If you listen to Glenn Beck and other #nevertrump conservatives, you would think there is an ironclad guarantee that Trump will lose. As it turns out, this is wishful thinking on their part. On July 19, Victor Davis Hanson penned a piece in The National Review. In it he explains why Trump can win. Here are some highlights with a link to the full article below:
When critics are not slurring Trump as Hitler or Mussolini, they write him off, in sloppy fashion, as a dangerous populist — at worst an hysterical, demagogic Huey Long, at best a quirky Ross Perot: in other words, a flash in the pan who capitalizes on occasional but brief surges of Neanderthal isolationism, protectionism, nativism, xenophobia, and collective insecurity among the lower middle classes. That diagnosis is rehashed groupthink. By any definition, Trump is not a classical populist. His traction derives from opposing unchecked and cynical illegal immigration, not diverse and measured legal immigration. And he is rebelling not so much against a flabby, sclerotic status quo as against a radical, even revolutionary regime of elites who are now well beyond accustomed norms. It is hardly radical to oppose the Confederate doctrine of legal nullification in more than 300 sanctuary cities, or a de facto open border with Mexico, or doubling the national debt in eight years, or ruining the nation’s health-care system with the most radical reconstruction in the history of American health-care policy, or systematically running huge trade deficits with an autocratic China that does not adhere to international norms of free trade and predicates expanding political and military power in the South China Sea on its commercial mercantilism. Trump seemed incendiary in the primaries, but as he is juxtaposed to the official Clinton extremist agenda, he will likely be reinterpreted increasingly as more mainstream — a probability enhanced by his selection of Mike Pence as his running-mate…
Trump struggles with embarrassing misdemeanors, Clinton with high crimes. She may be delighted at not having been indicted, but FBI Director Comey confirmed to the nation that she was an inveterate liar, paranoid, conspiratorial, and incompetent. That she was not charged only made the FBI seem absurd: offering a damning hooved, horned, pitchforked, and forked-tailed portrait of someone mysteriously not a denizen of Hell. Add in the Clinton Foundation syndicate and the fact that lies are lies and often do not fade so easily, and Hillary in the next 15 weeks may average one “liar” and “crooked” disclosure each week — at a rate that even the Trump tax returns and Trump University cannot keep up with…
Trump seems extremist in speech, but as the campaign wears on, Hillary may confirm that she is more extremist in fact. It may well be that voters would prefer a brash-talking pragmatist to sober and judicious ideologues. Sloppy talk about temporarily limiting immigration from the Middle East is not so injurious as contrived efforts never to utter the phrase “radical Islam.” Clinton, Obama, and Sanders have moved the Democratic party radically to the left; Trump in some areas has pushed the Republican party to the center. The voter terrified of ISIS, record debt, the spiraling cost of his health care, perceived U.S. decline, and the seemingly violent racial Balkanization of the country — but not terrified of gay marriage or tough trade talks with China — may find Clinton, not Trump, the true radical…
The relative closeness of polling in key swing states already suggests that the Reagan Democrats and other Trump converts may either be more numerous than the Never Trump establishment or at least more numerous outside of coastal, and electorally irrelevant, blue states like California and New York — and thus more significant as swing-state adjudicators. In addition, traditional media, in which Never Trump views are most frequently aired, are themselves growing ossified and do not reach voters to the same degree as outlets like the Drudge Report, Breitbart News, and talk radio. In my rural California community, when I meet pro-Trump welders, farmers, and tractor drivers of all races and backgrounds, I try to ask them just one question: Did you vote for Romney? So far 0 percent of that cohort of probably over 100 Central Valley residents said they had turned out for Romney in 2012. Again, the new Trump voters may not be numerous nationwide, but they may be able to swing one or two purple states. Also, it may be more likely that a Never Trumper will weaken and quietly vote Trump in November as he grows aghast at the weekly Clinton circus. The Trump buffooneries may well be more than matched by Clinton’s ideological insanities…
For all his lack of discipline, the media-seasoned Trump is still the better and more robust campaigner. His liabilities — bouts of outer-space incoherence, unfamiliarity with basic issues, sloppiness in diction, a personal cruel streak — are balanced by a TV host’s sense of audience, timing, and cadence. Hillary is the far more disciplined politico, but she is not so much uncharismatic as downright off-putting. Even on those rare occasions when she listens to her new voice-coach handlers and speaks quietly and deliberately, she still comes off not as reassuring, much less engaging, but rather as artificially trying her best not to revert to her natural screech-owl elocution. Heartfelt recklessness can sometimes wear better than packaged sobriety…
We have a long way to go till November 8, and the odds are still with Hillary’s establishment money, influence, power, and media. There will be dozens of Trump meltdowns and gaffes to come and always more slams at “crooked” Hillary. And never count out what narcissists like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — or Vladimir Putin — might do, or Obama’s Chicago-like warping of the electoral process. Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, an unlikely Donald Trump has become a liberal’s worst nightmare, not so much for what he says or represents, but because he still could win — and win in a way, along with the Congress and the prospect of a new Supreme Court, that we have not witnessed in 80 years.
Read the full article here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438011/trump-clinton-endgame
BeadprayingCatholic
If it was a fair election, Trump would win, but my concern is how the dark side progressive powers in charge are going to steal the election. What we need is for every State Governor to enforce Voter I D. If the other side is as evil as we believe them to be, they will stop at Nothing and I do mean Nothing in order to insure their domination to establish a One World Order and a a One World Religion.
Alana Forsyth
His name is Hanson, not Hansen.
Chris Jackson
Thank you. Corrected now.