King Cheeto

Via David Solin:

“If having someone say ‘vote your conscience’ hurts a candidate then the problem is with the candidate, not with the guy saying that.”

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Steve Berman:

The problem isn’t that Cruz failed to endorse a Constitution-loving conservative, it’s that most of Trump’s followers either don’t care about those things or know in their minds it’s not true yet support him anyway.

Mike Pence

Mike Pence was excellent last night. I had not really been familiar with him. Who knows every one-time Republican congressman? I don’t live in Indiana. So I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m not very happy with Newt Gingrich for selling out to Trump, but I could not suppress my personal preference for Gingrich as the Vice Presidential choice. Newt obviously has no real integrity, but he speaks well and delivers clear and cogent conservative ideas. Although Newt was in good form last night, I thought Pence, who followed him, actually outdid Newt as a performer, and I was able to understand, for the first time, exactly why Trump went with Pence.

Trump is not terribly intelligent and is intellectually lazy and self-indulgent, but he is not totally brain dead. If you watched episodes of “The Apprentice,” you’d find that Trump typically made what looked like the appropriate decision, he fired the contestant you and the rest of the audience thought deserved to be fired… most of the time. It is true that, occasionally, The Donald slipped into Third World Tyrant mode and arbitrarily decreed “Off With His Head!” capriciously, but by-and-large Trump’s choices made sense.

In the case of Pence, he clearly chose wisely. Pence speaks intelligently with self-deprecatory humor and projects Midwestern decency all over the place. If Trump wins, and then goes off cutting ribbons, banging White House interns, and playing golf with celebrities all day, leaving the Vice President to run domestic and foreign policy as has been predicted, things may actually work out pretty well.

If Trump wins, and then rapidly dies in office, it could be downright splendid.

However, I was reflecting on these happy thoughts, and I began to have a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Where had I had the same kind of thoughts before? I wondered. And it didn’t take very long, even at my age, to remember: every bloody election since 1988, in fact.

What is happening this year is really just another replay of the same deal we’ve been getting for more than a generation, for 38 years actually.

The winner of the GOP primaries is always some kind of less-than-really-principled-conservative, a Country Club Republican (George H.W. Bush), a moderate (Bob Dole), a compassionate conservative (George W. Bush), a consistent sell-out and democrat ally in the Senate (John McCain), a moderate Republican creator of Romneycare (Mitt Romney) and he always gets a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool real conservative running mate (Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan), in order to induce the GOP’s conservative base to come on board and support the ticket. Now it’s utterly non-conservative Donald Trump with Dudley-Do-Right conservative Mike Pence.

I kind of feel like I’ve been-here-done-that before, time and time again. You know the definition of insanity, don’t you? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result.

Political commentators have been speaking of the Trump takeover of the GOP, and conservatives have been worrying about the redefinition of the Party by the amateur outsider who ran away with the presidential nomination this year.

I think last night’s convention showed that there isn’t much to worry about with respect to an ideological remodeling of the GOP by Donald Trump. Convention speakers have been conservatives and the speeches they’ve been delivering have all contained basically nothing but standard current conservative talking points.

Trump has not really added or subtracted anything, which should probably not be surprising. Trump’s candidacy isn’t about ideas. It was never about ideas. Trump hasn’t got any ideas. It has always been entirely about Trump. Just as Mexican bandits don’t need no stinkin’ badges, Donald Trump doesn’t need no ideas or theories. Trump will simply Trump his way to victory using his appetites and oversized personality to get where he intends to go.

Though I think now that we haven’t got any future ideological contamination of Republican purity to fear as the result of the ascension of The Donald, the Cleveland Convention does make evident the existence of one future consequence of all this. There were all those Trump offspring giving speeches, praising and endorsing their father.

Donald Trump deliberately arranged to put one Trump child after another on center Convention stage in prime time, their speeches scattered at intervals between speeches by various national figures. This, I’m sure, was not an accident. In one evening, Donald Trump turned his obscure and unaccomplished sons and daughter into nationally-recognized celebrities.

