Cruz has been exhibiting manners that are considered to be old-fashioned. Politeness, restraint, not getting in people’s faces and wagging a finger and shouting them down. He really has been engaged in what I believe are time-honored behavioral techniques that represent manners, breeding, sophistication, maturity, and all that. And doing so has forced Trump into a couple of major blunders here.
.. I can’t think of another word to describe other than just respectful and polite, treat your enemies with kindness, you know, turn the other cheek, all that sort of stuff. The virtues that are found in the Bible, for example. Cruz has been living them.
.. One of them is you never brag about anything. You never talk about how much money you have or don’t have. You never condemn anybody for not having enough or too much. You don’t go there. The old argument, turn the other cheek. If somebody throws something at you, don’t reduce yourself to their level. Turn the other cheek and smile. Basically this is where Cruz comes from. I think he’s extremely sophisticated, well-rounded, great character, proper virtues.
..
RUSH: Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump was on with Chris Wallace who said, “What do you think of Ted Cruz?”
TRUMP: I don’t think he has the right temperament. I don’t think he’s got the right judgment. You look at the way he’s dealt with the Senate where he goes in there like a… You know, frankly, like a little bit of a maniac. You’re never gonna get things done that way. You can’t walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never get anything done, and that’s the problem with Ted.
RUSH: Whoa. Wait just a second here. Doesn’t that kind of describe the way Trump has been dealing with people he disagrees with? I mean, he’s been calling them stupid, he’s been calling them incompetent, he’s been saying you can’t get anything done with these people.
.. He’s come across as somebody who’s gonna beat somebody in negotiations, who’s gonna beat them down. He’s gonna tell them how it’s gonna be.
.. CALLER: Hi, Rush. Rush, just to give a little background here. Number one, I just thank the Lord Jesus Christ every day for you, Rush, ’cause you give me hope. I just want to give you a little background
.. CALLER: Here’s the way I look at it. It’s over for the United States if we don’t win this election. Trump can win. We have to win back our country. We cannot have another Romney. We cannot have another McCain. And I look at Ted Cruz as being almost like a Romney; he’s gonna lose.
.. RUSH: When you hear him jump on Cruz the same way Democrats in the media and the Republican establishment jumps on Cruz, that doesn’t raise a little red flag for you?
CALLER: He’s gotta do his strategy, okay? Trump has to do his strategy. I don’t know what his best strategy is. You see his polls going up, Rush, his numbers going up.
.. Trump doesn’t even believe that. Trump wants to steamroll people that stand in the way.
CALLER: Amen to that. God bless him for that.
..
RUSH: All right. When I hear any Republican, like the last one I heard saying it was Chris Christie, I cringe, and it was just a few short weeks ago. Are you tone deaf? Christie said,
“Look, I want the Democrats to know –” Well, what do you want the Democrats to know?CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: “I want them to know I will work with them. I can cross the aisle. And if they have good ideas, I’ll work with them.: And I said, what are you? This is John McCain. This is Mitt Romney. This is exactly how we lose. Our side does not want us working with the other side.
CALLER: — a lot of time. (crosstalk)
RUSH: They want us defeating the other side.
CALLER: Christie lost me the moment that he announced his candidacy by saying that we are not angry, but we are more disappointed by our politicians in Washington.
RUSH: Okay, fine, same thing.
CALLER: That isn’t the truth. We’re angry. We’re really angry about what’s happening to our country.
RUSH: Right. The only thing I’m saying here is that the way Trump went after Cruz, he’s free to go after him, don’t misunderstand. I mean, it’s a primary campaign. But to go after Cruz for not cooperating with the Democrats? Where has Trump said he’s going to? And if that’s what he’s gonna do, I damn well want to know it. You don’t want Christie to cooperate with Democrats. We want to beat ’em.
.. RUSH: Sounds exactly like what McCain would say of his opponent in the Republican primary, sounds exactly like what Romney would say. “I’m the guy that can go into the Senate and I can work with the Democrats and I can get along with ’em, and Ted can’t.” And my reaction, “I didn’t know you wanted to get along with the Democrats, Mr. Trump.” This is the first I’ve heard of that. That’s my only reaction. That’s not throwing Trump anywhere. I’m just reacting.
.. RUSH: Okay. That’s it. So he reads a story in the New York Times where Cruz is reported to have questioned his judgment. So Trump responds by questioning Cruz’s judgment. “I don’t think he’s got the right temperament. I don’t think he’s got the right judgment.” And I just… (sigh) Folks, it’s disappointing to hear Trump hit Cruz the same way that the Republican establishment hits Cruz and with the same things that the media hits Cruz and the Democrats do. You know, this is a big deal to me, this Republican belief that somehow the voters want a candidate who can compromise, who can make Washington work.
