I don’t often agree with Conor Friedersdorf, but this time he nails it. I’m myself the grandson of turn-of-the-last-century Lithuanian immigrants. My ancestors arrived legally, because immigration was all but unregulated before 1905 and had no limits on anyone except East Asians before 1921.

I know a lot of people I went to school with in my hometown, of precisely the same background as myself, who have convinced themselves somehow that their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, and who are now horrified to see the American landscape polluted by a new wave of exotic greenhorn immigrants speaking imperfect English.

Donald Trump’s immigration paper asserts, as “core principles,” that “there must be a wall across the southern border” because “a nation without borders is not a nation.” And it argues that “any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages, and security for all Americans,” because “a nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation.” Many have observed that America has never had a wall across its southern border, and that no immigration plan has ever improved wages and security for all Americans. By Trump’s logic, America has never been a nation.

One wonders what he calls the country that allowed his ancestors to immigrate here.

He is of German stock on his father’s side.

Prior to his grandfather’s arrival, plenty of immigration restrictionists believed, not without reason, that German immigration had irrevocably changed their communities.

As one example, consider what took place in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“In the 1840s and 1850s, Cincinnati society became increasingly unstable as German and Irish immigrants poured in,” The Cincinnati Inquirer reported in a historical retrospective. When an Italian emissary of the Pope visited in 1853, “German Catholics took to the streets armed with guns, pistols, clubs, canes and sling shots trying to run Cardinal Bedini out of town. The Germans, many of whom fled to the U.S. after the failed European revolutions of 1848, saw the priest as a symbol of repression.”

Two years later, Germans clashed with a nativist mob alarmed by a rumor about electoral shenanigans. “German-Americans barricaded streets into Over-the-Rhine on the north edge of the Miami-Erie Canal,” the story notes. “Members of the Turners, a German physical fitness organization, aimed their cannon and ‘shot it over the head of the mob of nativists that came at them,’ says Don Heinrich Tolzmann, University of Cincinnati German-American studies director and curator of UC’s German-American Collection.” German immigrants, who started many German language settlements in the U.S., “had become such a force at the ballot box that they pushed for—and received—bilingual education in city schools and Sunday beer sales.”

The Know-Nothing Party ultimately failed at mid-century to stop the immigration of both Irish and Germans. And because they failed, Frederich Christ Trump could immigrate to America in 1885.

Read the whole thing.

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Building a wall across the entire Southern US border would be preposterously expensive as well as constituting a disgraceful expression of totalitarian statism. Hispanic immigrants are not perfect. They are typically socially and educationally inferior to Americans. Some of them are criminals and undesirable. But that’s the way it always was. You get a certain number of crooks and radicals along with a great mass of perfectly assimilable salt-of-the-earth hard working people. America has always needed affordable labor, and America has always needed a new influx of people willing to take the low-paying, unpleasant jobs which native-born Americans, who have typically moved up and out of the laboring class, cannot be found to do.

Jim Geraghty forwarded, in his morning email, a portion of a letter to the Atlantic making what he calls “the most compelling argument” possible for electing Donald:

Many would probably question why, of all people, a decadent, rude, and pompous billionaire should be trusted to meddle with American culture? I think it comes down to a perception that America has already drowned in a post-modernist nightmare of moral relativism, from which extreme political correctness and protest culture stem. Trump, on the other hand, is all absolutes. Everything he says, accurate or not, is stated in absolute, definitive terms. His personal morality is clear: He respects people who work hard, are loyal, innovate, and “win,” and he shuns those who don’t meet the criteria. Cruel as it may sound, I think America needs to reenergize these fundamental cultural values before we can ever hope to create a better society.

Hat tip to Lynn Chu.

Mytheos Holt strokes his chin and analyses the phenomenon which is the Trump Candidacy. Amusingly, Mytheos assigns the blame to the pious Left rather than to the angry Right.

