Charles Cooke versus Ann Coulter: Why are conservatives supporting Trump?

This segment feels like a new phase in the debate over whether Trump truly qualifies as a populist conservative. For the first two months of Trumpmania, the position taken by his fans essentially was that he gets a pass on not being much of a conservative because he’s such a superb populist. If you hate political correctness, if you’re tired of the political class in Washington talking down to you and then making a hash of every policy they touch, Trump’s your guy. He’s a middle finger to the establishment of both parties, especially to the not-so-conservative-themselves GOP. That’s not the argument Coulter and Hannity are making, though. Cooke comes in here demanding to know how two conservatives as famous as them can possibly be shilling for a guy who’s held the liberal position on every major issue — health care, abortion, guns, eminent domain, you name it — and the answer is … well, he’s had a charge of heart. Or he’s a businessman, therefore he’s allowed to play on both sides of the fence or whatever. Or that his new positions, like the idea that he’s going to get Mexico to pay for a border wall, are actually plausible and worth taking seriously.

Glenn Beck watched this segment live last night and then took to Facebook afterward, wondering if he’d woken up in the Twilight Zone.

When Cooke confronts her about Trump’s 24-hour flip-flop on whether to defund Planned Parenthood, she’s actually reduced to arguing that that doesn’t prove he’s not conservative, merely that he was ignorant of how the group is funded because he’s not a professional politician. Trump 2016: Easily rolled by liberals because he doesn’t know the issues, but definitely conservative.

Coulter’s not really representative of the big-name conservatives mentioned by Beck in his post because she’s been more open to centrist Republican presidential nominees than they have in the past. She used to love Chris Christie until his Senate appointee in New Jersey voted for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill. She loves Mitt Romney even now, having once gone so far as to write a defense of RomneyCare(!) in the middle of the 2012 primary. That’s not to say her support for Trump isn’t weird, because it is — one thing Christie and Romney had in common circa 2012 was that they were among the GOP’s most electable options. If you wanted to be charitable to Coulter, you could have defended her at the time by claiming that she was merely interested in maximizing the party’s chances of winning. Trump does … not maximize our chances. Still, if she was willing to tolerate conservative heresies from Christie and Romney, it’s no great surprise that she’d tolerate them from him too. Especially since, with his “Mexican rapists” comment early on, he injected one of Coulter’s core themes — crime committed by illegals, a key part of her new book — into the presidential debate. In fact, Coulter defends Romney to this day principally because he pushed self-deportation as a solution to illegal immigration in 2012. She may not be a single-issue voter but immigration appears to be her number one, by far. And Trump’s the guy who’s making the GOP establishment squirm on that point, never mind the fact that he’s awfully squishy on what he’d do about illegals himself.

As for what Beck says about Hannity, Rush, Ingraham, et al., who are normally quick to call out RINOs for their departures from conservative orthodoxy but seem willing to extend Trump an infinite line of credit, you tell me. My theory is that they’re enjoying his anti-establishment fireworks too but that mostly they’re trying to stay on the right side of their audience by not coming after him. They’re perceived in the wider media and among the GOP establishment as conduits to the Republican base; they articulate the concerns of grassroots conservatives and shape opinion about what the grassroots should properly be concerned about. If they go after Trump as a fake and listeners revolt (Erick Erickson’s still getting hate mail a week after disinviting Trump from the Red State Gathering), it’ll be seen as proof that they’re not as much in tune with the base as they thought. Essentially, their own status as supreme channelers of populist conservatism would be trumped by the cult of Trump. That’s not a fight worth picking, especially this early in the campaign. I’d be curious to know what Beck, himself a famous anti-establishmentarian and a guy who sees this from the inside, thinks is the reason his colleagues are falling in line for Trump. It can’t be that they think he’s really a conservative who’d be as principled in resisting Democrats as president as, say, Ted Cruz would be. Can it?

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"Just today on the air, he was comparing Trump to Perot. ...
Rush knows what we all know.
Trump is a useful idiot."

I looked for that in todays transcript and I just don't see it.

