Free Republic

When the people vote against democracy.The social media hashtag #NeverTrump first appeared in June 2015, days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. For the balance of that year, social media derision attracted less attention than Trump himself, mostly due to the widespread belief that Trump’s campaign was self-extinguishing, which argued against pointless efforts to bring about an already inevitable defeat. In election cycles since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory, unlikely protest candidates for the GOP presidential nomination—Pat Robertson, Ron Paul, Herman Cain—had briefly surged in the polls, only to give way to a conventional politician who ended up as...

Of all the arguments against Donald Trump, the softest has been his poor prospects for victory in the general election. True, he has consistently polled worse against Hillary Clinton than have Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and virtually every other person who ran. But polls change. And if Trump were to win the Republican nomination, it would be such an earthquake that the political order might be transformed. Clinton, moreover, has huge vulnerabilities. She lacks many basic political skills, and she is a hostage to fortune—in both the usual way, as the heir to an incumbent president, and in the unusual...

This week provided yet another opportunity to compare George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Again, our president came up a bit short. Blair had a brilliant and compelling essay in the Guardian over the weekend. Give it a read. Then look at the transcript of Bush's April 13 press conference. A few differences stand out in particular. First, Blair's language allows that he understands our success in Iraq is a very open question. Bush speaks with astonishing--and, to me at least, vaguely unsettling--certitude on nearly every issue: the viability of democracy in an Islamic, Middle Eastern state; the question of...