[I]f there was ever a man who was suited for a national moment because of his flaws rather than his virtues, I would argue that it’s Donald Trump. …

Since the Republican implosion in the 2012 election, much of American political discourse has centered not so much on whether particular ideas are wrong as on whether they can be expressed at all. Sometimes this approach has helped to root out genuine ideological cranks, but it’s also a style that has clearly favored the Left more than the Right. Witness the constant barrage of arguments that people who dissent from leftist causes are on the “wrong side of history,” as if history is something that can be predicted in advance like the weather.

To be sure, the impulse not to live long enough to see yourself become a villain or a footnote is a valid one from a pragmatic point of view. However, like all appeals to authority, this “don’t stand athwart history” argument only has a shelf life for as long as it appeals to a reasonable authority and condemns transgressors who seem genuinely bad. The idea that egalitarian principles require us to legally sanction gay marriage might be persuasive, but the idea the same principles should allow gay-rights proponents to trample religious freedom is a much harder sell. Therefore, prudence requires not overextending that argument for it to maintain its effectiveness

But the Left, high on their own success, has not just overextended this argument: it has strapped it to the rack and dislocated its limbs. The idea that certain sentiments can’t be expressed without branding you as an artifact of a dark and unenlightened past has entered the realm of self-parody. It’s all well and good when your unenlightened feminist bogeyman is Todd Akin using cocktail napkin math to pretend rape babies don’t exist; it’s another thing entirely when it’s Laura Kipnis questioning whether grad students dating professors is really such a monstrous imbalance of power. Yet, especially in its natural habitat—the faculty lounge—the Left just bulls right on, trying to write anything and everything to the right of Karl Marx and bell hooks out of existence, until even Bernie Sanders is getting booed for “whitesplaining.”

The avalanche of stories and think pieces about trigger warnings, mattress-carrying bluestockings, and freakouts over “misgendering” someone who as of only a month ago was still a man have painted a very unflattering picture of our national culture. America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, appears to be in danger of becoming the land of the fragile and the home of the breakable. Everyone, both Left and Right, is getting fed up with treating their fellow citizens like overpriced glassware.

Into this great American China shop steps Donald Trump, aka the bull.

If Donald Trump didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. While he probably won’t win the Republican nomination, the man will probably perform at least one public service by making it that much safer to speak honestly about your political views.

Only someone as rich, and seemingly immune to past failure, as Trump, could have played this role. A man who is at once worth so much, and also so used to bankruptcy court, is a man for whom the prospect of failure or disapproval no longer holds any fear.

In essence, Trump is wealthy and reckless enough to be immune from public opinion. It’s not that he has nothing to lose, it’s that he doesn’t care if he loses.

Read the whole thing.

Angelo M. Codevilla argues very cogently that Donald Trump’s ephemeral rise really signifies an unprecedented level of electoral dissatisfaction, not with a particular party or individual, but with the entire urban community of fashion establishment and ruling class. He contends that “The 2016 election is simple; the person who runs on the platform ‘Who do they think they are?’ will win.”

Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world. Trump’s attraction lies less in his words’ grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous.

Trump’s rise reminds this class’s members that they sit atop a rumbling volcano of rejection. …

[O]ur ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society’s commanding heights, by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has coopted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily this regime may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated.

Having failed to destroy Trump, Republicans and Democrats are left to hope that he will self-destruct as Perot did. Indeed, Trump has hardly scratched the surface and may not be able to do more than that. Yet our rulers know the list of things divide them from the American people is long. They want to avoid like the plague any and all arguments on the substance of those things. They fear the rise of an un-intimidated leader more graceful and precise than Trump, someone whose vision is fuller but who is even more passionate in championing the many resentments the voicing of just a few channeled so much support to Trump.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Donald Trump was always looked upon as a dubious presidential candidate, seemingly lacking in judgement, depth, and gravitas. But Trump decidedly surprised everyone by demonstrating unexpected abilities to debate effectively, to address issues, and to create a case for his candidacy based on opposition to conventional American politics, professional politicians, and political correctness.

