As execrable as those highly misleading beliefs would be if earnestly held, it is arguably worse for a man to disingenuously stoke xenophobia to advance his political prospects.

Thus it is worth noting that, after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, Donald Trump told the website Newsmax that Republicans would continue to lose elections if they came across as mean-spirited and unwelcoming to people of color. Democrats were kind toward illegal immigrants, Trump said, whereas Romney “had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.” He added that the GOP needs a comprehensive solution to “this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful, productive citizens of this country.”

These discordant statements praising and savaging immigrants are not entirely unlike one another—they’re both framed as bold efforts to tell it like it is. Donald Trump is a master at that affectation. He seems as if he is fearlessly stating his core convictions, consequences be damned, even when he is being a shameless poseur.

Some conservatives understand this.

At National Review, where Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Herman Cain, the populist poseurs of the last election cycle, were treated with as much respect as contempt, the rise of Donald Trump has been met with a mix of horror and open disdain.“I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played,” Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, wrote. “I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.”



Other National Review writers concurred. “Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes,” Jim Geraghty wrote. Ramesh Ponnuru noted Trump’s bygone support for legal late-term abortion. Rich Lowry, who wrote an ill-considered Politico column using Trump’s remarks as if they were a good peg to persuade people to cut back on legal immigration, has criticized him for failing to adequately learn about the subject matter he is discussing, calling some of his remarks on immigration “completely absurd.”

Says Mona Charen, not to be outdone:

It seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate, including Hispanic and Asian voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.

And even that biting criticism cannot compete with the derisive takedowns of Kevin Williamson, who has recently published the following remarks about The Donald: