Trump just joined Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein in coming out for no-due-process, at-will suspension by unelected federal officials of a constitutional right.

Why bother trying to pass any new Gun Control Law, when one federal agency or another can simply add anyone (or everyone) to a list of people now instantly, abracadabra! without constitutional rights?

What Constitution? What Rule of Law? Trump would say. We have to be smart.

This is where you wind up when you choose a pragmatist unconstrained by principles or ideas as your leader. Of course, we already had lots of professional leaders of the same kind already. They are called liberals and democrats. Donald Trump is the same thing, just appearing currently in a conservative clown suit and pretending to be a brave opponent of Political Correctness. The real Trump is completely indifferent to political philosophy, principles, theory, and ideas. The real Trump is a sociopathic narcissist driven to personal aggrandizement at any cost. He’s exactly the same kind of creature as Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, just more vulgar and with a more limited vocabulary.

So he’s backtracked on Gun Control. Put him in office (if you can, which many of us doubt) and watch him backtrack on everything else, including those promised conservative Supreme Court appointments which you keep arguing justify supporting this orange-faced mountebank with a woodchuck on his head for president. Wake up, Trumpkins!

David Remnick, in the New Yorker, contemplated the horror show that is the 2016 election slate. He got off one particularly good line, summing up the perspective of NeverTrumpers:

[T]hose who reject Trump as some noxious combination of Father Coughlin and Ethelred the Unready.

Read the whole thing.

David French explains that, really, there is no such thing as a bound delegate.

Let’s begin with a simple proposition: As a matter of law and history, there is not a single “bound” delegate to the Republican National Convention. Not one delegate is required to vote for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or any other individual who “won” votes in the primary process. Each delegate will have to make his or her own choice. They — and they alone — will choose the Republican nominee. The paragraph above contradicts much of what you’ve been told about the presidential nominating process, and it even contradicts state law in multiple jurisdictions, but state law does not govern the Republican party. The party governs itself, and according to the rules it has implemented, there is only one convention where the delegates were truly bound: 1976’s, when Gerald Ford fended off a challenge from Ronald Reagan. In every other Republican convention ever held, every delegate has been free to vote their conscience.

Read the whole thing.

He’s right and, if Trump continues screwing up and sinking in the polls, there will be a revolt.

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Charles R. Kessler does not agree with NeverTrumpers like myself, but he does accurately perceive Trump’s flaws and has interesting thoughts about the rise of Trump in his current essay in Claremont Review of Books.

Trump’s own business record is indistinguishable from his career as a celebrity. He stubbornly defends his crudity, anger, and egotism as integral to the Trump brand, which he promotes incessantly, and as in touch with the working class voters he covets. To conservatives enamored of the gentlemanly manners of Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, this indecency offends.

Yet it hasn’t disqualified Trump as a candidate, because it helps to certify him as a non-politician, a truth-speaker, and an entertainer. Trump seems to know the contemporary working class well, its hardships, moral dislocations, and resentments. Readers familiar with the new working class described by Charles Murray in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (reviewed in the Summer 2012 CRB) will have a roadmap to the America that Trump sees and rallies to his side. As the Obama team got a jump on its rivals by exploiting new campaign software and technology in the 2008 race, so Trump got a cultural jump on his rivals in the 2016 primaries. He saw that the older, politer, less straitened America was fading among the working and lower middle classes. Downward mobility, broken families, disability and other forms of welfare support—these were increasingly the new reality for them.

This left them lots of time for TV (as Murray shows), especially for reality TV shows. Trump was more in touch with these developments, and also with the anxieties of the working part of the working class who feared falling into this slough of despond, than any of the other candidates. To put it in business speak, as the New York Times did, Trump “understood the Republican Party’s customers better than its leaders did.” It didn’t help that much of the rank-and-file had lost confidence in those leaders. Trump ran rings around them, and employed new media to do it. Steve Case, the founder of AOL, described that part of the achievement in an email to the Times that had the odd rhythm of one of its subject’s tweets. “Trump leveraged a perfect storm. A combo of social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles).”

Every republic eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem. Has the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable? America is not there yet, though when 40% of children are born out of wedlock it is not too early to wonder. What about when Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president? Many conservatives think that’s also sufficient reason to worry the end is near.

Whole thing.

Nerō Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 15 December 37 AD – 9 June 68 AD. Younger, but has a definite bit of resemblance to Trump in the shape of the head, doesn’t he?

Angelo Codevilla, Last February, analysed precisely the country’s situation and warned presciently about just where we are heading.

Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class’s unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism.

Today, nearly all the rules under which we live are made, executed, and adjudicated by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and countless boards and commissions. Congress no longer passes real laws. Instead, it passes broad grants of authority, the substance of the president’s bureaucracy decides in cooperation with interest groups.
Trump’s career and fortune have been as beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others.

Nancy Pelosi’s remark that we would know Obamacare’s contents only after it passed was true, and applicable to nearly all modern legislation. The courts allow this, pretending that bureaucrats sitting with their chosen friends merely fill in details. Some details! Americans have learned that, as they say in DC, if you are not sitting at one of these tables of power, “you’re on the menu.”

