say about America’s politics. He thinks a nation with a culture like ours can only have the kind of national leadership we have.

Who wins what office makes no difference. Until the nation undergoes a tremendous shift at the basic, cultural level, elections will only pour more of the same on this country and every new election makes matters worse. And that cultural shift takes time, not elections.

We’re at a point in this nation where the Supreme Court has been stuffed with a near-majority of members for whom the constitution is simply a set of words they can use to lever in anything the latest progressive positions hold. When a court has even a few judges who are utterly disinterested in constitution, wisdom, reason, justice, or sanity, that court ceases to have any validity whatseover. It has been corrupted to the point of being useless.
Arguments we have to get the right sort of politician in this position or that for The Judges ignores the utter destruction of the constitution and nation that has already been wrought by a supposed judicially sensible majority. After the utter abortion that was the Kelo vs New London decision, the court followed up with several horrendously decided trash cases which demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with power no matter who they are or what they claim about law.

Will a supreme court justice picked by a corrupt, horrible hag like Hillary Clinton be much worse than even a lying bozo like Donald Trump? Yes. But the bad is not a question of ruining the nation, its a question of how fast and in what direction. Its going that way anyway, its just a matter of how swiftly. …

There’s a phrase some use to describe this attitude: “let it burn.” Some misunderstand this as a call to destroy the nation. But its not. Its a call to step back and give up the fight because its going down either way. For years now I’ve been telling everyone to focus locally, on family, neighbors, local politics. Your home, your area, your town. Because the federal government is a write-off. There is no fixing it through any elections.
That’s what Let It Burn means; not “revolution!!!” but rather “its already burning and the firefighters know it won’t be saved.” Let it Burn recognizes that its already on fire. We’re past the point of preventing it. We cannot save this Republic, until we get past the hard times ahead and begin the slow, painful process of rebuilding.

I’m sorry. I don’t like it either. but that doesn’t make it any less true. And recognizing this doesn’t make me a crazy old man. Just a sad one.

“Posterity–you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”

-John Quincy Adams

Sorry, John. We didn’t. We gave it a pretty good run for a while, but its over.

Hat tip to Bird Dog and Vanderleun.

John Adams became the first president to move into and occupy the White House on 1 November 1800. On his second night in residence, he wrote the following prayer in a letter to his wife Abigail. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had Adams’ words carved on the fireplace mantel in the State Dining Room. Truman removed the carving. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had it restored to the State Room where it is still to be seen today.

I Pray Heaven To Bestow the Best of Blessings on THIS HOUSE and All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.

We, today, ought to follow President Adams’ wishes and vote only for Honest and Wise Men.

Detail, John Melhuish Strudwick, A Golden Thread, 1885, Tate Gallery.

This ought to be a locked-in-concrete, dead-certain Republican year. America has a two party system, and Americans have an instinctive habit of giving both sides a turn at the presidency. Unless the incumbent walks on water like Ronald Reagan, after 8 years, the American public is hankering for a change and typically turns the ball over to the other team.

Beyond that, running against Hillary is a lot like running against the mean old woman of every Blues song, who moreover seems likely any day to be indicted.

But, along comes Trumplestiltskin.

In Scenario 1, Trump wins nearly all the rest of the primaries. The GOP caves and gives him the rest of the votes he needs for the nomination, and then the Party splits. Movement conservatives, the people who nominated Barry Goldwater and elected Ronald Reagan, and the intellectuals (very possibly including the Neocons), conceivably including socially-moderate, but snobbish, Country Club Republicans take a hike. In significant sectors of the Party, voting for The Donald is just infra dig, and some contend that even Hillary would make a more responsible first magistrate. Trump loses, Hillary becomes President.

Scenario 2, Trump has a ceiling, getting a plurality of delegates on the first ballot, but no majority. Conservatives and GOP Establishmentarians will die in the last ditch before nominating Donald. The knives come out. Trump delegates are pulled away on subsequent ballots, and a brokered convention nominates Cruz or Rubio. Donald J. Trump is no sportsman. He immediately forms a Third Party, and in the election proceeds to pull all the numbskulls and Reagan democrats away from the GOP candidate. Hillary becomes President.

There is no scenario 3.

The Trumpkins are going to say: This isn’t fair. We’re having a Revolution, and the rest of you are supposed to get on board. Donald Trump is our only hope of Change. Change you can believe in. And the rest of us, the sane people, are going to make little circle next to our temples with our index fingers at the idea of turning all the power of the Presidency over to a totally-unprincipled, egomanaical airhead with the morals and manners of the most spoiled rich kid in the entire country. Some of us actually know what happened when they made Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, nicknamed “Caligula” (“Little Boots”) by the Army, Emperor. It was not pretty.