Carly on Hillary, Rather on Trump -- and Dr. Carson on What Ails America August 14, 2015 ... RUSH: ... CNN last night, Don Lemon speaking with host of the TV show called The Big Interview. This would be Dan Rather, about the presidential race. Don Lemon said,"Have you ever seen anything like this Trump stuff? You ever seen anything like this in all of your years covering politics?" RATHER: I have not. I'm fond of saying I've been to goat-ropings and space shots and been covering presidential campaigns a long time. I've never seen anything like this... Many Republicans fear...He's definitely tapped into something. And I know that the other Republican candidates see him as sort of a sun-powered, perpetual motion, all-American bull-shine machine, but a large section of his party doesn't see him that way. RUSH: Right. So Dan Rather thinks he's in for the long haul."You ever heard of goat roping? Can't say that I have, either. But Dan Rather... (interruption) He been to one. And... (interruption) "I'm fond of saying I've been to goat-ropings and space shots and been covering presidential campaigns a long time. I've never seen anything like this." He was around when the Perot phenomenon was happening. Would he not...? How many of you people think that the Perot think is vastly different from what's happening now? How many of you think it's much the same thing? I mean, Perot?Can anybody say third party? There was no pledge from Perot. I mean, Perot... You know, you look at the differences in Perot and Trump. Snerdley, off the top of your head can you cite any? I know it's an unfair question because there are some things. (interruption) Well, yeah, Perot didn't brag about how rich he was, but he did in his own way, and others did it for him. He didn't do it exactly as Trump does, but I'll give you an example. He's out there describing how the federal government wastes money. (impression)"Hell! Hell, Larry! You know, they're running around and they're buying all these 737s and 757s. Hell, I don't need all that! I have two of 'em myself. What you need to do is get a bunch of Lear 55s. You can save about $150 billion and get rid of..." Well, how does he know that? So it was subtle (chuckles), but it was the same thing. I think there was a... How many of you in this audience...? Let me just ask you.I know I can't see your hands raise, but how many of you think that Trump is in this to win it.? That's the big question. Snerdley, you think Trump's in this to win it? (interruption) Snerdley says he don't know.Dawn, you think Trump's in this to win it? Dawn thinks he is.Brian? No? Don't know, or don't think he's in to win it? Brian doesn't know, and I can tell by the way he's saying it, he doesn't care. So how many of you think Trump's in it to win it? I can tell you Perot was never in it to win it, and that was a huge factor. That was important to me. How do I know that? How did I know that, do you mean ... ? Because it was borne out to be true.He quit when it looked like he was gonna win! I knew... (interruption) I predicted he would get out. I predicted IF it looked like he was gonna win, he would get out 'cause he didn't WANT to win. I mean, what was that thing? He didn't go somewhere,somebody didn't go to his event 'cause some daughter was getting married or some such thing. I happened to find out WHAT Ross Perot's REASON for getting into the race was, and it was PERSONAL. I have a lot of respect for Ross Perot. You can't take his achievement away from him. You can't. He's a unique, genuine American in a whole lot of ways, but I knew he did NOT WANT to win the presidency. That first speech he gave at the National Press Club that got all this attention... I'll never forget Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens was on C-SPAN the next day. There was some authors hour or some such thing, and Perot the previous day, they televised a speech he had given the National Press Club where he just railed against the irresponsibility of Washington and the spending and HOW he would fix it."They're flying around in 737s, Larry, and 757s! Get rid of all that. Get some Lear 55s. That's all the people running our government need. They don't need to stand up in there. Got room to sit, that's fine, fine for everybody. Nobody else stands up in airplanes; why should they?" All right, fine, the next day on C-SPAN, when it was time to take calls, every call to Christopher Hitchens was about Ross Perot and he had no idea what had happened. So he's getting all these question from C-SPAN viewers who had seen Perot the day before or maybe a couple days before and about 30 or 45 minutes into this Hitchens said,"I'm very much uninformed here. There's something happening that I'm totally unaware of." He was there to talk about his book and nobody cared about that. They wanted to talk about what they'd seen Perot do. But Perot didn't do that speech to win the ... he didn't even .... wasn't even thinking about running at that point, and he I know that he didn't INTEND to win. I don't know that ABOUT Trump.

So Rush DID NOT SAY that Trump was NOT in it to WIN.
Rush has an entirely different thought about Trump.

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