RUTHFULLY YOURS

With his victory in the conservative heartland of Indiana, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee for President. A plurality of GOP voters has rejected the strongest presidential field in memory to elevate a businessman of few fixed convictions and little policy knowledge who has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential polling. Now what?
***Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives. Dozens of miscalculations made his hostile takeover possible, not least decisions by other candidates in the early primary states to attack each other instead of Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz and his allies also prepared the ground by stoking rage against “the establishment” and immigrants, only to have Mr. Trump hijack their stage-managed rebellion as a more convincing restrictionist. (See nearby.)

Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy. The GOP electorate had its chance to reconsider Mr. Trump after his Wisconsin defeat a month ago. Instead the voters rallied behind him for seven straight wins with a majority in each state.

The most hopeful way to look at this is that GOP voters see Mr. Trump as the vehicle for American revival. They are at heart nationalists who see the U.S. in retreat abroad and the economy failing to raise wages at home, and they are revolting against both. Unlike the Japanese or the French, they aren’t going to accept decline without a fight.

In that sense they hope Mr. Trump will be another Ronald Reagan, who can storm Washington and overturn the status quo. This may be one reason so many of Mr. Trump’s voters are older Americans who recall the failures of the 1970s and the Reagan revival that followed.

The problem is that Mr. Trump is no Gipper, who had spent 40 years developing a philosophy of limited government and the U.S. national interest. As his letters show, he had superb instincts about the major issues of his day and was a brilliant political strategist. Mr. Trump is a clever political tactician, but his policy and rhetorical jaunts don’t lead to anything coherent we can detect beyond his desire to “do great deals.”

Donald Trump is a businessman, television star, and a newcomer to campaigning for public office. Running for president as your first elected office is highly unusual. A few have tried before, but in the last hundred plus years, only Dwight Eisenhower, a highly decorated World War II general, has succeeded. There were 17 Republican candidates who made it to the debate stage this year, and only Trump and Ben Carson had never run for office before. Carly Fiorina, despite having never held office, did run for the U.S. Senate in California.

Trump, with his victory in Indiana, appears at this point destined to be the winner of the GOP nominating process. His campaign over the past year has been an unusual one, to say the least, and could not have been more different than that of his all but certain opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a product of more than 40 years of obsessive political campaigning for herself and her husband on both the state and national level, is one of the most scripted candidates ever to run for president. Clinton holds morning conference calls with as many as dozens of campaign aides to review her talking points for the day. If there was ever a consensus candidate whose themes have been tested with her handlers, and poll tested by her large campaign staff, it is Clinton. Clinton spent most of her two years after leaving the State Department mapping out her future campaign, warehousing future campaign team members at the Clinton Foundation and speaking before likely future campaign contributors and supporters. The lives of both Clintons has been all about politics at every stage.

Clinton’s goal for both the primary and the fall campaign, which she has viewed as a sure victory, has been to stay on message. Despite this, her message has been impacted by the leftist populism of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, who has proved profoundly resilient and therefore extremely annoying to Clinton. Sanders has pushed Clinton leftward, at times even to Sanders’ left (gun control), and she has on occasion made some unusually foolish remarks for someone so experienced in the business of politics. One of these remarks was her promise to put out of business a lot of coal companies and coal miners. Today, she was forced to eat crow and explain to some West Virginians that she can not really explain what prompted her to say something like that:

“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”

I am not #NeverTrump, but I’m getting close… thanks to Donald Trump and his supporters.

The fact is, Trump often makes profoundly stupid and manifestly false statements. These are the kind of statements that always offend the intellect of anyone who thinks analytically and is interested in the actual truth, regardless of who is saying them. If you are not offended by such, then by definition you simply have jettisoned any concern for truth and intelligence. That Trump runs afoul of both concepts is beyond debate.

Written words are the least emotional medium possible, so let’s remove the feeling of the mob rally or the sycophantic television interview and dispense with a few Trump pronouncements in the cold harsh reality of the written word.

No doubt some of Trump’s supporters will quickly retort that Trump is a billionaire, so there’s no way he could possibly say anything stupid about any topic. Or that it’s impossible that Trump would lie. Yet Trump can, and does, routinely lie. In the words of Victor David Hanson, for Trump “truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.”

Let me translate: Trump repeats nonsense loudly and often. Moreover, he daily adds insults to anyone who opposes him, which is an odd strategy for someone wanting to “unite the party.” He’s doing everything now to make that impossible for anyone to do anytime soon. His apparent cliching of the nomination simply lends more urgancy to the matter.

