Good, in Theory

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh — Voltaire [10]

As Trump’s position solidifies, there is a growing chorus of media, celebrities and political elite sounding the alarm. Yet in the face of this growing opposition Trump’s position does not weaken; it gets stronger. How can this be? How can the voices of so many revered people and organizations be ignored? How can the force of big money be withstood? Historically lobbyists and money have been cited as the foundations of corruption of the political system; perverting political leaders from the path of right and justice for the many to that one favouring the [few] monied.  But it doesn’t seem to be working this time?

We are witnessing what Atlantic Magazine calls [3]: “The Great Republican Revolt.” Voters are ignoring the admonitions of the cognoscenti and supporting the outlier.   Yet the message just doesn’t seem to have sunk in. The National Review’s argument [9] suggests the problem lies elsewhere and seems unwilling to look in the mirror at the GOP and consider there may be the perception of a history of lies and deceit [Atlantic Magazine [3]] that have turned the voters away.  “Trump’s current popularity reveals something good. President Obama’s core domestic-policy agenda was designed to pull working- and middle-class voters left. It assumed that once they received the government’s redistributive largesse, they would be invested in maintaining it — and maintaining the Left in power. Trump’s rise bespeaks the utter failure of this program for the American working class: They have seen the Left’s agenda up close and do not believe it is good enough to make a nation great.”

Unaware they are missing the point, the GOP Leadership appears to be fighting the wrong battle. The NewYork Times [4] reports the “Republican Leaders are mapping a strategy to derail Donald Trump.” In my experience, Americans respond negatively to being told what to do.  

What is notable here is that voters are ignoring the preference of the GOP Leadership; ignoring the attack ads and making up their own minds.   Democracy is overcoming money, lobbyists, the power elite and media. It’s a great day for democracy; but a bad day for leadership and good governance. 

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A short selection of comments from the chorus:

• Mitt Romney [1]: he’s a phoney and a fraud
• Newsweek [2]: Trump isn’t Hitler. He isn’t a fascist either … Trump’s more likely to end up like Jimmy Carter—a poor craftsman of legislation and a crushing disappointment to his supporters
• MS NBC [5] “Why Barry Goldwater’s family is against Donald Trump”: They see Trump as a “cowboy” and an “authoritarian” — not to mention irrational, unprincipled and a symptom of a lost party.
• National Review [6]: Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.
• Fox News [7]: “Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land,” 
• National Review  [8]: Outlined the views of several leading Conservatives, some of which are summarized below:
  • Glenn Beck: If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government. This is a crisis for Conservatism
  • David Boaz: Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America
  • L. Brent Bozell III: The GOP base is clearly disgusted and looking for new leadership … Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.
  • Mona Charen: Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others, including, or perhaps especially, women? Where is the center of gravity in a man who in May denounces those who “needlessly provoke” Muslims and in December proposes that we (“temporarily”) close our borders to all non-resident Muslims?
  • Mark Helprin: he is astoundingly ignorant of everything that to govern a powerful, complex, influential, and exceptional nation such as ours he would have to know.
  • William Kristol: Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained? Isn’t the task of conservatives today to stand athwart Trumpism, yelling Stop?
  • Yuval Levin: Trump … offers himself as the alternative to our weak and foolish leaders, the guarantee of American superiority, and the cure for all that ails our society; and when pressed about how he will succeed in these ways, his answer pretty much amounts to: “great management.”
  • Dana Loesch: Popularity over principle — is this the new Right?
  • Andrew C. McCarthy: Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this [Global Affairs], careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.
  • David McIntosh: …Trump is no better than what we already have. He’ll say anything to get a vote but give us more of the same if he gets into office.
  • Michael Medved:  Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.