He surged in the (very, very early) polls, by being entertaining, and –more importantly– by cleverly framing himself as the opponent of the same political establishment which much of America absolutely loathes and detests.

Serious conservative commentators and the GOP establishment were appalled, but people like me thought Trump was making some good points. He never really seemed all that likely to won the nomination, but in the meantime he did seem to be driving Republican politics in the right kind of anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual direction. And, heck! if by some miracle, Trump actually won, he’d be bound to be better than Obama.

Well, lo and behold, all it took was the first official GOP debate on Fox News to do in the Trump candidacy. Curiously, Trump really actually did do just fine in the debate itself. But he began to self-destruct as soon as it was over.

Two excellent posts by Stuart Schneiderman:

8/7: On the Republican Debate:

The moderators are professional journalists. No one should have been surprised that they acquitted themselves as such. The leftist slander of Fox journalists as Republican toadies is so entrenched that people are surprised when they act professionally. No one should be.

Some conservative commentators criticized the Fox moderators for their tough questioning, but nearly all of the candidates were prepared to address them. The overall quality of the Republican candidates is exceptional; unfortunately, they are, for now, being overshadowed by Trump.

In New York Magazine Gabriel Sherman wrote about the conflict between Trump and Fox News:

Having spent the past six weeks rhetorically slashing at his Republican rivals, it makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would eventually run out of targets and find himself in a war with the party’s media arm: Fox News. At the GOP primary debate Thursday night in Cleveland, Trump’s on-stage clashes with the Fox moderators, and his post-debate complaints about the network’s treatment of him, were among the most talked about storylines to emerge from the Quicken Loans Arena.

If your take-away from the debate is that the moderators were not very nice to you, you do not look like a winner. You look like a whiner.

Read the whole thing.

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8/8 Still Defending Trump?:

Megyn Kelly’s first question in Thursday’s debate ostensibly addressed Trump’s insulting remarks about women. …

Kelly was asking whether Trump had the temperament to be president. Did he have the strength of character to be calm and collected under fire? Could he handle a crisis without flying off on a rant? Could he deal with foreign leaders when he could not impose his will on them?

The answer did not lie in his words, but in his behavior. Especially, in his continuing post-debate attacks on Megyn Kelly.

Now we know that the great Donald became undone when faced with big, bad Megyn Kelly. Keep in mind, as long as Trump is leading the Republican candidates in the polls, whatever he says reflects on the Republican Party.

Clearly, Kelly got to him. She got under his skin. She provoked an appalling rant, which did not subside after Trump got some rest.

Yesterday on CNN, Trump said this:

But, certainly, I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly, she’s a lightweight. And she came out there reading her little script, and trying to be tough and be sharp. And when you meet her, you realize she’s not very tough, and she’s not very sharp. She’s zippo.

Kelly might not have been very tough, but she was tough enough to threaten the Donald. If he cannot deal with someone who is a “zippo”–presumably, he was talking about the lighters– how could he deal with someone of substance. He was so threatened and so disarmed that he started lashing out, irrationally. I suspect that no woman has ever addressed him with such disrespect. As is his wont, Trump responded with a disgracefully indecent remark:

And you know, you can see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever, but she was, in my opinion, she was off base.

When you can’t answer the question, you attack the messenger. It is not a sign of toughness or of strength. It signals weakness. It shows that Trump can be easily manipulated. Those who think that Trump is a tower of strength should revise their opinions. Trump is more bluster than strength; more boasting than leadership. One should be able to tell the difference.

Read the whole thing.

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Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, collects negative conclusions on Trump’s potential presidential performance from conservatives.

