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.”
Donald the Dangerous
Trump told The New York Times in January that he favored a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, then denied ever having said such a thing. The Times produced the audio (that part of the conversation was on the record) in which Trump clearly backed the 45 percent tariff, risking a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
.. The third risk is to America’s reputation and soft power. Both Bush and President Obama worked hard to reassure the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Trump has pretty much declared war on all Muslims.
.. He is America’s Ahmadinejad.
.. As Mitt Romney notes, “This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
.. Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who was a national security official in the Bush White House, noted that most Republicans are united in believing that President Obama and Hillary Clinton have damaged the United States and added to the burdens of the next president.
“Yet what Trump promises to do would in some important ways make all of the problems we face dramatically worse,”
The Politics of Magical Thinking
The longterm decline in participation in local government and civil associations is an important piece of the “why Trump?” puzzle. The less experience citizens have in the practical work of politics, the more mysterious it becomes to them. Rather than (mostly) honest people trying to do a tough job, politicians are seen as wizards who command dark and incomprehensible powers. If they fail, it is not due to the difficulty of the task, but because they capriciously refuse to make full use of their abilities.
.. For the last century, progressives have been critics of local government and civil society. Not without justification, they’ve attacked the corruption, inefficiency, and injustice of political parties, town councils, private charities, and proposed national solutions to otherwise overwhelming problems. Conservatives bear responsibility, too. Dogmatic hostility to unions has helped marginalize the most effective form of association available to workers in large enterprises
.. Trump, in other words, is just a symptom. The disease is older, and also more frightening. Once we’ve lost our capacity for meaningful self-government it’s almost impossible to get it back.
Why Southwest Virginia Is Trump Country
A black pastor named Mark Burns gave a brief, very hoarse sermon containing the line “We won’t let little Rubio get away with what he said about Donald Trump.” No turning the other cheek for these Christians!
.. Then the insults began, directed primarily at “Little Rubio,” a phrase I must have heard 20 times from the podium: half by Trump and half by the warm-up acts. “We cannot have choke artists running our country.” Clearly, Trump is most concerned with Rubio, though I did hear the phrase “Lyin’ Ted” at least once.
.. Someone tore a sign to bits, and amidst the falling debris starts chanting. Trump gives him a stare-down and asks him “Are you from Mexico?” Some angry shouts from the crowd, which now gets a bit surly. A group of black protestors calls out “Black Lives Matter,” to which the crowd responds with “All Lives Matter.” A scuffle takes place as the black protestors are removed, which I later learn is a a Secret Service agent body slamming a press photographer who had left his holding pen.
.. We seem to be in a very ugly place. Sure, you need police to protect a presidential candidate and would-be president. But is violence against the press what we’ve come to? (In the event that he is elected, Trump promises to change the libel laws to make it easier to sue the press.) The protestors were indeed rude—though hardly ruder than the candidate himself, and nothing compared to the violent act by the SS (a suitable acronym) agent on a press guy.
.. One of the messages is that this is not a left/right election, it is an insider/outsider election, and the base finally discovered that it has been played. It is hardly surprising the stories being told that the second choice of many Bernie Sanders voters is Donald Trump (though I doubt that the reverse is true), something that might have applied to me before seeing Mr. Trump in action.
.. As I said to some Swedish press person who mistook me for a hard-core Donald Trump supporter, the Republican National Committee will do everything in their power to stop Donald Trump—except modify their policies that have been shafting the base.
.. I left with the sinking sensation that this will not end well.