Donald Trump – who accused the GOP of being “mean-spirited” toward immigrants as late as 2012 and donated more to Democrats than Republicans in the mid-2000s – is nobody’s idea of a real conservative. Among other things, he is an enthusiastic backer of the US supreme court’s decision in Kelo v New London, which substantially broadened the government’s power to invoke eminent domain and seize private property for private commercial interests. But given that undocumented immigrants are the backbone of the hospitality industry, a real estate and hotel mogul railing against illegal immigration is a compelling testimony against personal interest.

Donald Trump's Latino comments are just GOP orthodoxy in a cruder shell | Jeb Lund Read more

When Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists against facts and basic civility, it elicited little more than a wag of the finger from other heavyweights in the GOP. But the moment he went after a party stalwart who served in the military, the calls began from within his own party for him to drop out of the race. Bill Kristol, who had archly argued that Trump would be a better president than Hillary Clinton and defended him in interviews, backtracked on Sunday and hinted that it might be the end for Trump.

Still, Trump’s comments on Senator John McCain – pulled from a 15-year-old joke Al Franken made before becoming the senator from Minnesota – came just in time for Trump’s competitors, as a few polls last week showed him at the top of the GOP pile. Most of that pile used the opportunity to engage in the kind of competitive sanctimony more common on the political left these days, condemning Trump in strong terms. Rick Perry, a man who once bragged about jogging with a loaded pistol, declared Trump “unfit to be commander in chief,” and called on him to “immediately withdraw from the race.”

Trump’s comments, which reports indicated seemed to suggest that McCain’s service in Vietnam was diminished by having been taken prisoner, were hedged because, as Sharyl Atkisson points out, in full, Trump said that McCain is both a hero and not a hero (if Sydney Schanberg is correct that McCain helped suppress evidence we left POWs in Vietnam, that certainly would diminish his legacy). And, as has been less widely reported, Trump was responding to McCain’s statements to Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, that Trump had “fired up the crazies,” and that the mogul’s rally in Arizona was “hurtful to me.”

His critics on the right, however, pale in comparison to those on the left, who eschew specific policy condemnation in favor of an extremely boring kind of mockery. There’s a popular blog out there that uses Jon Stewart’s nickname for Trump in all its coverage, and news coverage is full of phrases like “carnival barker”, “clown”, “rodeo clown”, “carnival sideshow” and “circus sideshow”. The only thing stupider than the mad rush to denounce Trump on the left and now the right is the way that comedians talk about him, as if they could just walk on stage, say his name and the audience would erupt in laughter. Donald Trump, amirite? Comedy gold! Don’t you get it?

Hamilton Nolan of Gawker correctly, if condescendingly, captured Trump’s appeal to the masses:



What accounts for Trump’s wide appeal are the facts that he thinks and speaks about political issues with the same level of contemplation and refinement as most of the voting public.

In other words, Trump and most non-liberal voters are equally stupid, or else they’d be liberal voters. This is an explanation that actually fits with the New York Times’s analysis, that “the predominant force” behind Trump is not an anti-immigration groundswell but “extraordinary and sustained media coverage.” It’s nice to hear an admission that the media is helping to drive the Trump phenomenon, but We don’t like Trump because we think he’s as stupid as you are probably gets at the codependent heart of it a little better.

FDR once said, when stumping to federalize hydroelectric power, “judge me by the enemies I’ve made.” Roosevelt certainly had more interesting detractors than Trump, another would-be national CEO. Whether that makes Trump better or worse, I couldn’t tell you.