After The Gold Rush

Unfortunately for Donald and Ivana Trump, all that glittered wasn’t gold. But the reign of New York’s self-created imperial couple isn’t over yet. Donald’s Midas touch may be tarnished, but the banks are still throwing money at him, while Ivana is busy brokering a future of her own. Marie Brenner reports on how the Trumps are still going for it all.

Why Republicans Won’t Renounce Trump

Asked about one right-wing blogger who said Republicans were backing a racist candidate, McConnell simpered that what matters is winning the White House. “The right-of-center world needs to respect the fact that the primary voters have spoken,” he said.

Yes, in favor of blatant intolerance.

.. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, who practically strained his back flipping from denouncing Trump to endorsing him, said that “claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment. I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Not so unacceptable that he is withdrawing his endorsement. “I believe that we have more common ground on the policy issues of the day and we have more likelihood of getting our policies enacted with him than we do with her,” he said, referring to Hillary Clinton.

How Donald Trump Made Republicans Half-Aware of Racism

Buckley was a defender of white supremacyand segregation in the 1960s, and then a defender of apartheid in the 1980s. Buckley’s publisher, William Rusher, argued for the GOP to recast itself as an ideologically conservative party by bringing southern whites into the fold. Buckley helped turn a party that once had congenial relations with academic experts into a raging populist force. “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book,” he famously declared, “than the entire faculty of Harvard.”

.. If you comb through Buckley’s writings on race, the emphasis falls less on a principled defense of racial apartheid in the United States and South Africa (though he did offer that) than on resentment against its critics. Buckley was simply far less interested in racial oppression than in the hypocrisy, obnoxiousness, and potential overreach of its critics. That spirit defined racial conservatism then, and defines it today. To read the pages ofNational Review, or The Wall Street Journal editorial page, racism against nonwhites is a virtually nonexistent problem. Conservatives are instead fixated on the way the racial debate has been turned against conservatives or white people.

.. The Trump constituency factored into conservative calculations all along. Conservatives courted them, defended them, and understood all along that their votes would supply the margin needed to implement conservative ideas, even if many of those ideas (like supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy) had little natural appeal to those voters. They even understood, as Lowry very explicitly laid out, that those voters would doom the orthodox conservatives if they formed a splinter party. The one thing Buckley and his successors failed to imagine, though, is that those people would actually one day take over.