.. That’s the problem. We don’t want somebody who can walk into the Senate and compromise what we believe with these people. We want somebody walk in the Senate and defeat them, and ditto in the House, and ditto nationwide! And that’s what Trump has been expressing he can do, wants to do, and will do.
.. I mean, Cruz has taken it to the floor of the Senate and taken it to the Democrats on the Senate and done exactly what conservative voters claim they want to happen. But then to turn around and accuse him of not having temperament or judgment, not being able to work with these guys? It’s just disappointing, ’cause Trump’s not working with people. Trump’s campaign’s not based on his ability to compromise and work with people. Trump’s campaign’s based on the people currently doing things are goofs. They’re dumb. They’re not competent. We need smarter people in there doing these things.
.. He hasn’t made it a process by which the two parties compromise and work together. That’s for losers. That kind of talk and that kind of belief is for Republican losers. And I can name them for you: Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and anybody else in this field who talks about it. Anyway, that was one thing. Then the Trump hit on Scalia! I’m just telling you, they raise red flags for me, folks. That’s all. I think it’s unfortunate. (sigh) Antonin Scalia is the last, best hope of Supreme Court along with Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.
..
The relationship that Trump has with his supporters, I don’t think the establishment has the slightest idea of understanding it, slightest ability to understand it.
They don’t have anybody who’s ever had that kind of relationship. It’s really true to point that out. And, as such, they don’t understand. They don’t understand that kind of loyalty. The loyalty they understand flows from dollars and cents, and to hell with cents. The kind of loyalty they understand flows with dollars. You get some dollars; in return you’re loyal to who gave them to you. And that’s not… Trump’s support is not based on money. It’s not based on quid pro quos. It’s totally based on ideas. It’s one of the things that scares everybody in the establishment about Trump’s campaign.
Conservatives Weren’t the Ones Who Made Trump a Ubiquitous Celebrity
If Trump is this repugnant, nasty racist, so undeserving of public office . . . why is he hosting Saturday Night Live and joking around with Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert? If he’s so self-evidently unsuited for the presidency . . . why has the national media spent a full year dissecting his every move? If he’s such a vulgar embodiment of reality-television narcissism, why the soft-focus profiles of his lovely family? If his economic plans are so wildly unrealistic and reckless, why has the business media written those glowing profiles about his keen mind and eye for opportunities?
.. So the guy who’s been advising Vladimir Putin’s man in Ukraine is now running Trump’s delegate-securing operation? Will polonium be involved?
How The Right Created Trump
if conservative Establishmentarians fear and loathe the coarseness of Trump’s rhetoric, they need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask why they didn’t object to it when it was helping them raise money and elect Republicans.
.. I think it’s also true that Democrats who don’t object to the foul rhetoric from left-wing activists are going to come to regret it when it gets turned on them one day. On campus today, you can see the old-school liberals shouted down by the young radicals. Sooner or later there is going to be a left-wing candidate who does not have the decency of a Bernie Sanders — and he’s not only going to be taking aim at Republicans.
Can We Please Retire the Notion That Donald Trump Is Hijacking the Republican Party?
Even now, many Republican elites, hedging their bets and putting any principles in escrow, have yet to meaningfully condemn Trump. McCain says he would support him if he gets his party’s nomination. The Establishment campaign guru who figured the Trump problem would solve itself moved on to anti-Trump advocacy and is now seeking to unify the party behind Trump, waving the same white flag of surrender as Chris Christie. Every major party leader — Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, Kevin McCarthy — has followed McCain’s example and vowed to line up behind whoever leads the ticket, Trump included. Even after the recurrent violence at Trump rallies boiled over into chaos in Chicago, none of his surviving presidential rivals would disown their own pledges to support him in November. Trump is not Hitler, but those who think he is, from Glenn Beck to Louis C.K., should note that his Vichy regime is already in place in Washington, D.C.
.. Though the Republican Establishment is routinely referenced as a potential firewall in almost every media consideration of Trump’s unexpected rise, it increasingly looks like a myth, a rhetorical device, or, at best, a Potemkin village. It has little power to do anything beyond tardily raising stop-Trump money that it spends neither wisely nor well and generating an endless torrent of anti-Trump sermons for publications that most Trump voters don’t read. The Establishment’s prize creation, Marco Rubio — a bot candidate programmed with patriotic Reaganisms, unreconstructed Bush-Cheney foreign-policy truculence, a slick television vibe, and a dash of ethnicity — was the biggest product flop to be marketed by America’s Fortune 500 stratum since New Coke.
