A literal Republican in Name Only, Trump holds political views that were, until the day before yesterday, up-and-down-the-line progressive: pro-abortion, pro-Kelo and supportive of other tools of crony capitalism, and, if the words of Donald J. Trump himself are to be believed, pro–amnesty for illegal immigrants, too — not for 11 million, but for the fictitious 30 million he discussed with Bill O’Reilly: You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.
Sarah Palin Defects From the Neocons
This election cycle, Donald Trump has claimed that his opposition to the Iraq invasion dates back to 2003. His account of when he turned against the war easily predates the surge. He regards American efforts there as a folly, a waste, and a catastrophe. Politicians who characterized the conflict in that way were once deemed by Palin to be disrespecting the troops and showing white-flag waving naiveté in the War on Terror.
They were unfit, in her view, to be commander-in-chief.
The Art of the Con, by Donald Trump Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420084/donald-trump-puts-camp-campaign
Trump is a sort of action star for the sedentary, a boardroom gladiator, and that is what makes him so successful as a reality-television freak. One of the functions of popular entertainment is wish-fulfillment, a chance to imagine oneself in various satisfying situations, in this case scenarios involving the exercise of executive power.
.. Trump’s performance-art character is butch in the sense that certain gay icons are butch — bikers, cowboys, and the rest of the Village People — and appealing to certain men for similar reasons, one of which is overcompensation for threats against their virility.
.. Every age produces its reactionary fantasy: The overpowering domesticity of the 1950s, followed by the heaviness and drabness of the 1960s and 1970s, provoked American mass culture to a series of ever more frivolous and exotic retreats: Disneyland, Las Vegas, Playboy, Star Trek, Deep Throat. Trump’s act is a way of ritualizing certain insecurities — certain specifically male insecurities — in order to tame our terror of them.
Donald Trump Is Not the Moral Leader We Need
In 2009, the Manhattan Declaration, led by Chuck Colson and Robert P. George, reaffirmed the three primary goals of religious conservatives: to protect all human life, including that of the unborn; to reinforce the sanctity of marriage and the family; and to conserve the religious freedom of all persons. All three goals would be in jeopardy under a Trump presidency.
.. Beyond that, Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled, and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the “winners” of the moment, are created in God’s image.
.. Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy that Neil Postman warned us about years ago, in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of “winning” for the masses. Social and religious conservatives have always seen this tendency as decadent and deviant. For them to view it any other way now would be for them to lose their soul.