But I digress. To the cold hard words, in perfect context, starting this week in Indiana.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up? They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

What is this, coming from a man who wants to be the most powerful in the world? Does Trump consider the National Enquirer to be the gazette of truth? Was Ted Cruz’s father at Area 51 too? It’s not even clear that Trump has any idea whose death he’s even rambling about. Serious people would be bothered by a candidate who is capable of saying this.

How about the Mike Tyson endorsement: “So Cruz is now saying, ‘Oh, he (Mike Tyson) was a rapist. This guy is a real liar, that’s why we call him Lyin’ Ted Cruz. I mean, the greatest liar that ever lived except he gets caught every time.”

Trump may have no responsibility over embarrassing endorsers. But Tyson was in fact convicted of rape and served hard time for it.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump insists Israel should keep building West Bank settlements as he says Netanyahu should ‘keep moving forward’ because Palestinians fired ‘thousands of missiles’ at Jewish state

In interview with DailyMail.com, Donald Trump says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu should continue building West Bank settlements
Rejects call for a pause in settlements as a precursor to peace talks with Palestinians
‘I don’t think there should be a pause,’ Trump said; ‘Look: Missiles were launched into Israel’
The billionaire GOP front-runner said of Netanyahu: ‘I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3571403/Trump-insists-Israel-building-West-Bank-settlements-says-Netanyahu-moving-forward-Palestinians-fired-thousands-missiles-Jewish-state.html#ixzz47fti572A

Hillary Clinton ventured into Appalachia this week, seeking forgiveness for promising to destroy the carbon-based economy. Her 53%-47% loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana suggests she’ll need it, especially among working-class voters, even if she still maintains a commanding delegate lead.

Mrs. Clinton calls her swing through West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio a “Breaking Down Barriers” tour—but the truth is that President Obama’s green agenda broke down coal country, and Mrs. Clinton is promising to preserve these barriers to the region’s economic revival.

The presumptive Democratic nominee told out-of-work coal miners in Williamson, West Virginia that she felt their pain, promising to “do more to see how we can get coal to be a fuel that can continue to be sold and continue to be mined.” In a perfect Clintonian non-apology, she added that “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason and the excuse to be so upset with me because that is not what I intended at all,” referring to her remarks in March.

Mrs. Clinton claimed those remarks were “totally taken out of context,” so here’s the full context: “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” CONTINUE AT SITE

With Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race after his loss Tuesday, Donald Trump should be well on the road to the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a nomination majority in advance of the convention.

Mr. Trump’s Tuesday victory in Indiana shows that he was able to transform his wins in the recent eastern primaries into momentum that overwhelmed Mr. Cruz, despite a strong effort from the Senator in the Hoosier State. It wasn’t enough to overcome the consolidation of Republican support by the New York businessman.

While by no means minimizing Mr. Trump’s considerable achievement here, we must ask again why Senator Cruz made so little effort to expand his appeal beyond the slice of very conservative voters who were his target from the start. The time to do that was after his Wisconsin victory, but the broadening never came, and Mr. Trump continued to siphon away the greater share of the GOP primary vote.

Mr. Trump won Indiana among most demographic, income and ideological groups, while Mr. Cruz carried “very conservative” voters and people with post-graduate degrees. Mr. Trump won 46% of women to Mr. Cruz’s 42%.

Now as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, it is past time for Mr. Trump to start acting like it. He says that it’s time for the GOP to “unify.” But most of the responsibility for unification is now his. CONTINUE AT SITE

Only The Simpsons got it right: not a single pundit or political scientist guessed that Donald Trump had the ghost of a chance at the Republican nomination, yet there he stood tonight in Indiana with a trail of corpses behind him and a clear road ahead of him. Welcome to the Zero Sum World, where you have to lose for me to win. The facts have been recited often enough: real median household income is still 8% below the 1999 high water mark, real GDP is 10% below the long-term trendline, 10% fewer Americans own their own homes than in 2007, more business have closed since the 2008 crash than opened, and the jobs on offer mainly involve changing bedpans and flipping burgers.

Republican voters bought Trump’s message that the wicked Chinese and the feckless Mexicans have stolen jobs and wealth that rightfully belonged to Americans, and that he, Donald Trump, with his world-class negotiating skills, would go out and get them back.

Don’t hold your breath.

worldtrade

There’s nothing to negotiate, no pie to re-divide, no Chinese hoard to bring home. World exports are down by 12% year-on-year in terms of price and dead flat in terms of volume, something that happens during recessions. The world economy is dead in the water. The US economy grew at an annual rate of just half a percent during the first quarter, which is a recession in all but name. Japan shrank, and Europe grew by 1.6% (and has only just regained its overall output level of 2007). China is growing, but too slowly to move the needle elsewhere.