.. you’ll see that the objections of Trump’s Establishment critics have several common threads. Trump is a vulgarian (true). He has no fixed ideology or coherent policy portfolio (true). He repeatedly and brazenly makes things up (true). He wantonly changes his views (true). He is not recognizable as “a real Republican” (false).
.. Romney is a man who made up so many things in 2012 that his own pollster was moved to declare that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
.. But just over a year ago the Republican congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana conceded that he had committed an even greater infraction than Trump’s by speaking before a Duke-affiliated white-supremacy group in 2002. Scalise had been invited to do so by two longtime Duke aides, at least one of whom was a friend, but he nonetheless maintained, just as Trump did, that he had no idea who these people were or what they stood for. Even hard-line conservatives doubted Scalise’s story — Charles Krauthammer called it “implausible,” and Erick Erickson asked, “How the hell does somebody show up at a David Duke–organized event in 2002 and claim ignorance?” — but the incident was hardly an impediment to Scalise’s advancement in the GOP. He was rewarded with the No. 3 post in the House leadership, majority whip, which he retains today.
.. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan traveled from the 1980 Republican convention to give a speech on states’ rights to a virtually all-white audience just outside the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, best known as the site where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil-rights workers in 1964. Reagan was no Klan sympathizer, but, like Trump, he knew how to pander to voters who might be.
.. Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in his first run for Senate in Texas because he thought it “trampled” the Constitution. When he first ran for president in 1980, he hired Charles Snider, the longtime campaign manager for George Wallace, the populist and racist demagogue who increasingly seems to be Trump’s role model. Eight years after that, Bush hired Thurmond’s protégé Lee Atwater to run his race-infected campaign against Michael Dukakis. (Atwater rhetorically linked Willie Horton, a black murderer and rapist featured in a pro-Bush pac’s ad campaign, to Jesse Jackson.)
.. You could deny Trump the nomination by playing dirty tricks, but he’s definitely going into the convention convinced, along with all of his supporters, that he’s the legitimate nominee. And you have to assume it can’t be taken from him legitimately, because there’s nobody to beat him! So it will have to be stolen. We know Trump can get on TV anytime he wants for as long as he wants. What would he do with his time for the next several months after the convention? Seems to me he’d use it to scorched-earth-destroy the party.
.. George W. Bush journeyed to Bob Jones University to deliver a campaign speech in 2000, when it still banned interracial dating; that same year, he refused to support taking down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia, where it had been raised in 1961 in resistance to desegregation.
.. What separates Trump from such stalwarts of the Republican Establishment as the Bushes is that instead of perfuming his nativist or racial pandering with disingenuous phraseology like compassionate conservatism and kinder, gentler and right to rise, he dispenses with the niceties, or, as he would put it, is brave enough to be politically incorrect.
.. Thomas Frank, writing in The Guardian, has mocked the liberal pundit Nicholas Kristof for devoting a column to a dialogue with an “imaginary” Trump voter rather than speaking to an actual one ..
.. If Trump has one indisputable talent, it’s for spotting the weakness in others (though not himself).
.. In his devastating populist put-down of Romney in 2008, Mike Huckabee described himself as a prospective “president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.”
.. That Trump, who’s literally made a show of firing people on national television, escapes this stain is a testament to the power of his crude everyman shtick.
.. the percentage of Republican voters who call themselves “very conservative” has jumped from 19 percent to 33 percent since 1995.
.. Trump refuses to kowtow to the Establishment—and it is precisely that defiance, as articulated in his ridicule of Romney and Jeb Bush and Megyn Kelly and Little Marco, that endears him to Republican voters and some Democrats as well. The so-called battle for the “soul” of the Republican Party is a battle over power, not ideology
.. It’s the classic populist pitch, and it will not end well for those who invest their faith in Trump. He cares about no one but himself and would reward his own class with extravagant tax cuts like any Republican president.
.. You’ll notice that just about the only Republican politicians or campaign operatives who are vocal in the #NeverTrump claque are either congressmen who are retiring this year, party potentates who have long been out of power (Christine Todd Whitman, Ken Mehlman, J. C. Watts, Mel Martinez), or, as Trump would say, losers (anyone who served in the campaign hierarchies of Romney or Jeb, any neocon who served as a Bush-Cheney architect of the Iraq War). Everyone else will keep on doing what senators and governors like Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions and Paul LePage have steadily been doing: They will appease Trump or surrender to him altogether on the most favorable terms they can, for “the good” of the party and the ticket in November. They will make their peace with the art of the deal.