Catholic writer Austin Bay explains exactly where the nevertrumpers break down. His piece on observer.com is entitled, “To All the Peter Pan Republicans: Trump Bests Captain Crook Clinton; The businessman succeeds where the GOP has failed.” If you are a nevertrumper or if you know a nevertrumper, I highly encourage you to read and share Bay’s piece in full here: http://observer.com/2016/07/to-all-the-peter-pan-republicans-trump-bests-captain-crook-clinton/
Until you do, here are some highlights:
Donald Trump will be 2016’s Republican presidential candidate. He won the nomination by boldly and relentlessly addressing difficult political and social issues that his opponents preferred to either avoid or carefully finesse. He damned political and media hacks who run down America. When racist fanatics murdered cops Trump demanded law and order. A convincing plurality of Republican primary voters appreciated bold and relentless, supported law and order, and piled on the anti-American jerks who blame America.
That plurality gave Trump over 13 million votes—an all-time Republican presidential primary record. The number is a hard fact, one that Trump’s most bitter detractors cannot dismiss without loss of moral and intellectual integrity. To do so would wage War On Honesty.
Let’s stipulate that Trump is quite a character—a startling mix of flamboyance, authenticity and audacious savvy that America hasn’t seen since Teddy Roosevelt. Trump’s been on the planet seven decades. He may be a newbie to the game of national politics but he’s no newbie to the complexity of life. As a businessman he doesn’t have a record for hiring yes-men and yes-women (I refuse to write yes-people), which tells me Trump expects and values legitimate criticism and opposition. As president he’ll encounter such opposition on a daily basis. That’s America, folks—when America works. Disagreement and fruitful discussion help make a free America Great Again.
But bitter detractors dedicated to undermining Trump, despite his convincing primary win? That strikes me as another matter entirely.
Though the #NeverTrump movement within the Republican Party has faded, I doubt it has entirely succumbed. Based on what I read, Washington Post Writers Group columnist, baseball fan and conservative-approved-by-liberals George Will remains in NeverTrumpLand. It appears he intends to stay there. He may be constructing a bunker, or perhaps a compound.
In their fictional clashes, Neverland’s perpetually adolescent Peter Pan and his Lost Boys—no matter the sword play and dire straits—eventually bested the villainous Captain Hook and his pirate crew.
How wonderful escapist fiction, where pre-pubescents fly if they just believe.
But GetRealLand’s a bitch of a place, where you wake up and the accelerating whine you hear isn’t dream noise but an incoming 82 millimeter mortar round.
NeverTrumpLand’s childish Sore Losers don’t thwart the ambitions of America’s all-too-real Captain Crook—Hillary Clinton—and her privileged Clinton Foundation cronies. Quite the opposite. In GetRealLand Sore Losers become Crooked Hillary’s political tools.
If Sore Losers tell themselves otherwise, in Washington Post op-eds, or over a glass of crisp Chablis, or in George Will’s demonstrably principled bunker—they’re waging War On Honesty…
By now I’ve read at least four dozen essays by conservatives, libertarians and Republican stalwarts that seriously weigh Trump’s strengths and weaknesses. There are several themes—but I’ll summarize one I find most compelling.
Viscerally despising President Trump as a personality might be justifiable, Trump’s policy inclinations might well be bull-headed if not wrong-headed, and his flamboyant rhetoric may prove to be a diplomatic problem—but all of these dislikes, downsides and theoretical worries are far preferable to living under Clinton’s guaranteed lawless rule and demonstrated incompetence.
The American people don’t trust her. She combines a salacious scandal sheet with a criminal rap sheet. When she screams misogynist everyone knows she should be yelling at Bill.
Everyone knows this. The Democrat propaganda machine routinely portrays Republicans as callous, heartless, mean-spirited. Hillary flips the narrative.
Consider the speech delivered on the first night of the Republican National Convention by Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith who was slain in the September 11, 2012 assault by Islamist terrorists on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
“I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. Personally, in an email to her daughter, Hillary Clinton blamed it on—shortly after the attack—terrorism, but when I saw Hillary Clinton, she lied to me and then called me a liar. Since then, I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to ask [for] the real reason why my son is dead. I’m still waiting. Whenever I call the State Department, no one would speak to me because they say I am not a member of the immediate family… Sean was my son. Hillary Clinton is a woman, a mother, a grandmother of two. I am a woman, a mother, and a mother of two. How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not… He is blunt, direct, and strong. He speaks his mind and his heart. And when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorist who threaten American lives…. He will make America stronger, not weaker… This entire campaign comes down to a single question: If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?”
Lawless. Incompetent. Greedy. A callous liar. A proven national security risk.
Trump might struggle in a crisis—might. In GetRealLand’s Benghazi bloodletting, Hillary Clinton was a total failure. And then she lied about it, insistently blaming a crackpot video when she knew the attack was the work of an Al Qaeda affiliate. Hillary Clinton waged a Total War On Honesty to protect Obama’s 2012 self-serving and totally false campaign claim that terrorism was waning and the tide of war receding…
Here’s the future history insight: Trump is doing America and the world a great service by refusing to capitulate to mainstream media narrative frames which not only cripple free speech and the open exchange of ideas by free people, but insult human intelligence. Early on Donald Trump identified the biased U.S. media as a threat to democracy because its heinous pro-Democrat slant wages War on Honesty.
I recently reviewed Don Surber’s new book, TRUMP THE PRESS—a professional journalist’s exercise in factual due diligence. Surber documents—in arrogance-stripping detail—media bias, ineptitude, exaggeration and failure to learn from self-inflicted, unforced errors.
Surber argues “People mistook his [Trump’s] extemporaneous speaking style for being undisciplined, but he had mastered speaking from an outline instead of a script.” Whatever happened, Trump continued to win “the news cycles” and he did so by “being newsworthy.”
Trump succeeded in doing something Republican strategists and campaign geniuses have failed to do since 1932: smack down an ideologically hostile press…
George Will says he is no longer a Republican. OK, he’s still a free man, he can choose. By Washington acclamation he’s an intellectual. But, when the stakes are weighed, Will is just another Lost Boy.