For starters, this line of thinking is deeply anticonservative. Conservatives believe that politics is a limited activity. Culture, psychology and morality come first. What happens in the family, neighborhood, house of worship and the heart is more fundamental and important than what happens in a legislature.
Ryan’s argument inverts all this. It puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values.
.. The classic conservative belief, by contrast, is that character is destiny.
.. The Republican Party can’t unify around Donald Trump for the same reason it can’t unify around a tornado. Trump, by his very essence, undermines cooperation, reciprocity, solidarity, stability or any other component of unity. He is a lone operator, a disloyal diva,
.. By one theory narcissism flows from a developmental disorder called alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. Sufferers have no inner voice to understand their own feelings and reflect honestly on their own actions.
.. To make decisions, these narcissists create a rigid set of external standards, often based around admiration and contempt. Their valuing criteria are based on simple division — winners and losers, victory or humiliation. They are preoccupied with luxury, appearance or anything that signals wealth, beauty, power and success. They take Christian, Jewish and Muslim values — based on humility, charity and love — and they invert them.
.. Other people are simply to be put to use as suppliers of admiration or as victims to be crushed as part of some dominance display.
Donald Trump, Mainstream Conservative
Those who have long stoked the flames of populism should not be surprised by the results.
.. The American Right has become willfully disengaged from its fellow citizens thanks to a wonderful virtual-reality machine in which conservatives, both elite and grassroots, can believe anything they wish, no matter how at odds it is with reality
.. They can wake up in the morning and read email newsletters filled with nonsense from the likes of Dick Morris along with false promises of “secret cancer cures.” As they make their breakfast, they can flip through websites utterly devoid of reporting and data analysis predicting that Democrats are on the run and Hillary Clinton is sure to be indicted. During the work day, they can turn on the radio and listen to Christian nationalists like Bryan Fischer tell them how the Founding Fathers intended to provide religious freedom only to Christians.
.. Fischer and Trump are not alone in their desire to illegally target Muslims. Fischer’s preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, has proposed that law-enforcement officers conduct perpetual campaigns to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods in a sort of secret-police arrangement. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins has repeatedly said that liberal Christians and Muslims do not deserve religious freedom as well. Anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney wants to bring back HUAC.
.. One of the most persistent right-wing claims against Trump has been that he is better described as a nationalist than a conservative. The accusation has no power against him, however, since he has freely admitted to it, knowing as he did that the majority of Republican voters and the nation as a whole have never been particularly interested in constitutional conservatism. The data points on this subject have been out there for years,
.. But usually, instead of arguing with him on the issues, #NeverTrumpers challenge him on process questions or criticize him because his supporters are on the fringe. Conservatives cannot support Trump, the argument goes, because some of his backers are outright racists.
.. The time to stop Trump was in the 1990s, when the movement’s intellectuals were busy prostrating themselves before Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as they sought to remake the GOP into a party for white Christians.
.. The time to stop Trump was in 2009, when Sarah Palin was dumbing down conservatism into an alternative lifestyle that glorified anti-intellectualism. The time to stop Donald Trump was in 2013, when Ted Cruz was opportunistically telling Republican voters that obstreperousness was the equivalent of conservative philosophy.
In 2002, Donald Trump Said He Supported Invading Iraq
For months, Donald Trump has claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before the invasion began — as an example of his great judgment on foreign policy issues.
But in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump said he supported an Iraq invasion.
In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
..
At the Feb. 6 debate in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I’m the only one up here, when the war of Iraq — in Iraq, I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’”
Trump’s Libya Quagmire
.. but on foreign policy, Trump has actually tried to run to Clinton’s left. Yet he keeps getting snagged on evidence that he’s not that different.
.. For months, Trump claimed that he had opposed the Iraq war before it started, a decision that would have placed him a prescient minority—alongside Barack Obama, and notably apart from then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who voted to give the George W. Bush administration the right to pursue the war. Initially, he got away with that: Because he wasn’t a politician, there was no easily found record of his position at the time. But dogged work by BuzzFeed and others eventually turned up proof that Trump had voiced support for the invasion in 2002.