Trump’s claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for “fixing” America, he tells us, is to appoint “the best people”—he names some of his fellow crony capitalists—to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with “unbelievable speed.” He assures us that, this time, it will be to “make America great again.” Peanuts’ Lucy might reply: “This time, for sure!”
Deal-Making Expands Government

In recent years, Obama and the Democratic Party (with the Republican leadership’s constant collusion) have prevented Congress from voting to appropriate funds for individual programs and agencies. They have lumped all government functions into “continuing resolutions” or “omnibus bills.” This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, shielding elected officials from popular scrutiny, relieving them of the responsibility for supporting or opposing what the government does. This has enabled Obama to make whatever deals have pleased him and his Republican cronies.

This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, relieving elected officials of responsibility.

Trump touts his own capacity to make good deals. But good for whom? And who is to say what is good? Who or what causes would benefit from continuing government by secret deals? Who or what would lose? Trump’s stated objective is to wield whatever power might be necessary to accomplish whatever objectives upon which he—in consultation with whomever—might choose from time to time. But the difference between Trump and Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies. …

Like Obama, Trump is not about persuading anybody. Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them. Throughout history, this style of politics has been the indispensable ingredient for wrecking republics, the “final cause” that transforms free citizens into the subjects of emperors.
Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them.

This style of politics has grown, along with a ruling class that rejects the notion that no person may rule another without that person’s consent. As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.

Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epitaphs—racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid; they have had careers and reputations compromised by speaking the wrong word in front of the wrong person; endured dictates from the highest courts in the land that no means yes (King), that public means private (Kelo), that everyone is entitled to make up one’s meaning of life (Casey), but that whoever thinks marriage is exclusively between men and women is a bigot (Obergefell).

Trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.

Trump’s voters expect precisely such turnabout. Within good measure, not only would this right any number of wrongs and restore some balance in our public life, it is also indispensable for impressing upon the ruling class and its constituents that they too have a stake in observing the limits and niceties that are explicit and implicit in our Constitution.

But not only do opposing sets of wrongs not make anything right. As I have argued (Sophocles did it a lot better), trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions—easy to start and soon impossible to stop.

Read the whole thing.

Bill Kristol has not so far kept his promise of delivering a third party alternative to the unappetizing choices currently in the process of being nominated by the two major parties. The Washington Examiner, though, yesterday reported that there is currently at least on third party alternative better-qualified than Trump or Hillary: Cthulhu.

A group of people looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are encouraging people to consider the demon god Cthulhu as a write-in candidate for president in November.

Cthulhu was created in 1928 by writer H.P. Lovecraft in a short story called Call of Cthulhu. He is essentially a god, and is commonly depicted as a giant winged beast with tentacles for a beard.

At a time when both parties are looking for alternatives to Clinton and Trump, which both have high negative ratings among voters, a human-run campaign says Cthulhu should be seen as a viable option.

“Cthulhu has been running for the presidency throughout the decades in one form or another. Most Americans think it as a joke,” said Samir al-Azrad, press secretary for Cthulhu for America, in an email interview with the Washington Examiner. “And indeed, in more ‘civilized’ times, humanity has been mostly uninterested in the glory of a Cthulhu-driven apocalypse. But 2016 is turning out to be an excellent year to bring the word of Cthulhu to the masses.”

Stay abreast of the latest developments from nation’s capital and beyond with curated News Alerts from the Washington Examiner news desk and delivered to your inbox.

The Cthulhu movement is aiming to do the same thing Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is hoping to do with David French: launch a third-party candidate who can provide a refreshing alternative to the two traditional parties.

If picking a candidate viewed as “the lesser evil” feels like a cop-out, Cthulhu represents the greatest evil of all, and does so proudly.

“Third-party candidacies are ascendant as the two major parties put forth the most hated candidates the nation has seen,” al-Azrad said. “We see a path to victory through this wreckage that will finally bring an end to the status quo. And life as we know it.”

Cthulhu for America is an organized entity with a functioning campaign website where people can track all the latest Cthulhu news, buy Cthulhu-related merchandise, or donate to the cause. The campaign currently has 25,100 Twitter followers, and has earned at least one famous endorsement thus far.

Hollywood director Guillermo del Toro, of “Hellboy” and “Pacific Rim” fame, declared his support on Twitter this week for the demon god.

Whole thing.

One of the commie bloggers I have traditionally most detested is Heather Digby Parton. Imagine how weird life in America has become when I read a piece of hers savagely attacking the presumptive GOP nominee, and find that I enthusiastically agree with it.

Why is Donald Trump so out of sorts? Against all odds he managed to win the Republican nomination against the best and brightest stars from all factions of the Republican party. He did it without spending nearly as much money as the rest and without any study or preparation. He dominated the media which reportedly gave him a couple of billion dollars worth of free airtime. He came out of the primary five weeks ago on top of the world, ready to take on the Democrats who were still skirmishing in their primary, divided and at each others’ throats. It was the perfect time to make that presidential “pivot” from the primary to the general and start to show non-Republican Americans that he could be their president too. That didn’t happen.

