Trump Hasn’t Self-funded his Campaign “more than $100 million”
Trump has also continued to fall short of his commitment to self-fund his campaign. In the October 1 to October 19 period, he only gave some $30,682. In total, he’s given himself a little over $56 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which doesn’t come close to his “more than $100 million” pledge. Perhaps in recognition of that, Trump contributed $10 million to his campaign on Friday, NBC reports, therefore bringing his total contributions to $66 million.
The Conservative Intellectual Crisis
The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.
First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise. Small magazines have been overwhelmed by Rush, O’Reilly and Breitbart.
Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment. In search of that mass right-wing audience that, say, Coulter enjoys, conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth. Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump. Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else. The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.
.. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory. According to a Public Religion Research Institute survey, 72 percent of white evangelicals believe that a person who is immoral in private life can be an effective national leader, a belief that is more Machiavelli than Matthew.
.. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.
For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good. Trump demagogy filled the void.
.. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old.
Liberals Hope Elizabeth Warren Will Serve as Clinton’s Scrutinizer in Chief
And few surrogates have been able to rattle Mr. Trump like Ms. Warren, who has called the Republican nominee a “thin-skinned bully who thinks humiliating women at 3 a.m. qualifies him to be president.”
On Monday, Ms. Warren took furious aim at Mr. Trump’s comments about women and the sexual assault allegations against him.
“He thinks that because he has a mouthful of Tic Tacs that he can force himself on any woman within groping distance,” she said, alluding to Mr. Trump’s mention of the breath freshener in a 2005 recording in which he boasted about forcing himself on women.
.. “She’s a very powerful ally to have on your side, but it’s well known that she’s a very formidable opponent to have working against you,” said Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee
.. “Obama had a very lengthy honeymoon when there wasn’t much pressure on him from the left,” said Dan Cantor, the national director of the Working Families Party. “That won’t be the case with Hillary Clinton.”