Tom Nichols argues quite persuasively, and on the basis of good precedent, for the unthinkable in the event that the election comes down to Trump versus Hillary.
A few years ago, The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, suggested that conservatives consider dumping the “Buckley Rule,†the late William F. Buckley’s admonition always to choose the most conservative candidate who can win. As Ben pointed out, things have changed since Buckley first issued this advice, including that the elite determination of “who can win†is often flawed. The Buckley Rule, for example, might have led to supporting Charlie Crist—you may shudder at will—instead of Marco Rubio in the 2010 Florida Senate race.
In its place, Ben raised the possibility of a “Hamilton Rule,†named after Alexander Hamilton. Although both were Federalists, Hamilton despised John Adams and his coterie among his own party to the point where he was willing to lose the election of 1800. “If we must have an enemy at the head of government,†Hamilton said in exasperation, “let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.â€
In other words: Better to lose to a true enemy whose policies you can fight and repudiate, rather than to a false friend whose schemes will drag you down with him. This is a painful choice, but it also embraces realism while protecting the possibility of recovery in the future. The need to live to fight another day is why conservatives should adopt a Hamilton Rule if, God forbid, the choice comes down to Hillary and Trump.
My hands almost could not type those words, because I think Hillary Clinton is one of the worst human beings in American politics. She has few principles that I can discern, other than her firm conviction that she deserves the Oval Office for enabling and then defending her sexually neurotic husband. She lies as easily as the rest of us breathe. She has compromised national security through sheer laziness at best, and corrupt intent at worst. If elected, she will enrich Wall Street and raid the public coffers while preaching hateful doctrines of identity politics to distract America’s poor and working classes.
But Trump will be worse. Morally unmoored, emotionally unstable, a crony capitalist of the worst kind, Trump will be every bit as liberal as Hillary—perhaps more so, given his statements over the years. He is by reflex and instinct a New York Democrat whose formal party affiliation is negotiable, as is everything about him. He has little commitment to anything but himself and his “deals,†none of which will work in favor of conservatives or their priorities.
His judicial appointments will likely be liberal friends from New York. His Great Wall of Mexico will never be built, and employers will go right on hiring cheap labor and outsourcing jobs, just as Trump does with his made-in-Mexico suits. His China Smoot-Hawley Tariff will never be implemented. His administration, led by a vulgar, aging man-child who is firmly pro-abortion, who jokes about having sex with his daughter, and brags about his wealth, will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable among us—including the unborn.
Trump, of course, will dissemble and whine about all these eventual failures. His fans will excuse him, as they do now, but they have short attention spans and will vanish in later midterm elections and future presidential contests. His white nationalist supporters, clinging to him like lice in the fur of an angry chimp, will shake their fists along with him for a time, until they too eventually slink away. By 2020, his core constituency will be a tiny sliver of what’s left of the white working class, pathetically standing at the gates of empty factories they thought Trump would re-open.
More to the point, after four years of thrashing around in the Oval Office like the ignorant boor he is, voters will no longer be able distinguish between the words “Trump,†“Republican,†“conservative,†and “buffoon.†He will obliterate Republicans further down the ticket in 2016 and 2020, smear conservatism as nothing more than his own brand of narcissism, and destroy decades of hard work, including Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
The normal operations of American two-party politics fail to protect the country from crooks, scoundrels, liars, and complete shits. In 2004, the democrats nominated a traitor for the presidency. In 2008, they elected a totally-unqualified community organizer, i.e. a professional agitator. We have had worthless playboys (JFK), vulgarian shit-kicker crooks (LBJ), a lachrymose neurotic (Nixon), a wholly incompetent prig (Carter), and an amusing scoundrel (Clinton) as presidents in my lifetime. We have elected plenty of egotists, but we have never elected to the chief magistracy any spoiled and unhinged egomaniacs not reliably connected to reality. The system at least saw to that.
In the case of Donald Trump, we are dealing with a completely unprecedented phenomenon. Every past president, however unethical, deluded, or malevolent, could be relied upon to operate within certain broad bounds of conventionality. None of them, for instance, was ever going to cancel the next election and remain in office.
Hillary is a crook and a liar, to be sure, but Hillary in the final analysis is just a corrupt, left-wing democrat. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is something out of the nation’s Hollywood nightmares. Donald Trump is Willie Stark from “All the King’s Men” (1949). Donald Trump is “Lonesome” Rhodes from “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). Donald Trump is the barbarian outsider swept into power by popular emotion, operating completely outside conventional norms, mores, and expectations. Donald Trump talks happily of forcibly deporting 12 million people. No normal American politician would try to do something like that. Trump might. And there isn’t really any telling what else someone like Donald Trump might do.
Roger Kimball argues that the spell can be broken, Trump can be stopped, if his Republican opponents fight back and start telling the truth about him.