Donald Trump may not understand, or care much about, the Constitution, but he does understand and cares deeply about branding. Trump has been branding his children. You can bet on it. There is going to be a Trump political dynasty with one Trump after another running for public office, and breezing in on the strength of membership in an American royal family.

Pence will run domestic & foreign policy, while Donald naps.

The New York Times supplies another of those leaks indicating that Trump doesn’t really intend to do the job of being president.

One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March that Trump was “really not prepared to be president of the United States,” and the following month he took the highly unusual step of coordinating with his rival Senator Ted Cruz in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?

When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?

“Making America great again” was the casual reply. …

Ultimately, Trump chose Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, not Kasich, to be his running mate.

Some years ago, I was Chief Operating Officer of a (much smaller than Trump’s) inherited New York real estate company. My principal, I expect, very much resembled Donald Trump in operating style. He did not care to be actively involved in the business every day. He had management (me) for that. He had every intention of retaining absolute power, but he was normally King Log. Only when questions of credit and compensation came up or when the requirements of the business made unwelcome demands upon him did he turn into King Stork. Most of the time, he simply didn’t want to know about it.

This kind of personally-convenient delegating of responsibility, while retaining ownership, final authority, and –in the end– taking credit for what other people do, is quite typical of the way a New York real estate mogul would run his empire.

One wonders how it will work when applied to running the US Executive Branch. Good luck to Mr. Pence. I can tell you that being the COO in such a regime has a lot of drawbacks.

That clever Gerard van der Leun, despite being recently much too infatuated with the deep thinkers of the Alt Right trailer parks, sums up perfectly where we find ourselves right now.

First he quotes neo-neocon:

The deed…

…is done.

The fat’s in the fire.

The fat lady’s sung.

The bird’s on the wire.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

and adds:

gives you the finger.

Then Gerard writes:

I watch the formal nomination with a growing feeling of special dread. I watch it with a kind of sardonic awe as Fox splits its screen in two and on the right I see someone from Ohio proclaiming their surreal votes while on the left some aging supermodel working for WeightWatchers proclaims “Bye-bye bellyfat!” And thus the rising surreality of our current reality washes over me and gives me a sick, sinking feeling. Not about Trump. Not about that at all. Just the feeling that returns and returns, that echoes and echoes, that repeats and repeats the careworn mantra, “Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

Feeling the tectonic plates shift deep under the population….

Something moving deep in the mantle. Small tremors here, vibrations at slant there….

Like that movie with the burrowing monster worms roaming under the homes of men. Not the hellish island sized worms of Doom sifting sand mountains and devouring whole factories, but the smaller ones, the predators, the carnivores, the ones in the American grain, the ones that rise up and at most take down a Chevy with a couple of people in it as sandwich filling.

Over the passing months this saison en enfer fills me, more and more, with a kind of nameless dread regardless of the outcome. The more that I read from people who have it “all figured out” the more I feel that my only shelter is in staying stupid. Staying stupid and admitting that deep down I don’t have one single crisp clue as to what is really going on.

Read the whole thing.

I have had the same feeling that, as it did before back when Gerard and I were young, History has begun to awaken, the foundations of everything have begun to move, change is happening, and soon it will be happening faster and with less civility than anyone could ever have imagined. No one is in charge, except the noisiest, the craziest, and the stupidest.

The Business Insider argues it’s all Matt Drudge’s fault.

CNN couldn’t stop Donald Trump. Neither could Fox News.

Some of the nation’s most influential conservatives, from Glenn Beck to Bill Kristol, were powerless. Karl Rove and the Bush family had no effect. Scandal after scandal failed to put a chink in his armor.

And the 16 other GOP contenders, comprising some of the party’s brightest and budding stars, proved to be impotent.

But some observers say that one man may have had the power to prevent Donald Trump’s accession within the Republican Party: Matt Drudge.

“If Drudge had come out really negatively against Trump and had supported someone who would have played well with his reader base like Cruz, it would have been much harder for Trump to win,” BuzzFeed political reporter and editor Andrew Kaczynski told Business Insider, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The news mogul, one of the most mysterious individuals in the media industry, operates entirely outside the New York City and Washington, D.C., apparatus. He is seemingly accountable to no one. He is rarely spotted in public and holds close company with only a few select people. Reporters tip him off to stories through email or instant messages but never expect a reply, knowing he is unlikely to write back.

