This was the moment last night for me that reinforced my conviction that Trump cannot be trusted, because he will say whatever comes to mind:
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump suggested at Thursday’s CNN Republican presidential debate in Miami that he would be willing to support a massive ground force to take on ISIS.
This is a shift for Trump, who has, as a presidential candidate, often portrayed himself as less hawkish than his Republican opponents.
.. More ground war in the Middle East. How, exactly, is Trump different from his opponents on foreign policy?
.. One of the most fascinating dynamics has been Trump’s invincibility, in specific his inability to harm himself. He came across last night as somebody who doesn’t know his material. He often does; he is all about attitude. He flip-flops — on Mideast war, on H1Bs, etc. And yet … it doesn’t matter. I think there is in many Trump voters such a deep and abiding desire to punish the Republican Party that they don’t care.
.. Whatever his imperfections, Trump is mostly hated by professional Republicans and Democrats because he stands for the idea that US foreign policy, economic policy, and immigration policy ought to be run in the interests of the American people, not some abstract ideal of trade globalism, internationalism, or the interests of multinational corporations and minority-group lobbies.
.. And I keep hearing from readers — conservative Republicans! — who say that if Trump does nothing else, the fact that he has smashed the Republican Party is an admirable achievement.
.. I suppose I am a conservative outlier here, but until the GOP gives a sign of understanding what it got wrong in Iraq, and that it has learned from that catastrophe, I find it impossible to trust Republicans more than Democrats on foreign policy. For all his mistakes and shortcomings on foreign policy, President Obama has kept us out of another land war — one that President McCain or President Romney would have been more likely to bumble into.
..The fact that they aren’t (the argument goes) indicates that they are, deep down, RACISTS. What they refuse to grasp is that there is nothing about Sanders that would restrict immigration or would stand up to political correctness. In fact, Sanders yielded to the Black Lives Matter protesters who seized his microphone in Seattle. He is a symbol of the weakness of liberal authorities in the face of left-wing illiberalism — and for Trump voters, that, rightly so, is a deal-breaker.
.. I recall that after the 2006 election (or perhaps 2008), David Brooks wrote a column in which he predicted that America was in for a period of ideological instability as both parties grappled their way towards a new paradigm to replace the exhausted Reagan-era/Clinton Democrat consensus. Well, it looks like something new is emerging.
Rubio’s Florida Endgame
The Florida delegate apportionment model lets the winner take all, and it was set up that way to clear a path to the nomination for Jeb Bush.
.. The campaign wanted to have the rally at the University of North Florida arena on Jacksonville’s Southside. But they couldn’t swing the $11,000 charge. So they went with the Morocco Temple, a nearby concert and event facility, which rents for $5,000. The Morocco Temple’s main ballroom holds 3,000 for concerts, when not configured for press corps setups, which took up maybe a tenth of the floor space.
.. The bigger problem revealed in Rubio’s speech was a fundamental disconnect between the movement conservative talking points that are de rigueur in his speeches, and the kind of populist appeals that are moving the Golden Corral Conservatives and Gun Rack Republicans who are deciding state after state for Cruz or Trump.
.. Appeals to a National Greatness conservatism, paeans to conservatism in general, and pledges to support Israel and reform regulatory structures all fell flat with the crowd beyond the true believers in the front and the VIP seats. As did a pledge to “repeal every one of Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.”
.. If anyone is going to emerge as Trump’s permanent intraparty foil, it’s Ted Cruz, whose data driven campaign has gotten tremendous return on investment for money spent.
.. “Identify[ing] the low propensity voters who other campaigns are ignoring,” and “tailoring issues and how they think about those issues,” has been key to Cruz’s success thus far.
.. The Northwest Florida Daily News, a Pensacola paper, said that “Rubio appeared to attempt to diminish ‘North Florida’ as a voting force” after a Fox News host noted that “Florida shares media markets with 19 counties in Alabama and Georgia and in those counties Trump beats you 50 percent to 16 percent.”
“Obviously these are important counties and great people that live in those counties, but you’re talking about North Florida, not heavily populated areas,” Rubio said, adding that “the bulk of the vote comes from the I-4 corridor, Southwest Florida and, of course, my home area of Miami and even up into Jacksonville.”
So Rubio’s Florida strategy is not predicated on appeal throughout the state. (This is probably just as well given that his favorability rating is -24 in a recent Public Policy Polling poll.) It’s targeted to appeal to very specific demographics that are anomalous in the GOP base.
Clash of Republican Con Artists
Mr. Ryan also declares that the “party of Lincoln” must “reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.” Has he ever heard of Nixon’s “Southern strategy”; of Ronald Reagan’s invocations of welfare queens and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps; of Willie Horton?
.. Then there’s foreign policy, where Mr. Trump is, if anything, more reasonable — or more accurately, less unreasonable — than his rivals... the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment has been playing on its own base. I’m talking about the bait and switch in which white voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People, but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class.
Twilight of the Apparatchiks
As many have noted, it’s remarkable how shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the G.O.P. the party of Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high-minded philosophical messages, like talking about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks?
Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles.
.. So what’s the source of this obliviousness? The answer, I’d suggest, is that in recent years — and, in fact, for the past couple of decades — becoming a conservative activist has actually been a low-risk, comfortable career choice. Most Republican officeholders hold safe seats, which they can count on keeping if they are sufficiently orthodox. Moreover, if they should stumble, they can fall back on “wingnut welfare,” the array of positions at right-wing media organizations, think tanks and so on that are always there for loyal spear carriers.