Earlier this week, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) columnist Holman Jenkins blamed the unprecedented rise of Donald Trump to front-runner status in the race for the GOP presidential nomination on the voters. According to Jenkins people who vote for Trump “lack clear thoughts”. They act like children, unleashing “recriminations against mommy and daddy because the world is imperfect”.
Jenkins wanted to make it clear in his view that “Trumpsters” blaming, in his words, the “elites has gone too far”. It’s the American voter who has brought on their own disappointments. He suggests that they’ve voted for politicians who promised them stuff and they stood by while government got bigger and business-killing regulations grew exponentially.
Briefly Mr. Jenkins has had enough! It’s not the establishment’s fault that the nation is in decline , economically, diplomatically, militarily, in its social structure, its education system, and in virtually every other way.
Now, Jenkins opined, people are in a snit and so have turned to the reprehensible Donald Trump.
Then, yesterday, singing from the same approved hymnal book, former GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, unleashed one of the bitterest attacks on a fellow Republican, seen in modern times, if ever at any time. Calling Mr. Trump, the front-runner in his own party’s race for the nomination, a fraud and a failure in business, and generally a total incompetent. Romney urged Trump’s opponents to stay in the race at all costs in order to bring about a Republican establishment-orchestrated convention floor fight, from which, no doubt, Romney expects a more “suitable” candidate will be nominated.
The gist of Romney’s brief against a Trump candidacy is that his supporters have to be ignorant, uninformed fools for whom things like the “Pigeon Drop” swindle was invented.
It would be kind to call Mr. Romney’s performance merely the incoherent and tasteless tirade by a very sore loser suffering from “success envy”. But he was joined by a fellow unsuccessful GOP nominee, Senator John McCain.
These two could collaborate on authorship of a book titled “Tips on Winning a Presidential Campaign”. It would inevitably be the thinnest volume since a mythical “Winning Super Bowl Strategies” by the Vikings’ Fran Tarkenton.
Today Bobby Jindal, who is credited by many as having coined the characterization of the Grand Old Party as the “Stupid Party”, chips in with his theory on who is responsible for the unseemly Trump candidacy. In this case, and with some degree of validity, Jindal blames it on Barack Obama.
It seems that the thread that joins these various notions of who’s at fault for the Trump phenomenon is the uniform agreement that the Republican establishment itself is the innocent victim. All those Trump voters are just angry…they are in a “childish snit”: They’re also greedy and stupid…they want free stuff but don’t want to pay for any of it; it’s really all Obama’s fault…he created them through his divisive and destructive policies.
All of these have some germ of truth perhaps. Many of us were duped by politicians who assured us they shared our concerns about unsustainable debt, the flood of illegal immigration threatening to devour the nation’s resources and destroy the country’s moral and cultural underpinnings, the dictatorial governance that has shredded Constitutional safeguards, etc.
And a lot of us are angry. About Obama’s lawless actions, his dismantling of the nation’s national security apparatus, his arrogant disregard for every American value, tradition, and principle, etc.
It is also true that many of us are not well-informed or educated, thanks to a near total corruption of the nation’s education system; many fell for the lies about the promise of a better, more affordable health care system.
Yet, as”benighted” as we are, the average American, sooner or later, recognizes when disaster looms and who has been responsible for it!
And this is where lies the bulk of the responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump…at the doorstep of the Republican Party Establishment!
The dangers and disasters America is facing today became obvious to the American people several years ago. And that’s when they looked to the GOP to do something about it. And the Grand Old Party’s “elites” responded. They assured their voters they understood…they felt their pain…we all became “tea partiers’. Send us to Washington and we’ll halt the nation’s decline.
“Make me Senate Majority Leader”, thundered Mitch McConnell, “and we’ll roll back Obama’s illegal executive actions and lawless governance!”
“Give me the “Power of the Purse”, John Boehner, and then, Paul Ryan told us, “and we’ll stop the runaway spending and begin to reduce the debt and stop funding Obama’s irresponsible and destructive programs and regulatory excesses.”
And, so we did. Conservatives and everyday Republican voters went to the polls and delivered to these guys the powers they said they need to halt the nation’s downward “transformation” and trajectory.
It doesn’t take an advanced degree or a keen understanding of macro economics or geopolitical nuance for people to see how that turned out, and how the “elites” delivered on their promises. The borders are more open than ever, spending continues out of control, debt has passed the “unsustainable” stage, our military has become a “social experiment”, our national security and global influence is perhaps at the lowest ebb since the nation’s founding.
And the “Stupid Party” deplores the “tantrum’ its voters are throwing by going to someone who has effectively exploited their anger and sense of betrayal for having trusted the “establishment”.
While we believe that Donald Trump is not the answer, we are under no illusion that the Establishment shares our fears and concerns. When they call for “anybody but Trump”, they don’t mean “anybody”. They mean the candidate they select, as they have since Ronald Reagan.
They characterize us as “children’ having a tantrum. And they view themselves, as they always have, as mommy and daddy, and they know best!
DLH
*not to be confused with the ubiquitous ads promoting blue pills for treatment of a trumped-up male condition commonly abbreviated as “ED” . In Veritaspac parlance the abbreviation refers to the Republican “establishment/donor” class. Any association with the other condition is purely coincidental, or not.