Donald Trump was never impossible. Nor is he now inevitable. It would be useful to have some of Donald Trump’s golf partners step forward. On Monday, a well placed friend told me that over the years he had run into many of Trump’s partners on the links. “He doesn’t only cheat in every game,” my friend said, “He cheats on every hole. You can hear the splash of a ball going into the pond. But when his partners catch up to Trump, they find him standing over his ball on the fairway, claiming that that’s where the ball landed.” This is of a piece with Trump’s sullied reputation as a businessman. I have heard from several sources that his common procedure is to pay his creditors 75% or 80% of what he owes them and then, when they ask for the balance, tell them to sue. I suspect we will be hearing a lot about Donald Trump’s business practices in the coming weeks. By all accounts, it will tell the story of an unscrupulous bully and cheat. Much has been made of Trump’s populist appeal. That appeal will vanish, I predict, once Trump’s character is subject to the scrutiny it deserves.
Exactly a month ago, I wrote about Trump and “the madness of crowds.” The phrase was from Charles Mackay’s classic book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. For the moment, I noted, Trump occupies that empyrean of seeming invulnerability that occasionally cloaks movements of ecstatic enthusiasm. Point out Trump’s past support for Hillary, for Obama, for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, mention his abuse of eminent domain to grab private property for his casinos, and his acolytes will respond, “He just did what he had to do to make his business succeed.†Couldn’t John Gotti have said the same thing?
Mackay was writing about such curiosities as Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland, when a single bulb could, briefly, be traded for the price of a mansion, or various money or stock schemes like the South Sea Bubble or the Mississippi Scheme or the (perhaps more pertinent in this case) “the popular admiration for great thieves.†A common thread of these admonitory tales, I noted, “is the giddy rapidity of ascent followed by sudden and cataclysmic collapse once the spell is broken, which it always is.” The $64,000 question, of course, is exactly when the rude awakening will come. I pray it will not be too late.
Kevin Williamson is justifiably annoyed that stupidity and vulgarity is coming out on top in the early GOP primaries.
One lesson… is that the broad Republican electorate is not actually very conservative. For all of the pleasure that these so-called conservatives derive from denouncing socialism on the Euro-weenie model, they turn out to have much more in common with Marine Le Pen than they do with Ronald Reagan, of free-enterprise and amnesty infamy: They like their welfare state just fine, thank you, but they’ll wet themselves in terror if they see a Marlboro billboard in Spanish.
What’s more illuminating, though, is how many of the so-called conservatives in the entertainment wing of the movement — the contrepreneurs — turned out to be mob-rule enthusiasts simply looking for a sufficiently large and stupid mob. Donald Trump is Bill Clinton without the experience in office, and indeed is a considerable financial patron of the Clinton enterprise. He has been on the wrong side of practically every important issue — life, the Second Amendment, national security — and managed to go nearly 70 years, most of which was spent in public life, without uttering a notable sentence about what has become his signature issue: immigration, about which his policies range from the nonsensical to the never-gonna-happen.
For the contrepreneurs and their followers, it’s an exercise in wishful thinking: If not for the illegals, employment and wages would go up, taxes would go down, spending would go down, budgets would be balanced, schools wouldn’t be terrible, etc. Chickens not laying? Cow gone dry? Somewhere, somehow, somebody called Perez is to blame. How do you know? Because some third-rate doggie-vitamin salesman on the radio says so.
When the God of the Old Testament was especially annoyed with His people, he threatened to take away their statesmen: “I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.†We Americans don’t have princes, and we don’t need anybody to rule over us. But we do need capable public administrators, including capable presidents.
The New Yorker’s Andrew Boynton has a go at trying to edit Donald Trump’s response to Pope Francis into something more closely resembling conventional English syntax.
Trump candidacy predicted by Gilbert Shelton in 1967.
P.J. (in 2016) sends a letter to Pat (in 1968) instructing him how to save America from the disaster looming in the former’s time.
You can get next to these people.
The awful Republican is named Don Trump. He’s a senior at Penn.
The awful Democrat is named Hillary (two l’s) Rodham. She’s a junior at Wellesley—exactly the same age as us.
It’s possible we know Hillary already. She went to Maine East High in Park Ridge outside Chicago, right up Harlem Avenue from Oak Park where we went to high school. She was in a Methodist Youth Group. We were in a Methodist Youth Group. We may have dated her. And erased the memory.
So I have a plan. I’ve enclosed money. (No, you didn’t get rich. A buck is only worth 15 cents in 2016.)
This Don Trump is the easy part. Skip some classes. I seem to recall you’re ahead of me on that part of the plan. But (I checked our transcript) your grades are shit this semester no matter what. Fly Youth Fare standby to Philadelphia.
Trump is the campus loud mouth New Yorker. You won’t have trouble finding him. Tell him you’re part of a commune that wants to pay too much rent for a crappy place in a bad part of town.
He’ll be glad to have coffee or a mu tea or whatever with you. (You’ll have to pay.) Slip the STP in his java. He’ll freak. He’s on the verge anyway. The cat’s been a space case since birth. Skip town before he starts peaking.
Way to go!
I just checked the mental hospitals in New York. A “Donald Trump Jr.†has been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue since January 1968. Good karma, man.
Getting rid of Hillary Rodham is more complicated.
