Recently, National Review, the premier voice for conservatism, came out with an entire issue dedicated to exposing Donald Trump as a fraud. As they expected, the backlash has been incredible. You can’t question the Trump without expecting to be demonized. This will cost the magazine membership, money and in the short term, influence. However, as Jonah Goldberg, one of the top writers for the magazine puts it, “this may have been their finest moment.”
Anyone who reads my column on a regular basis, knows that I am not exactly an honored member of the Republican establishment. In fact, I often go to great lengths to make sure that I am not seen as a Republican, but as a libertarian leaning conservative writer who supports politics and politicians that lean the same way.
Regardless, at the beginning of this election cycle, I was somewhat pleased with the Republican Party’s line up. Now, however, they are all at each other’s throats, and the Republican primary has morphed into a reality TV show where morals and values count for nothing and the only goal is to do whatever you must to stay in the game.
The vanguards of this fiasco are many Republicans who have rightly felt abandoned and ignored by the Republican establishment. Leading the troops is Trump.
However, listen closely to him. He never speaks of protecting freedoms, decreasing government size or honoring Constitutional limits on power. He only promises that he can manage things better than the current regime. Like Mussolini, he can keep the trains running on time. Just because Trump appears anti-establishment (in reality he has been playing the system for years) does not make him conservative.
Trump is an entertainer and he is pulling all the right strings to fire up many of the disenfranchised in the GOP base. Many of them, too busy with life to explore the details, only see the rebel hero -standing up to political correctness and politics as usual.
That is understandable – but this next fact is weird.
Thirty-six percent of Republican voters who say that conservatism is the most important trait for their candidate, also nominate Trump as their first choice.
Trump is no conservative.
This 36 percent either do not understand conservatism, or only know Trump through his politically incorrect sound bites.
Below are some comments posted in the recent National Review anti-Trump edition. Consider what these well-known, well informed conservatives think.
Mona Charen: “But one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative—he’s simply playing one in the primaries. Call it unreality TV…When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.”
Glen Beck: Sure, Trump’s potential primary victory would provide Hillary Clinton with the easiest imaginable path to the White House. But it’s far worse than that. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government.
David Boaz: Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America.
Mark Helprin: forget trying to determine whether he’s a conservative. Given that, at the suggestion of Bill Clinton, he has like a tapeworm invaded the schismatically weakened body of the Republican party, it’s a pointless question, because, like Allah in Islamic theology, he is whatever he pleases to be at the moment, the only principle being the triumph of his will.
David McIntosh: Trump beguiles us, defies the politically correct media, and bullies anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes. None of that makes him a conservative who cherishes liberty.
Russell Moore: Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy that Neil Postman warned us about years ago, in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of “winning” for the masses.”
Yet Trump gets away with it. He is like a chameleon constantly changing colors to fit the surroundings that suit him best. Just last week he declared, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
The majority of the Republican Party still does not support Trump. Plus, he has the highest disapproval figures in the pack. Hopefully, the rest of the party can coalesce around someone … anyone that a true conservative can vote for.
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