(Scott Olson/Getty)

In the last few days we’ve entered into a new phase in the campaign: Paul Manafort, the designated grownup in the Trump palace, has embarked on persuading Donald Trump to stop his degrading Twitter rants, and on persuading the RNC to learn to love its new, likely, master. “That’s what’s important for you to understand,” Manafort told the RNC. “That he gets it, and that the part he’s playing is evolving.”


Seen in this light, it is not clear that Trump’s decision to disappoint the pro-life movement by abandoning the strong party-platform language that pro-life advocates have worked for years to insert is actually a misstep rather than a tactical shift.

Or that Trump’s nearly simultaneous decision to throw the people of North Carolina, now under fierce attack by Hollywood and Silicon Valley, under the bus is also not intentional.

The professional political class hates social conservatism. Ana Navarro, the unfiltered voice of the Washington professional GOP, immediately tweeted her derision for the North Carolina law, saying she couldn’t imagine how to enforce the “bathroom stall police.”

Ted Cruz once again showed he understands who is responsible. He correctly told Glenn Beck: “You’ve got the Obama Education Department suing to try to force junior highs to let teenage boys shower with teenage girls.”



RELATED: Godot Will Arrive before the New, ‘Presidential’ Trump

Beck seemed unaware of the fact. It has received scant media coverage. (I am trying to imagine some equivalent GOP-crafted education regulation that would be ignored by radio talk-show hosts and most of TV, including Fox News.)

Ted Cruz spoke up for the vast majority of Americans when he said:

That’s crazy! It’s just — that’s not a reasonable position. It’s simply crazy. And the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls — you don’t need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize bad things can happen. And any prudent person wouldn’t allow that, and it is only the lunacy of political correctness. ESPN has fired Curt Schilling for making the rather obvious point that we shouldn’t allow grown adult men strangers alone in a bathroom with little girls. That’s a point anyone who is rational should understand. . . . There are some bad people in the world, and we shouldn’t be facilitating putting little girls alone in bathrooms with grown adult men. That is just a bad, bad, bad idea.



Trump, in contrast, shrugged his shoulders and said, Just let it be. That, of course, is one of the problems conservatives face: The Left uses government power to aggressively shift the cultural norms of every small town in America, and the GOP says, “Let it be. Get back to business as usual.” This is the one-sided truce that is destroying not just American comity and liberty but the GOP coalition.

#share#

Governor Pat McCrory, a real hero against political correctness and the Left’s aggression, immediately fired back in a statement released by his reelection campaign:

Governor McCrory has always said that North Carolina was getting along fine before the Charlotte city council passed its unneeded and overreaching ordinance. Now that it has been overturned, businesses can adopt their own policies — like Target has — instead of being mandated to allow men into women’s restrooms by government. . . . Where the governor disagrees with Mr. Trump is that bathroom and shower facilities in our schools should be kept separate and special accommodations made when needed. It’s just common sense.


If as a candidate for president you cannot summon the courage to say the federal government, controlled by Democrats, should not be threatening to take away the funds needed to educate your children unless you agree to let your daughters shower with transgender biological males, then, frankly, you aren’t much use in the battles that we face.

#related#It’s not that hard to imagine how this works. When a man exposes himself in the women’s locker room at a public swimming pool in front of little girls, as this man did in Green Lakes, Wash., you call the police and he is escorted out.

As president of the United States, when a transgender biological male wants to shower with your daughters at a local public high school, you don’t threaten to take away all federal funding for that school unless it accedes to that male’s wish to be treated like one of the girls. Sure, local schools should do their best to offer accommodations, because transgenderism is a real and serious mental issue and every child deserves an education.

But you don’t declare war on the basic privacy rights of girls and women to accomplish that goal. And above all, Mr. Trump, Mr. Manafort, and Ms. Navarro: You don’t provide political cover for the Democrats’ war on women’s privacy.