The trouble is that everyone already has had the same idea as Mr. Trump. The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have imposed negative interest rates on their money markets. If you buy a 10-year Japanese government bond or a 5-year German government bond, you get back less than you paid for it: you pay the government to hold your money. When it costs money to save, financial markets lose their reason to exist. The Europeans and Japanese have done this to try to keep their currencies cheap and get a bit more of the stagnant volume of world trade. Now that the Federal Reserve has backed off from raising interest rates in the face of uniformly depressing economic data, the dollar is falling, despite the best efforts of the Europeans and Japanese to cheapen their currencies.

Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly. And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz’s wife. And on and on.

Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero. Zilch.

Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade, given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling? Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or Republican.

The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed adverbs like “finally” and “at last” to characterize each of the latest outrages likely to end Trump’s campaign. Trump broke his promise about releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the public were a lender that he was conning.

Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the experts about a “turning point” in his fate. How many times has someone on a Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, “Trump has gone too far this time” — without defining “too far”?

These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead followed by upticks in Trump’s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump should be and is through — a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, “Make America Mexico Again.”

The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times.

Violence emanating from Trump supporters buttresses a false narrative that many within the establishment media wish to propagate; namely that Trump’s immigration and border policies are laced with racist undertones. The issue is not framed within the context of securing borders, protecting U.S. citizens from crime and terrorism and curtailing an already overburdened entitlement system for illegals. Rather, Trump’s opponents and their allies in the media have succeeded in framing the issue as one involving racial divisiveness and incitement.

That narrative, displayed over and over again in print as well as social media has succeeded in fueling extreme left-wing violence at Trump rallies far outweighing the violence exhibited by a very limited number of Trump supporters. Yet violence by Trump supporters is still given prominence despite its limited scope and scale. Isolated incidents involving violence at Trump gatherings are given disproportionate coverage far beyond their importance.

Consider the side-by-side contrast of media coverage in two separate instances of violence at Trump rallies. On March 10, a 78-year old senior citizen punched an anti-Trump demonstrator in the face at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The action was inexcusable and the perpetrator was arrested and rightfully charged with misdemeanor assault while his victim required no medical attention.

On Thursday and Friday, a large unruly mob of anti-Trump hooligans, some of whom displayed Mexican flags, assembled at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California where a pro-Trump rally was held. The mob quickly resorted to violence, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, ransacking police cars and attacking policemen. One bystander, who had the misfortune of wearing a Trump T-shirt was slugged in the face, knocked to the ground and required several unsightly stitches to close his wound. Several police cars were damaged and a police horse was injured. The resulting damage will reportedly cost the fairgrounds tens of thousands of dollars.

When it was announced that Harriet Tubman would displace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, there were two sets of dramatically different reactions among Republicans on social media.

One group passed around links to a National Review piece celebrating the decision to “tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.”

“If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares?” it asked.

Much of the Republican base, the other group, cared. Donald Trump noticed and denounced the move as “pure political correctness”.

Political correctness is the defining element of the culture war today. It’s also one of the driving forces of Trump’s candidacy. Republicans and conservatives who ignore the backlash to it do so at their own peril.

When the left exploited the Charleston church shooting to begin a purge of Confederate flags that extended all the way into reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, Republicans failed to defy the lynch mobs and even cheered the takedowns, some of which took place under Republican governors, as progress. Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican, announced recently that state flags in the Capitol featuring confederate insignia will be taken down due to the “controversy surrounding Confederate imagery”. The “controversy” is another term for the left’s manufactured political correctness.

There are legitimate positions on both sides when it comes to the Confederate flag, but the historical debate is not the issue. Just as it doesn’t matter very much that Harriet Tubman was a Republican. It matters far more that both moves were driven by the social media mobs of political correctness.

Culture wars are not about actual historical facts, but a tribal conflict over culture between clashing groups. This is a conflict in which it mattered a great deal that northeastern elites were lining up to get $400 tickets to see Hamilton, a hip-hop musical praised by many of the same Republicans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. That New York theater trend led to Southerner Andrew Jackson being displaced on the currency instead of New York’s own Alexander Hamilton.

Some conservatives would argue that Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party while Hamilton, a longtime foe of its political forebears, would likely have aligned with the modern Republican Party. And like Tubman on the $20 bill, they would be completely missing the forest for the factoid.