[Roger Simon thinks foreign adversaries would easily roll The Donald:]

Here’s how I would imagine they would handle Trump. They would love him to death, treat him like the king of the world, the genius at deal-making, ask him for advice on everything from golf courses to hospital maintenance, and if he got suspicious, love him even more, say great things about how rich he is, what a wonderful plane he has, ask for a tour, get pictures with him for People and Der Spiegel… then, after he feels like he’s been just the perfect president and has settled everything, that’s maybe six months, snatch the Baltic states (Russia), explode your bomb (Iran), move in on practically everything west of Honolulu (China) and look the other way when ISIS blows up three shopping malls in Dallas.

What would Donald do about it? Say “You’re fired”? Brag about his money? I’m not optimistic.

And when it comes to domestic matters, as libertarian blogger “Popehat” tweets, “Consider the way Trump and his supporters speak of perceived enemies. Now, give them control of the IRS and Justice Department.”

So a looming disaster on public policy, a thin-skinned vindictive man with control over the IRS and the Justice Department, a core base of voters who view him in a near messianic light, a Fox News hater, and a man who has made common cause over the years with Bill, Hillary, Harry Reid, and the late Ted Kennedy. Trump really is the Bizarro World version of Obama.

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Krauthammer: “He’s running as a tough guy. …[He was] going to stare down Putin, and now he says that he was treated not nicely by three Fox News anchors.”

The Daily Caller obtained an advance transcript of tonight’s first Republican debate in Cleveland, Ohio.

Moderator: Welcome to the first Republican presidential debate. Assembled on stage are the top 10 candidates according to the average of the last five national polls. Let me quickly explain the format. For the first half of the debate, we will direct all questions toward Donald Trump. For the second half of the debate, we will ask the other candidates to respond to what Donald Trump said. Mr. Trump will, of course, be permitted to critique both your answers and you personally. So let’s begin. Mr. Trump, your opening statement please.

Donald Trump: Thank you for having me tonight. Look, I’m not a debater, I’m a doer. So this is an unusual setting for me — and, by the way, not just unusual because I’ve never really debated before. It’s also unusual because I’ve just never been in a room with so many losers before. I’m a really rich guy — I mean, much richer than most people know. Like over $10 billion rich. Maybe over $100 billion. And I’m not even saying this to brag. I’m just saying I don’t usually deal with so many losers. I mean, look at these guys. Just look at them. [Begins pointing at each candidate, one-by one] Looooser. Looooser. Looooser. Looooser. Ted Cruz is only a semi-loser because he said some nice things about me. Looooser. Loooser. Loooser. And looooser. All total losers. Trump’s a winner. I can make American great again.

Moderator: That concludes our opening statements.

Read the whole thing.

It’s probably not the graphics, but just the word association, that makes Rand Paul’s logo work for me.

Politico and Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post critique the candidates campaign logos.

Roger L. Simon notes that Trump is winning and argues that everyone should get used to it and love The Donald. (Roger does like tormenting the lefties.)

What would a Trump presidency look like?

To start with the obvious — flashy. Designer gowns are back at the White House — with extra gold lame and very big steaks at state dinners, hold the kale. Everything Obama is out (thankfully) except golf. Golf is way in as never before. Negotiations will be handled quickly, Trump style. Many will be fired, but there’ll be more jobs in the private sector for them to go to. Iran will be out. Israel in. (Little known fact: Donald has a company over there called Trump Drinks Israel that markets Trump-branded vodka to the Israeli and Palestinian market …I thought they weren’t supposed to drink). Reruns of The Apprentice will be mandated on all cable channels after midnight.

Here’s more…

IN: Hair pieces, Tony Bennett albums (with and without Lady Gaga), cufflinks, New York accents circa 1953, social conservatism (lip service only, sorry), super models, gold escalators.

OUT: John Podesta, microagressions, trigger warnings (they are way out), anybody who doesn’t think Donald is great, anybody who has mixed feelings about Donald, Code Pink, comparative literature professors, John Kerry, John Kerry’s sailboat, the IRS.

Now does that sound bad? Certainly a lot better than we’ve been experiencing lately. So, as we learned years ago from the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove… How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb… this is How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump.

And as for ISIS, all Donald will ever say to them is, you guessed it, “You’re fired!”