08/14/2015
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available free on VDARE.com.]We're so used to hearing Leftist lunacy from the mouths of show-business airheads, it’s refreshing to know that there are those willing to give a word of praise, or at least semi-praise, to Donald Trump even among the glitterati. Or perhaps it’s not surprising; you could make a case, I suppose, that Trump himself is a glitterato … glitteratus, whatever.
Leaving that side, let’s just relish these words from a TV actor whose last hit show I greatly enjoyed. Quote:
There’s something so refreshing about shaking up that world that is all about being handled and here comes this loose cannon who has terrible ideas and would be a horrible president, but there’s something great about his "I-don’t-give-a-shit" attitude that really kind of keeps others honest. I think it’s a surprise benefit to the country, actually.[ Bryan Cranston: ‘Something So Refreshing About Donald Trump’,by Charlie Spiering, Breitbart, August 14, 2015]That was Bryan Cranston, a/k/a/ Walter White of the TV show Breaking Bad. Yeah, it’s a back-handed compliment — "Terrible ideas"? What, like enforcing the people’s laws on immigration and settlement? "Horrible president"? Compared to whom? Barack Obama? — but Cranston has grasped something: a whole lot of citizens have had it with the timid, mealy-mouthed, don’t-offend-anyone mumblings of our bought-and-sold professional pols.
Donald as Walter White and the GOP as Hank the brother-in-law … except the Stupid Party is even slower on the uptake than Hank was.
As a Trump supporter, I wish he'd start doing a little work on the gravitas thing. But then, again as a Trump supporter, I’m glad to see that neither the Thursday, August 6 debate nor his Friday follow-up about Fox’s Megyn Kelly seems to have dented his support.
Polls at midweek showed Trump ahead of the rest of the GOP field both among likely GOP primary votes nationally and among likely Iowa caucus-goers.
(And there’s this just in, from the Deep South: Donald Trump leads Alabama primary poll, by Howard Koplowitz, AL.com, August 13, 2015.)
So the archangel Gabriel has not yet sounded the Last Trump. The Donald marches on. We're already hearing him called the Teflon Don. That’s the tag that used to be attached to late Mafioso John Gotti because of the feds' inability to make charges against him stick. At last they did make something stick, and Gotti died in jail.
So Teflon works…until it doesn’t. That’s just by way of a caution to Trump and his handlers.
Meanwhile, however, Trump is doing the Lord’s work shaking up the GOP side of the 2016 campaign. There were the professional pols in the August 6th debate, reading the focus-group-tested answers from their shirt cuffs; and there was Trump breaking the rules of genteel politics, rattling the GOP teacups and refusing the cucumber sandwiches.
The reason we Trump supporters like the guy so much is precisely that following the rules has gotten us — us patriotic conservatives — nowhere.
Following the rules got us eight years of George W. Bush, who gave us Open Borders, missionary wars, and "When somebody hurts, Government has got to move." Then it got us eight years of Barack Obama, who gave us Open Borders, Amnesty for foreign scofflaws, radical-left Supreme Court justices, and eighteen trillion dollars of debt.
Maybe if we knock over a few teacups and throw the cucumber sandwiches around, we'll get some conservative policies at last. Hey, it’s worth a try.
So Trump is king of the GOP jungle. But if Trump is Cecil the Lion, who’s going to play the part of Dr. Walt Palmer?
First in the audition line is the GOP Establishment. Bigfoot Establishment commentator George Will and former George W. Bush staffer Michael Gerson this week called for the party to purge Trump. National Review has been running anti-Trump diatribes for a month now. Make no mistake: What my VDARE.com colleague Peter Brimelow calls "Conservatism, Inc." hate the guy and want him out of the race.
However, there are two problems with that: mutually exclusive problems, but problems none the less.
If Trump is scrubbed from the GOP roster, then he will either run as an independent, or else he won’t.
If he runs as an independent, his supporters, who really like him, and who would otherwise mostly be GOP voters, will vote for him anyway, handing the Presidency to the Democrats 1992-style.
If Trump is tossed out of the GOP and decides not to run as an independent, leaving the GOP ticket to some lackluster Chambers of Commerce sock puppet, disgruntled Trump fans will tune out and stay home on election day, as they did when Romney ran in 2012, again delivering the Presidency to the party of Amnesty, public-sector unions, and Al Sharpton.
So minus Trump in the GOP field, the betting is on a rerun of either 1992 or 2012. Pat Buchanan, in a brilliant column this Thursday, referred to the 1992 scenario as "the Samson Option."
With respect to Pat, I’m not sure they will. This is, after all, the Stupid Party we're talking about.Trump should tell the GOP that if it disrespects him and his followers, then he is prepared to do as did the biblical hero Samson, when, blinded and mocked by the Philistines, he pushed the pillars apart and brought the temple down upon the heads of them all.
The Republican Establishment will understand that.
One more quote from Pat:
Thursday, the Census Bureau revealed that a record 42.1 million immigrants, here legally and illegally, are in the U.S., a population explosion being driven by Mexicans still flooding across the border.The Establishment GOP answers to Pat’s questions are: Yes, it’s xenophobic, and yes, it’s outrageous. Now shut up and vote.Is it "xenophobic" to ask if Americans approve of this historic change in the composition and character of the country they love?
Is it outrageous to ask whether there is a correlation between this massive infusion of unskilled and semi-skilled labor from the Third World, and the stagnant and falling wages of native-born Americans?
We may be at the end of the era when attitudes like that win elections for the GOP
I don’t know how all this is going to play out, and nor does anyone else. I’m glad Trump’s in the race, and I’m glad he’s doing what he’s doing. It needs doing.
Here’s this week’s suggestion for Trump from Radio Derb.
Sir: You've opened up the immigration issue, which was badly in need of opening up. Now go for some focus. Pick a particular aspect of the immigration issue and hammer on it.A moratorium on immigration: Come on Donald, get the M-word in play!My suggestion: an immigration moratorium. Just get the word in circulation: a moratorium. You can spin it positive: "We've taken in a lot of people this past fifty years, let’s take a breather so they can assimilate, as happened 1924-65 …"
Something like that.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.