Yet despite his reclusiveness, Drudge holds a firm grip on the conservative news cycle. As the founder and operator of the Drudge Report, he influences and often creates news narratives.

“In a sense, the Drudge Report acts both as a waterfall creating a ‘trickle down’ effect within the right-leaning (and sometimes mainstream media) as well as a gravitational force drawing stories to its preferred narrative,” conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler said.

Read the whole thing.

Last night, Rudolph Giuliani described a modest, altruistic, publicity-shunning Trump. Uh huh. Right. Let’s compare the reality, described in the New Yorker, by Trump’s ghost writer for “The Art of the Deal.”

No, Virginia, he never wrote anything himself.

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.” …

Schwartz thought that “The Art of the Deal” would be an easy project. The book’s structure would be simple: he’d chronicle half a dozen or so of Trump’s biggest real-estate deals, dispense some bromides about how to succeed in business, and fill in Trump’s life story. For research, he planned to interview Trump on a series of Saturday mornings. The first session didn’t go as planned, however. After Trump gave him a tour of his marble-and-gilt apartment atop Trump Tower—which, to Schwartz, looked unlived-in, like the lobby of a hotel—they began to talk. But the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”

In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been forthcoming with him during the New York interview, but it hadn’t required much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting.

Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial.

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said. …

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time,” Trump said. …

Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” …

Schwartz describes the process of trying to make Trump’s voice palatable in the book. It was kind of “a trick,” he writes, to mimic Trump’s blunt, staccato, no-apologies delivery while making him seem almost boyishly appealing. One strategy was to make it appear that Trump was just having fun at the office. “I try not to take any of what’s happened too seriously,” Trump says in the book. “The real excitement is playing the game.”

In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”

Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trump’s story, not his own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as “draining” and “deadening.” Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.”

Read the whole thing.

The Hay Ride called it a dumpster fire, rather than a convention.

Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack as presiding officer just called voice votes his own way, and rammed through Convention Rules denying eleven states on the record as asking for a roll call vote due process. The convention floor erupted in anger, and the Iowa and Colorado delegations walked out.

Former Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire said:

I sought to be recognized to raise a point of parliamentary inquiry and was immediately drowned out by people I would refer to as brownshirts in my surroundings. … You just saw the second most important item of business rushed through in a split second with no opportunity for debate, no opportunity for questions, no opportunity for points of order and no roll call vote although nine states under the rules requested a roll call vote, demanded a roll call vote, and should have been accorded that. So this was pretty shocking and shameful, I’ve seen a lot of, but this is not a meeting of the Republican National Committee. This is a meeting of brownshirts.

Totalitarianism was accompanied by unusual informality and carefully-assumed folksiness.

The informal speakers started off with Duck Dynasty’s hirsute Willie Robertson, wearing a patriotic American flag headband (!), with an open-collared pink polo shirt.

Marcus Luttrell survived Afghanistan, but apparently no necktie he owned did. He, too, addressed the convention with his collar wide open.

Former CIA Security Contractors from Benghazi John Tiegan and Mark Geist set some kind of new record for convention informality: neither wore a necktie, both addressed the convention wearing blue jeans, Tiegan’s jacket was patterned in some newfangled oil-stained camo and failed to cover a gold-and-silver belt buckle the size of a paperback book. Where are these guys’ former Marine Corps Drill Instructors when you need them?

The band later segued abruptly from “Brown-Eyed Girl” to “We Are the Champions” as Trump himself appeared suddenly silhouetted in smoke (having apparently arrived from his office in the Infernal Regions) to introduce his heavily-accented Croatian wife, Melania (who is, surprisingly, actually supporting him).

Melania proceeded to deliver a not-very-interesting speech, plagiarized in part, it turned out, from Michelle Obama (!).

Rudolph Giuliani, however, demonstrated that he, at least, really can deliver a barn-burner of a speech, in which he praised Donald Trump’s big heart and portrayed The Donald as a publicity-averse do-gooder. You could hear jaws dropping all over America.