Instead we’ve seen Donald Trump do nothing but air his endless grievances, whine about the press, complain that he’s being cheated, and double down on his dyspeptic racism, sexism and xenophobia. The more people tell him to cool it the more he explodes in public. He is the most ungracious winner in American politics. What gives?

If one had to guess it’s that he thought that he’d already gotten the hardest hits he was going to have to take. It seems he believed that because he faced a large group of GOP heavyweights and had the rapt attention of the press for six months that he’d passed the crucible and he’d get unquestioning adoration from here on in. Unfortunately, this is where political inexperience and an unwillingness to listen to anyone but sycophants and the voices in your head creates a problem. The primary was a cakewalk compared to the general election for a number of reasons, the most important being that his rivals were all walking on eggshells trying not to offend his voters. Most of them were also Republican office holders and professional politicians who have a responsibility to their party and they generally try not to destroy their own members just in case they become the nominee. By the time they realized that it might actually be Donald Trump it was too late.

The press meanwhile was stuck in a different kind of spin cycle. They mostly just gawked at the spectacle like they were reporting on a 200 car pile-up on the interstate. They didn’t dig very deeply because, like the Republicans, they simply could not fathom that he would actually become the nominee. And frankly, they never really devote a ton of resources to each primary candidate. They do some perfunctory digging and check out oppo from the various rivals but they never go very deeply into the candidates until they get the nomination. But once the nomination is in hand, it’s no hold barred and the press is going to delve into the nominee’s business, personal life and history in every way. Apparently, Trump didn’t know this.

And he’s not handling it well. There are ominous signs that his campaign is imploding, mostly due to his micromanaging and inability to cut loose his fawning primary operatives in favor of serious professionals who know how to wage a general election campaign. He is more undisciplined than ever from his embarrassing tweets to obtuse comments on the stump like “look at my African-American! Look at him!” (It turns out the man wasn’t actually a supporter.) He has dodged and prevaricated about why he won’t release his tax returns, using excuses that only a child could believe, raising questions about whether he’s actually as rich as he says he is.

When the Washington Post published an expose on the Veterans fundraiser he held last winter and revealed that he had not written his own pledged million dollar check, he went ballistic on the media at a wild press conference, even calling a reporter a “sleaze” to his face. It was angry enough for reporters to be taken aback despite the fact that he commonly calls them disgusting, despicable liars at his rallies.

And when Hillary Clinton hit him very hard with a tough speech last week in which she used his own words against him to make the case that he’s dangerously unfit for the job, his response was first unusually tepid — he complained in a tweet that she wasn’t “presidential” — and then recklessly authoritarian. At a rally in San Jose, he let fly (at the 13:55 mark) with a long tirade about how she is President Obama’s lapdog who is doing his bidding so he won’t throw her in jail (“it’s “yessir, Mr President Sir! Yessir! What would you like?! What would you like me to say here sir?!”)Then he said this:

I used to say, leave it up to the lawyers. I have watched so many lawyers on so many different networks. I have read so much about the emails. Folks, honestly, she’s guilty as hell. She’s guilty as hell. And the fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States, it’s a disgrace to our nation. It’s a disgrace.

So we’ll see what happens, I don’t know. I’ve always had great confidence in the FBI, I have great respect, I know some FBI folks, I’ve always had great confidence in them. I can’t believe that they would let this go… I’m telling you, it’s a great system we have, we have a great country, we’re going to make it a lot greater by the war, we love our country, but look, we love our country and I don’t believe our country can let her get away with this crime, I don’t believe it. So we’ll see. And you know what? If they do let her get away with it, it will be a big topic of conversation on the campaign trail, I can tell you that.

And then if I win? (pauses, shrugs dramatically, shakes his head) It’s called a five year statue of limitations. If I win … everything’s going to be fair but I’m sure the Attorney General will take a very good look at it from a fair standpoint, ok? I’m sure. I think it’s disgraceful.

In interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper and CBS’s John Dickerson, he repeated this threat to have her criminally charged (“very fairly” of course) by his own Justice Department if they fail to jail her before the election. When Dickerson asked what crime it was she was supposed to have committed he said, “she’s guilty of the server, she’s guilty of – you look at confidential information, I mean, all of the information that probably has gotten out all over the world. And then you know what else she’s also guilty of? Stupidity and bad judgment.”

If stupidity and bad judgment are federal crimes, Donald Trump would be serving a hundred consecutive life sentences. [Emphasis added -JDZ]

He evidently does not understand that a president does not have the power to have someone thrown in federal prison if they fail to do his bidding nor is it permissible for a presidential candidate to threaten to sic his future Attorney General on his political opponents. It’s called abuse of power and it’s a very serious business. (He keeps making this “mistake” about presidential power in various contexts and maybe it’s time that people took him at his word.)

Complete article

Digby isn’t wrong (for once in her life). Trump talks about doing outrageously illegal stuff now, months before the election. His understanding of the Constitution and commitment to constitutional fidelity may actually be less than Barack Obama’s, and that is really saying something. What might not he do if he ever became president? The mind boggles.

Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.