who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board.
.. telling one another, “We can control him.’
.. under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.
.. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
.. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
.. The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. Then the next lie, and the next. If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of “Well, guess he’s changed the rules!”
.. The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
.. If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks.
.. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.
Jonah Goldberg: Perry’s Folly
As I wrote in a column last week, I think Rick Perry has defiled himself. He took a strong, principled stand against Trump early on, likening him to a “cancer” on the GOP. He said that a Trumpified Republican party would lead to “perdition.” It didn’t work out well for him. Now that it’s Trump’s party, he says he wants to help this cancer “any way I can,” including being considered for his running mate.
.. That is one of Trump’s greatest accomplishments. He won by declaring the political class morally bankrupt and craven, and as a reward the political class proved him right.
.. I honestly believe that a President Trump would do enormous, perhaps fatal, damage to the conservative movement as we know it. I also believe that without the conservative movement, this country is toast. But I further believe that Hillary Clinton would do obvious and enormous damage to the country. That’s why I’m not voting for either of them.
Trump’s Asymmetric Warfare
There is no way to sufficiently sully a pig or mock a clown. The effort only draws one further onto the opponent’s turf and away from one’s own principles and priorities.
There is no way to shame a man who lacks conscience or to embarrass an embarrassment. Trump is smart enough to know what he lacks — substance — and to know what he possesses in abundance — insolence.
So long as he steers clear of his own weakness and draws others in to the brier patch that is his comfort, he wins.
As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said in December, this is asymmetric warfare. Conventional forms of political fighting won’t work on this man. Truth holds little power, and the media is still enthralled by the monster it made.
.. He has changed the very definition of acceptability as well as the expectations of the honor of one’s words. He has exalted the art of deceit to a new political normalcy.
.. You see, part of the problem here is that some people believe, improbably, that virtue can be cloaked in vice, that what he says and what he means are fundamentally different, that the former is acting as a Trojan horse for the latter. One of Trump’s greatest pros is that he has convinced his supporters, all evidence to the contrary, that they are not being conned.
.. We are a society in search of an instant fix to some of America’s most intractable problems.
.. This part of America isn’t being artfully deceived, it is being willfully blind.
.. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.
Paul Ryan Signals His Surrender
he framed the challenge of unifying the GOP not in terms of an accommodation between Trump and himself but between Trump and the legends of Republicanism past: Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Trump, he said, must be “Lincoln and Reaganesque.” And since the GOP can’t abandon its patron saints, it is Trump who must alter his views.
.. Last week, when Ryan referred to the GOP as the party “of Jack Kemp,” he was saying Trump must adhere to the party’s tradition of anti-racism.
.. Ryan was signaling that Trump must end his demonization of vulnerable minority groups. He must stop calling undocumented Mexican immigrants criminals. He must stop encouraging his supporters to assault African American protesters. He must stop calling for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.
.. But in today’s press conference, Ryan’s anti-racism language was strikingly absent.
.. He didn’t talk about treating all Americans equally and with respect. Especially given Ryan’s reference to the issue of abortion, which he mentioned twice, the Speaker could be signaling that if Trump offers robust assurances that he will appoint conservatives to the bench, that will constitute unity enough. Kemp-style inclusion be damned.
.. He’s an ambitious Republican politician who saw what happened to Marco Rubio, another up-and-coming darling of the GOP elite who incurred the wrath of the nationalist right. And so, in his press conference today, by abandoning the rhetorical framework he outlined last week, Ryan began the process of surrender.