Donald Trump and the Stunts That Expose the G.O.P.

The petition, which gained more than fifty thousand signatures, turned out to be something of a Dada joke: an attempt, on the part of a gun-control enthusiast, to force gun fetishists to confront the logic, or illogic, of their own position. If guns bring order, why not bring them to a Cleveland delegate floor fight?

.. What Trump oddly does is X-ray the Republican id, pure and raw, without the quavers that they have learned to execute in order to get down the street without being stopped. Being a Republican candidate is like being a professional wrestler. You’re supposed to be maximally crazy, but you’re supposed to pretend to pay attention to the referee who is, sort of, there to enforce fair play. You’re supposed to hit your opponent over the head with a chair, but you’re supposed to pretend to hide the chair you are about to hit him with from the view of the referee. Trump is willing to be maximally crazy, when it comes to the more extreme positions of the G.O.P., but he can’t remember, or perhaps never learned, the minimally sane-sounding speech acts that the referees want you first to attach to the craziness.

.. The actual position of the Republican Party since the Bush Administration, for example, has been to violate Reagan-era treaties, reject the Geneva Conventions, and torture people—but you’re not supposed to say you favor torturing people. You’re supposed to say that you are opposed to torture, but what you’re in favor of isn’t really torture and anyway you would only do it when you had to and anyway they tortured us first. (Terrorism equals torture, so they started it.)

.. It’s the same with abortion and big government. The actual position of the Republican platform, where abortion equals murder, would demand the creation of a government bureaucracy, a full-time pregnancy police, with cops who spend all of their hours tracking pregnant women to those now-illegal clinics and district attorneys who specialize in prosecuting doctors and can, of course, only do so by intimidating women to get them to testify—you cannot have a law making something a serious crime and not have the police pursue it.

.. What’s useful about these little Dada exercises is that they end by doing the great and distinctly conservative work of revealing the actual beliefs of the people who are taking part in politics.

.. We know that even the most passionate believers in forced birth don’t actually believe that abortion is really like murder, and have no real desire to treat it as such; they just want to do all they can to make abortion once again difficult, dangerous, and heavily stigmatized. They are for torture, but they are ashamed of it, too, and would rather it were done far away and in secret.

 

Donald Trump is a Danger to Our National Security

Last week, he said that he would target the families of ISIS terrorists: “you have to take out their families.” Mr. Trump—who never served in the military—obviously does not know that targeting civilians not engaged in hostilities is a war crime. The week before, he said he would bring back waterboarding: “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would….and even it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.” Someone should tell Mr. Trump that in October Congress banned the use of interrogation techniques not authorized by the Army Field Manual.

.. Rebecca Berg, the national security reporter for the right-leaning website RealClearPolitics, recently noted that Trump has been claiming for months that he would announce a team of “highly respected” foreign policy advisers but has not done so. One reason Trump may be having trouble recruiting foreign policy advisers is that he is not interested in receiving advice or listening to anyone else. One source told Berg: “He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to be briefed…It’s not in his personality.”

Ex-CIA Chief: Armed Forces would have to disobey Trump Torture Orders

Referring to Trump’s suggestion to torture suspected terrorists and kill their families, Gen. Michael Hayden told TV host Bill Maher, “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”

“You’re required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict,” Hayden said. “I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language candidate Trump expressed during the campaign.”