Ping
Trumps opponents (including those here during the primaries) promote an extreme liberal social agenda with their actions while promoting a conservative agenda with their words.
There will be no change from them.
George Will, Bill Kristol and the National Review, would rather have McCain or Romney being nice and polite, even if they are completely ineffective in pushing a conservative agenda, then Trump's rough rhetoric combined with being able to push a conservative agenda. Its amazing how they all focus on Trump's "gaffes" rather than what is actually happening. Or they project what Trump will or won't do in the future rather than looking at what he actually is doing. Its no wonder the "conservative" blogs and press are so ineffective and useless.
A man who is mentally unsound cannot build a billion dollar business empire.
We only need to keep in mind that people had no problem with Trump whatsoever when he was only a businessman. All of the vile vitriol and hate directed his way appeared only after he threw his hat in the ring.
One reason I supported him from the beginning is that his very public life would shield him somewhat from the lies and slander that are always thrown at Republicans. I am correct, it does shield him. What I did not anticipate is that the left liars and slanderers would ramp up the vicious hatemongering in proportion to that shielding.
Regardless, the left still has nothing concrete against him. They can have their protest tantrums, they can screech about racism/sexism/homophobism/whateverism all they want, but they still have nothing tangible. They are like cornered animals in their desperation.
VDH is squirming like a nerve gassed python trying to get off the hook the NR editors put in him and other previously good people with their ridiculous anti-Trump magazine cover.
Can't be done, losing, quagmire, disaster , demoralization, quagmire , disaster, quagmire, losing - Taiban and Al Qaeda defeated and America won.
Same thing with Trump. It's just the media trying oppose while the serious guys just get the job done
Get used to sound wall of opposition because we will be hearing it for the next 4 years at least
The anti-Trump crowd is having a very long temper tantrum.
McMasters, a retired general? Believe he is still active duty. Anyway McMsters position that ISIS is not Islamic is disturbing, especially after Trump proclaimed that it was in fact Islamist terrorism. With all the generals and admirals that Obama purged, one wonders how McMasters survived.....
In column after column VDH has exposed the NeverTrump position as an irrational position for conservatives to hold.
Now, these NeverTrump “conservatives” we are dealing with are not stupid people. They are not normally irrational.
When smart people continue to adhere to an irrational position in the face of constant, withering, logical arguments demolishing their position, why is that?
Some possibilities:
1. The apparent political agenda of the NeverTrumpers is not their true agenda, and for some reason they cannot be honest about their true agenda. For purposes of furthering their true agenda, opposition to Trump is rational.
2. The reasoning of the NeverTrumpers is clouded by a strong emotional bias. Even smart people can be gripped by irrational thinking resulting from, for example, an emotional attachment to an ethnic identity or some unrelated personal experience. If, say, nerds were bullied in high school by a person who by some bizarre coincidence was the spitting image of Donald Trump, then no matter if Donald Trump is doing something for them fantastically in their favor, they may irrationally resist him.
VDH is a smart and observant guy. I would love to sit down with him and have a cup of coffee and hear his honest assessment of what is going on here. But then again, he may be smart enough to know better than to openly share his honest assessment of what’s happening here.
"I thought that both Bush presidents were fine and good men and their agendas far preferable to the alternative. But was either in a political position to effect (or perhaps even willing to embrace) the sort of conservative change that the supposedly “not a conservative” Trump might well attempt?"..... Yeah we all wonder.
"I’m not sure that John McCain or Mitt Romney would have enforced immigration law, frozen government hiring, or embraced Reagan-like tax and regulatory reform"....Ha no no, they never would.
bump
Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote The Most Dangerous Man in America about Benjamin Franklin; in it, she blamed human nature for the many outcries at the time against Franklin, arguably one of the most significant figures in recorded history. She opined that people are always suspicious and condemnatory towards people of extremely high intelligence, and try to stop or thwart the progress of visionary thinkers.
I don't think it's particularly difficult. He simply filled an enormous political vacuum that was left by the establishment of both parties abandoning the middle-class voters:
Hillary (et al): The United States is inherently racist, sexist, and evil, must be punished, and the oppressors need to shut up and let us redistribute their wealth to the more deserving.
Trump: America is inherently great, has been sold out by both parties as well as the media, and I'm going to make America great again.
That is a rock-simple message thoroughly validated by the blatant establishment machinations that put Hillary in place and tried, heaven help us all, to place Yeb! Bush in opposition if such it may be called. It was similarly validated by outrageously biased behavior by nearly all of the media covering both primaries and the general election. Simplified still further, Trump convinced the public that he loves America, and virtually all of his opponents and the media convinced us that they don't. That's a winning political formula. In fact, it did.