Every time you hear him talk about the Constitution, it’s like he’s trying to remember his high-school French.
.. Trump’s lodestars are not liberty and freedom — he virtually never uses the terms, and shows little interest in discovering how he should. He values “winning” and “strength” and innumerate and illiterate beggar-thy-neighbor economics.
.. he is a glandular, generally friendless (by his own admission), zero-sum conniver who has made it clear that he sees nothing wrong with breaking promises — in business, in matrimony, and in politics — so long as he’s dubbed a “winner” by a narcissistic standard of his own choosing.
.. Many of the so-called gatekeepers of conservatism have been utterly inadequate to the task of protecting that which we love, because while we’ve been guarding the gate, the Trumpians have smashed down the walls on either side of it. And in response, many have left their post to join the mob, in the spirit of “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader!”
.. Even if I could bring over the entire Jonah Goldberg Class, Trump would still be underwater with independent and moderate Republican women, minorities, etc. —because Donald Trump is a very bad candidate, which is why I think the people most responsible for a Republican loss in November are those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see that.
.. I will tell you who I have contempt for and it’s not Ace or the gang at American Greatness or even Sean Hannity. It’s the class of pro-Trump pundits and politicians who, the moment the cameras blink off, turn to me or my friends and say how awful Trump is. A related group are the political reporters who go on TV and skew their analysis so as to ensure that they don’t burn their sources in the Trump campaign, at least not until they write their post-election post-mortems. Another group are the commentators and opportunists who see Trump’s candidacy as a useful way to establish themselves as cable-news “celebrities” or boost their ratings.
.. By their own words, the alt-righters want to destroy and replace classical liberalism and modern conservatism and replace it with some tribal “identitarian” understanding of whiteness as a unifying concept. In this it shares the same modes of thought as the radical racialist Left.
.. its real goal is to not just turn the alt-right into the Right, pure and simple, but to transform the consciousness of all white Americans — and white people everywhere — into racial jingoists. That’s not who white Americans are, thank God, and I see no reason to give an inch to the alt-righters’ effort to create an alt-white consciousness based upon the pigments of their imagination.
Identity Politics Run Amok
Politics is dividing along crude identity lines — along race and class. Are you a native-born white or are you an outsider? Are you one of the people or one of the elites?
Politics is no longer about argument or discussion; it’s about trying to put your opponents into the box of the untouchables.
.. By his evening immigration speech he’d returned to the class and race tropes that have defined his campaign: that the American government is in the grips of a rich oligarchy that distorts everything for its benefit; that the American people are besieged by foreigners, who take their jobs and threaten their lives.
It’s not that these two ideas are completely wrong. The rich do have more influence. There are indeed some foreigners who seek to harm us. It is just that Trump (like other race and class warriors) takes these kernels of truth and grows them into a lie.
.. Research suggests that the recent surge in immigration has made America’s streets safer. That’s because foreign-born men are very unlikely to commit violent crime.
According to one study, only 2 or 3 percent of Mexican-, Guatemalan- or Salvadoran-born men without a high school degree end up incarcerated, compared with 11 percent of their American-born counterparts.
.. immigration has very little effect on native wage or unemployment levels.
That’s because immigrants flow intodifferent types of unskilled jobs. Unskilled immigrants tend to become maids, cooks and farm workers — jobs that require less English. Unskilled natives tend to become cashiers and drivers. If immigrants are driving down wages, it is mostly those of other immigrants.
.. identity politics is inherently the politics of division.
How Trump Betrayed Ann Coulter on Immigration
The political commentator may be more committed to the Republican nominee’s platform than he is.
In In Trump We Trust, Coulter calls Trump a “tasteless, publicity-seeking, coarse billionaire” and argues that, “the one thing voters weren’t wild about was his personality.”
Coulter’s ideological interpretation of Trump’s appeal is plausible. It explains, for instance, why support for Trump correlates more strongly to racial resentment than economic misfortune.
