Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health.
He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.
But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.
.. In December, his longtime personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, announced that Mr. Trump had “no significant medical problems” over four decades and that, if elected, he “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Dr. Bornstein made no mention of the bone spurs but did note the appendectomy from Mr. Trump’s childhood.
.. But Mr. Trump had actually graduated from Wharton 18 months before the lottery — the first in the United States in 27 years — was held.
.. Mr. Trump said he had strongly opposed United States involvement in Vietnam.
“I thought it was ridiculous,” he said. “I thought it was another deal where politicians got us into a war where we shouldn’t have been in. And I felt that very strongly from Day 1.”
.. “I was never a fan of the Vietnam War,” he said. “But I was never at the protest level, either, because I had other things to do.”
.. “For all practical purposes, once you got the 1-Y, you were free and clear of vulnerability for the draft, even in the case of the lottery,” Mr. Flahavan said.
.. “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Stephanopoulos. “I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”
George W. Bush joked at a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”
.. The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.
.. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the “party of ideas,” because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and publications like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary.
.. In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will.
.. The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.
.. It is hardly surprising to read Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s best seller “The Art of the Deal,” say, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”
.. What little Mr. Trump does know seems to come from television: Asked where he got military advice, he replied, “I watch the shows.”
.. He claimed that Mexican immigrants were “bringing crime” even though research consistently shows that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born.
.. Mr. Trump also proposed barring Muslims from entering the country despite terrorism researchers, myself included, warning that his plan would likely backfire, feeding the Islamic State’s narrative that the war on terrorism is really a war on Islam.
.. The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world.
He couldn’t swallow his hurt and anger over the Khan’s speech, he had to lash out, to fight back, to smear them in response. This doesn’t make sense if you understand the goal of an election as getting elected, but it does make sense if you understand the goal of an election as playing out an endless series of dominance games.
This is a point TPM’s Josh Marshall has repeatedly made about Trump. A need for dominance, Marshall writes, “is the key to understanding virtually everything Trump does. Whatever is actually happening he tries to refashion it into a dominance ritual or at least will not engage before performing one. You saw that in those numerous examples where he said he would participate in a debate but only after the other party wrote a major check to charity. It’s primal.”
.. Putting Trump in the Oval Office would open a huge vulnerability in our national security. It’s much easier to bait Trump than it is to attack the United States. Our enemies’ aim is often to provoke us into overreacting and overcommitting abroad because they can’t hope to seriously hurt us here. With Trump in control of the armed forces, the path to manipulating us into that kind of overreaction would be clear.
f even a man like Donald Trump can count on Evangelicals, then the GOP will feel free to pursue power without regard to constitutional principle, content in the knowledge that its faithful Christian puppies will eagerly follow — wagging their tails at even the thought of crumbs from the table.
.. The social-justice Left has such a stranglehold on the Democratic party that for decades the Democrats have staked out extreme positions on abortion and enforced absolute discipline on judicial picks.
.. They’re indignant at the notion that Christians would turn away from a man who demonstrates aggressive, persistent ignorance on economic and foreign policy because there’s a chance — just a chance — that he might nominate a decent Supreme Court justice. They’re indignant that faithful Christians who’ve long called for integrity in politics won’t support a man who’s demonstrated faithlessness to his family and indifference to the truth.
.. Honestly, it’s pitiful. Is the Christian conservative movement so weak and so insecure that it will throw away its vote so easily? A vote for Trump is a declaration of irrelevance, a declaration that Christian support is unconditional so long as one can argue that the other side is marginally worse.