Posted on 10/01/2018 11:13:55 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The tribalization of conservatism.
Late on the afternoon of October 7, 2016, I texted an old friend, fellow Wisconsinite Reince Priebus. The Access Hollywood videotape had just been released, showing the GOP presidential nominee describing his approach to seducing and perhaps assaulting women. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,” Donald Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
In the course of his campaign, Trump had insulted POWs, women, disabled reporters, members of minority groups, and his opponents without derailing his candidacy. But this felt like it might be different, and events were moving quickly.
Trump was due to visit Wisconsin the next day for a rally with Speaker Paul Ryan, their first joint appearance of the campaign. Relations between Trump and Ryan had been fraught, with the speaker accusing his party’s nominee of “textbook racism” while Trump derided the speaker as “our very weak and ineffective leader.” The Wisconsin event was the culmination of Priebus’s peacemaking efforts. Like other members of the GOP mainstream, Priebus had been a Trump skeptic, but as chairman of the Republican National Committee he had embraced Trump’s candidacy with apparent enthusiasm. He was also one of Ryan’s best friends, so the joint event would be a symbol of his efforts to normalize Trump’s candidacy and rally the disparate wings of the GOP behind the erratic billionaire.
But now all of Priebus’s friends and colleagues from Wisconsin would have to stand on stage with their pussy-grabbing nominee. It would be the photo-op from hell, a month before the general election.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Indeed. By the end of this, “patriotism” will literally be defined as tribalism, i.e racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry.
Neoconartists whining about tribalism? Oh, my. Too rich.
Love it.
No, the author is quite correct. The stripped down budget that Trump submitted to Congress was the paradigm of government fiscal retrenchment. The GOP laughed at it as they threw the budget in the dumpster and passed another chronically deficit-laden spending bill. The GOP carries all the blame, Trump none of it.
-—No, the author is quite correct.——
No, the author is the one claiming Trump doesn’t deserve all these conservative accolades because of the deficit.
You’re helping my point, not his. It doesn’t matter who the President is, Congress has always been full of profligate spenders.
No President of either Party has ever gotten a real handle on the deficit or debt. They can’t force Congress to make massive spending cuts, and if they continually refuse to sign something that they’re sent, they’ll be politically blamed.
There’s no political will to balance the budget, and hasn’t been for generations.
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