Story highlights Former Reagan solicitor general: Clinton was right to call out Trump for his ties to the extreme right

Charles Fried: Trump is a man about whom the best you can say is that he doesn't believe anything he says

Charles Fried is the former solicitor general of the United States for President Ronald Reagan. He is currently a professor at Harvard Law School. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author.



(CNN) It was urgent that Hillary Clinton in her Reno speech indict Donald Trump for his regular, unremitting embrace of the slogans, causes and emblems of the far right (not conservative, please!) hate-mongering fringe of our public discourse.

This is not just an accidental association. It is his chosen signature. Remember, he was an enthusiastic birther and has gone on to embrace every sinister paranoid fantasy since.

These are not ghosts you can raise just when it seems convenient or because a particular crowd might thrill to them and then when the time comes to govern you can waive aside and pretend you never summoned them. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. And these fleas carry the disease of virulent hatred and discord.

I have a sense for these things. I am not, like Judge Gonzalo Curiel, just the child of immigrants but an immigrant myself. I was four years old when my family and I fled Prague just after the Nazis invaded. I was 13 when I raised my hand and swore an oath of allegiance to the United States and became a citizen. That was a privilege and it was an even greater privilege when Chief Justice Warren Burger administered a very similar oath to me and I was able to serve my country and the Constitution as Ronald Reagan's solicitor general.

I am a student of the history of the man and the movement who drove me and my family out of a young but prosperous and real democracy. He ranted and gestured and whipped up his people with streams of hatred and invective for those he accused of betraying them, stabbing them in the back, polluting their "race," and promised that, if the people would follow him, tomorrow would belong to them.

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