I suppose the partisan rhetoric and hokum wasn’t that much worse than that at any other convention, but over everything hung the air of astonishment and the gloomy recognition that these people, this Republican Party, this GOP establishment had so readily, and so completely, sold out to an unprincipled, unethical demagogue peddling a bunch of unconservative snake-oil largely in complete contradiction to everything the Republican Party has theoretically stood for since 1980 at least, if not 1964.

I guess it all proves that those low-information Alt-Right peckerwoods were right, and we Movement Conservative intellectuals were wrong: the GOP establishment really is comprised of a bunch of total whores and opportunists.

I’m changing my voter registration to Independent today.

Jeffrey Tucker explains that the Trump Nationalist agenda is just another version of Socialism, and that the world has seen the rise of precisely this kind of nationalist socialism before.

The rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period,” wrote Hayek, “but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” In Hayek’s reading, the dynamic works like this. The socialists build the state machinery, but their plans fail. A crisis arrives. The population seeks answers. Politicians claiming to be anti-socialist step up with new authoritarian plans that purport to reverse the problem. Their populist appeal taps into the lowest political instincts (nativism, racism, religious bigotry, and so on) and promises a new order of things under better, more efficient rule.

Hayek’s thesis is very similar to Mises’: that the greatest threat in the world today comes from a version of socialism — a rightist socialism — cobbled together in the name of fighting authoritarianism abroad and countering leftism at home. The road to serfdom, in Hayek’s view, is paved by a blind pursuit of unified nationhood and central planning in the name of national greatness. Or, to use today’s language, “making America great again.”

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton agree on a lot, especially on the need to protect and enlarge state power. None of them accepts any principled limits on what the state may rightfully do to the individual. Even on big issues where one might think they disagree — healthcare, immigration, and control of lands by the federal government — their positions are more alike than different. …

Most of these candidates’ supporters don’t see it that way, of course. They imagine themselves to be rebels fighting power itself, however they want to define it: Wall Street, the party establishment, the paid-off politicians, the bureaucracy, the billionaires, the foreigners, the special interests, and so on.

But notice that neither Trump, Sanders, nor Clinton attacks government authority as such. Instead they aspire to use it and grow it for their purposes. “The conflict between the Fascist or National-Socialist and the older socialist parties must indeed very largely be regarded as the kind of conflict which is bound to arise between rival socialist factions,” Hayek wrote. “There was no difference between them about the question of it being the will of the state which should assign to each person his proper place in society.”

As the campaign progress over 2015, the close relationship between right and left socialisms became more obvious. On the surface, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump represent opposite extremes. But in their celebration of the nation state as the people’s salvation — their burning calls to overthrow the existing elites and replace them with a more intense form of top-down rule — they are morally indistinguishable, and equally un-American.

Read the whole thing.

Golf Buddies

Erick Erickson has endorsed my own theory.

During the eleven years I ran RedState, I worked to actively squash a lot of conspiracy theories. …

My friend Donald Rumsfeld once said that there really are no conspiracies out there because no one can keep a secret. I tend to think he is right.

But there is one conspiracy theory I’m starting to embrace. I’m really coming to believe that Donald Trump is a Bill and Hillary Clinton operation to get Hillary Clinton elected.

A Republican candidate running for office would spend this entire week attacking Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information.

Instead, Trump has attacked Republicans and praised Saddam Hussein.

A Republican candidate running for office would spend lots of time in swing states. Instead, Trump is focused on New York and Scotland.

A Republican candidate, when asked by the New York Times about serving if elected, would mock the reporter and make it clear how he will serve instead of play golf like Barack Obama. Instead, Trump would not commit to actually serving.

Donald Trump managed to get the Republican nomination in a very crowded field by galvanizing only 33% of the Republican vote, a good bit of which was not even Republican, but disaffected, pissed off voters coming into the GOP to support Trump.

Even after all the other candidates dropped out, Trump could not even clear 44% support in the primary.

Trump ran a primary campaign playing to the worst fears and prejudices of a certain set of Americans and was able to consolidate them against 17 other candidates.

Having spent an entire primary on offense, Trump has not spent a single day doing anything other than defense.

I am beginning to believe Trump is a Clinton operation designed to get Hillary elected. Trump is, after all, the only Republican who ran who was a Clinton donor. He is also the only Republican running who called Bill Clinton to discuss running before he even got into the race.

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February 25, “What If?”

It would take a miracle effectuated by a political genius of the first water to make Hillary electable, especially in this unfavorable year. The Republican presidential nominee in 2016 has the key to the Oval Office in his pocket as long as he is normally presentable and can walk and talk.

Maybe Hillary can win after all, though, because it just so happens that she is married to a political genius of the first water. …

if I were Bill, how on earth could I possibly cause the unamiable, unattractive, scandal-infested, mean old Hillary to win in this most unfavorable year?

Well, what if… what if that slick old Bill actually did think up a way? How could he do it? Well, there is one way, after all. Just suppose it was possible for Bill Clinton to hijack the GOP nomination.

Suppose Bill Clinton figured out the sole, solitary possible way that he could shove a big, fat monkey wrench into the Republican Party’s Presidential Election Campaign’s works.

Let’s say, for instance, that Old Bill knew another feller, that he had a buddy, a good friend, not in politics actually, but a fellow in some respects kind of like himself, brash, shameless, fond of the ladies, appetitive, hugely out-going, and larger-than-life. Bill’s friend, like himself, would be a wealthy and successful person, a celebrity, a performer, and a chap vigorously able to go after what he wants free of ethical inhibitions.

One can picture Bill sitting down with his pal Donald, and saying, “Donald, old boy, I need you to do Hillary and me a solid. The good news is that the whole thing is going to be one of the greatest larks of all time, and together we are going to make history. This is really going to be a hoot! If it works, you get all the billions of dollars of federal contracts, leases, and subsidies you can use, and Hillary will appoint you ambassador to the Court of St. James. If it fails, sheeeit! you get to be president. This is a no-lose operation.”

And then Bill (behind the scenes) masterminds The Donald’s campaign, knocking out one legitimate GOP candidate after another with shameless insults, abuse, and outright baldfaced lies.

Donald gets the nomination, but it could be that Bill has a plan in mind to sink the Trump campaign right about the end of next September. Photographs of Donald (like Berlusconi) in the sack with some underage girls just happen to fall into the hands of intrepid NY Times reporters in the nick of time. The GOP campaign sinks suddenly in scandal, while Donald smiles over the stories of his sexual prowess, and Hillary coasts in after all.

What if?

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May 31: “What Happens When the Dog Catches the Car?”:

Suppose it was slightly more complicated:

Donald Trump, last year, is unhappy with the Obama Administration’s mishandling of the economy, foreign policy embarrassments, and the general atmosphere of American decline. He also doesn’t like the Republican emphasis on conservative ideas and he has no sympathy with the rarified idealism of Bush-era Wilsonian Foreign Policy activism. The idea of running in the Republican primaries as a protest candidate has occurred to him.

He would get to ventilate his personal opinions, throw his weight around, and have an impact. Hell, he might win a state or two somewhere. He’d have himself a place in the History books, and as a former presidential candidate he would have a bit more influence and enjoy more respect when he did his business deals. Come to think of it, he would probably even get a little more tail. The aroma of political power does things to chicks.

Trump is reluctant, though, to alienate his pals the Clintons, so he decides to talk it over with Bill. Trump assures Bill that he means Hillary no actual harm, but as Bill thinks about all this, his grin gets wider and wider. Trump running may not really injure Hillary one bit, but it sure could make an unholy mess of the Republican race.

Bill Clinton advises Trump to be himself, and to come out loudly with all the nationalist, protectionist, working-class-hero kind of BS that Jim Webb was peddling in that book of his. What Bill is proposing is, in essence, that Trump should run as a democrat in Republican clothing. The campaign will be all democrat class warfare and promises of special government interventions for Trump’s voters, all served up under a nice Republican sauce made up of flag-waving patriotism.

Obviously, all of this turned out to match the temper of the times, the mood of the low-information voter, perfectly. No one could have predicted that it would sell quite so well, not Bill Clinton, not The Donald himself.

Aren’t all you Trump supporters going to feel dumb, when this is finally confirmed?