.. The secret of Trump’s success, she argues, has been ideological. He recognized that “Americans,” by which she mostly means Republicans, “are homesick.” They don’t just oppose immigration because they believe it depresses wages and strains government services. They’re homesick for a whiter America, an America that was once truly free because “it’s not in the Anglo-Saxon character either to take orders or to give them.” (Never mind about slavery.) Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing more immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has been, according to Coulter in In Trump We Trust, overrun by “illiterate peasants … who can be instructed to learn certain symbols and bloc-vote for the Democrats.”
.. Suddenly, Trump is flirting with an immigration policy that resembles that of every other Republican who ran for president. Which makes Coulter look like a dupe.
.. Unlike most of the folks who appear on television supporting Trump, she has an independent brand. And it’s built on white nationalism. Trump may win votes by moderating his stance on immigration. But that’s not how Coulter sells books.
.. Coulter also needs an explanation for Trump’s likely defeat, an explanation that will preserve her ability to claim that America’s silent majority believes the things she does. By emphasizing Trump’s immigration flip-flop, Coulter could argue that this issue cost him the white votes he needed to win.
I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You.
“Pipe fitters. Ditch diggers. Asphalt layers,” Sharon says. “I can’t find one that’s not for Donald Trump.”
.. 39 percent of white voters nationwide cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. That figure was 28 percent in the South, but about 11 percent in Louisiana.
.. When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed (“I believe in freedom”) or who they’d vote for (“I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m voting Trump”). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I’ve come to think of as a deep story.
.. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it’s-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need.
.. When she’d asked a boy her son’s age about his plans for the future, he answered, “I’m just going to get a [disability] check, like my mama.”
.. “If you have seizures, that’s almost a surefire way to get disability without proving an ailment,” she said.
.. Her renters, she said, had been a hard-living lot. A jealous boyfriend had murdered his girlfriend. Some men drank and beat their wives. One man had married his son’s ex-wife.
.. Ambition was good. Earning money was good. The more money you earned, the more you could give to others. Giving was good. So ambition was the key to goodness, which was the basis for pride.
.. “I got told we don’t need an assistant fire chief. A lot of people around here don’t like any public employees, apart from the police.”
.. tea party enthusiasts lived in a roaring rumor-sphere that offered answers to deep, abiding anxieties. Why did President Obama take off his wristwatch during Ramadan? Why did Walmart run out of ammunition on the third Tuesday in March? Did you know drones can detect how much money you have?
.. Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
.. And it points to rescue: The tea party for some, and Donald Trump for others.
.. That was totally an age discrimination thing.” At last he found a job at $10 an hour, the same wage he had earned at a summer factory union job as a college student 40 years ago. Age brought no dignity. Nor had the privilege linked to being white and male trickled down to him.
.. the one thing America needed, she felt, was a steady set of values that rewarded the good and punished the bad.
.. The rich deserve honor as makers and givers and should be rewarded with the proud fruits of their earnings, on which taxes should be drastically cut. Such cuts would require an end to many government benefits that were supporting the likes of Sharon’s trailer park renters. For her, the deep story ended there, with welfare cuts.
.. Many blue-collar white men now face the same grim economic fate long endured by blacks.
.. conservative political scientist Charles Murray traces the fate of working-age whites between 1960 and 2010. He compares the top 20 percent of them—those who have at least a bachelor’s degree and are employed as managers or professionals—with the bottom 30 percent, those who never graduated from college and are employed in blue-collar or low-level white-collar jobs.
.. While more than 90 percent of children of blue-collar families lived with both parents in 1960, by 2010, 22 percent did not.
.. How wary should a little-bit-higher-up-the-ladder white person now feel about applying for the same benefits that the little-bit-lower-down-the-ladder people had? Shaming the “takers” below had been a precious mark of higher status.
.. Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue. He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story—women, people of color,the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he’s hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls “big government handouts,” for anyone—including blue-collar white men.
.. But in another stroke, Trump adds a key proviso: restrict government help to real Americans.
.. he’s created a movement much like the anti-immigrant but pro-welfare-state right-wing populism on the rise in Europe