‘The Revolution Is At Hand’
O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would “take out” the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would “put out hits on women and children” if he were elected. Trump replied, “I would do pretty severe stuff.” The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. “Yeah, baby!” a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.
This is barbarism. It really is, and it’s disgusting.
.. the G.O.P. needs to find a candidate and an agenda that can realistically address the economic anxieties of its base without succumbing to Trump-style bigotry.
.. After Trump’s rally in Biloxi, I talked to Joanna Patterson, who is forty-four years old. She said that she and her husband, Paul, who is forty-five and used to watch Trump on “The Apprentice,” are deeply religious Pentecostal Christians who follow the teachings of Christ’s Twelve Apostles. “We don’t believe that a woman should cut her hair. We’re like Kim—”
“The one that wouldn’t do the marriage licenses,” her husband interjected.
“Kim Davis?” I asked, referring to the Kentucky official who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses last year.
“Yes,” Patterson said. “We’re the same thing as her.” Patterson said she can pick out other Apostolics, especially women, by the way they dress—long skirts, no makeup—and she was pleasantly surprised to see that there were many at the Trump event. She conceded that Trump was not religious and hadn’t shown a commitment to any of the social issues she cared about. But she liked him because he showed “strength” and says “whatever he wants to say without having someone buffer it for him.” She explained that forthrightness, more than any particular issue, was at the foundation of her own religion.
“We like raw truth,” Patterson said. “Tell us what we need.”
.. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew.
.. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.
.. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Trump’s rise is that the arguments from people like Kristol, Wehner, Gerson, and Will, who have spent their lives trying to define conservatism, have had so little impact. “Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base,” blared a recent headline in National Review bemoaning the victory of Trump’s populism. In The Week, conservative columnist Michael Brendan Dougherty recently wrote, “What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is.”