Trump in 2011: Participating in Debates Takes Courage!
Donald Trump is out of Thursday night's debate? Fine. Back in 2011, Trump planned to moderate a GOP debate in Iowa; only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to participate. In an interview with Megyn Kelly at the time -- pause for irony -- Trump said, "We're not seeing a lot of courage here, are we? Not lots of courage, these Republicans. They're supposed to be brave." He went on to add, "Say what you want about Newt, Newt heard about the debate, 'I want to do it.' So there's a certain courage or confidence or something." A joking exchange with Kelly later: KELLY: "Do you really think you're a better moderator than I am?" TRUMP: "No. I could never beat you. That wouldn't even be close. That would be no contest. You've done a great job. I mean it.' Death of the Tea Party, Part Two April 11, 2011: "The Tea Party brings a dollop of honesty and grown-up leadership to Washington," said Katrina Pierson, [Tea Party Review] magazine's director of grassroots development. "That's not something the Harry Reids, Nancy Pelosis, and Barack Obamas understand or know how to deal with." January 26, 2016: TRUMP: Well, I think that I'm going to be able to get along with Pelosi. I think I'm going to be able to -- I've always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi. I've never had a problem. Reid will be gone. I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviously, I haven't been dealing with him so he'll actually use my name as the ultimate -- you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don't want. But I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid. And frankly, if I weren't running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I'd be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody. Hey, look, I think I'll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer. I was close to Schumer in many ways. It's important that you get along. It's wonderful to say you're a maverick and you're going to stand up and close up the country and all of the things, but you have to get somebody to go along with you. Everybody Feels Betrayed Today. Maybe It's Justified. Jerry Falwell Jr., endorses Donald Trump. Our David French summarizes the incongruence of this match: He is asking his admirers to make an enormous gamble that a man who has long stood against life, who's shown little interest in religious liberty, and is even a recent convert to his core immigration platform is not just an acceptable choice for Christians but the single best choice for Evangelical voters in 2016. Perhaps if the rest of the field featured men and women who'd proven to be weak and faithless and matters of life and religious liberty, the endorsement would be more understandable. But this field features, for example, two of the Senate's most stalwart defenders of the unborn and the persecuted church. Both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, moreover, have proven to be articulate defenders of the Christian faith. Trump, by contrast, seems only to dimly understand Christian theology and practice. And while I understand that there are evangelicals -- like many other voters -- who have deep concerns about immigration, Trump has been no more consistent in his views than Rubio and less consistent than Cruz. You know, Trumpies, you're not the only one who's feeling a sense of betrayal these days. Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro declared, "The National Review needs to get in line with the rest of the Republicans. How dare they trash the front-runner Donald Trump!" (Then again, maybe that's just the $20,000 donation talking.) Harris Faulkner of Fox News said of NR's editorial, "These words should disturb every American. He [Trump] is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Whose job is it to decide who gets to be where? It's the voters who decide. It is not any particular party. That's offensive on its face." Offensive? Disturb every American? Has she never seen a newspaper or magazine endorse or criticize a candidate before? Has she never heard of anything in the history of National Review? Buckley? The Birchers? In Search of Anti-Semitism? Sean Hannity's take: "In fairness, I'm not so sure why people did this at this late hour. And a lot of them didn't even say who they do support, which I think is kind of gutless, too." "At this late hour?" Nobody's voted yet! It's gutless to not say who you support? Oh, really, has Hannity endorsed yet? Since when does any criticism of any candidate invalid unless it comes with an accompanying endorsement of a rival? (Once you do that, don't you open yourself up to the counter-charge, "Oh, you're in the tank for the other guy"?) If you say John Kasich's insistence that God wanted him to expand Medicaid is insufferable nonsense, is that statement gutless unless you say who you support? Thankfully, Rush Limbaugh clarified Tuesday, "I do not believe nationalism and populism have usurped conservatism." Digesting Matt Lewis's Too Dumb To Fail Matt Lewis's new book, Too Dumb To Fail, offers sharp, needed observations in some passages, but offers infuriatingly off-base assessments in others. The good news is that it is very hard to put down. The bad news is that when you can put it down, you will want to do so by throwing it across the room. I should point out that I make an appearance in this book on page 54, as a critic of Christine O'Donnell. (Can we take a moment to go back to that 2010 race? The GOP primary pit old-guard establishment moderate Mike Castle against O'Donnell. One by one, all of the icons of the right at that moment -- Jim DeMint and the Senate Conservatives Fund, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and some others -- all explicitly or implicitly endorsed O'Donnell. Since that moment of decision, O'Donnell lost, lost badly, finished with $1 million unspent, failed to pay her lawyers, faces an FEC lawsuit for misusing campaign donations for townhouse payments, and now claims the FEC suit against her is a . . . wait for it . . . "witch hunt." Can we now all agree she was not the right choice? Are O'Donnell skeptics entitled to a little "we told you so"?) The upsides: Matt makes some points that need to be heard far and wide. His opening short summary about how philosophy from centuries ago shapes our politics today is important, and it would be a thrill to see some modern politician attempt to make this point to a mass audience. [Aristotle] believed that the way civilization developed was not random but, rather, natural. Man, it follows, is not malleable. As such, change (the logic continues) must be slow, organic, and cautious. Fast forwarding that approach to today, you realize citizens are not pawns to be moved around on a chess board by a player-government; there is no New Soviet Man; humanity cannot be reprogrammed by the state or reorganized by some brilliant central planner into a cog in a perfect machine of society. Lewis continues: It's easy for us to think of conservatism as merely a doctrine that is pro-national defense, anti-tax, and pro-life -- or even a philosophy of self-reliance or rugged individualism. But these downstream ideas derive from deeper, more existential concepts. Aristotle's foundational conservative truths speak to the very ideas upon which humanity rests, and on which nations rise and fall. If you absorb his worldview, you will usually arrive at conservative policies. But get his fundamental ideas wrong, and the consequences can be dire. Lewis points out that the Southern Democrats who turned into Southern Republicans over the past generation did not necessarily shed their appetite for big government. A good portion of the voters that the GOP spent the past three or four decades absorbing are not particularly opposed to government spending, as long as they think they're going to enjoy the benefits. Lewis's chapter about the intersection between culture and politics is one of the most frustrating chapters – because it's so alternatingly insightful and infuriating. One section that really stuck in my craw: Conservatives need to be able to talk about the culture without coming across like the angry old man shaking his fist and yelling, "Get off my lawn!" It won't be easy -- there is a missing ingredient. For this to work, more conservatives will have to ditch their 5-irons, put down their remotes, and infiltrate the intellectual elite. When you lose intellectuals, you lose popular culture and, before you know it, you've lost the culture war. And that's where conservatives have been for a long time. One key problem here is the question of how much the current "intellectual elite" have come to see progressive politics itself as the criteria for being "intellectually elite." A lot's been written about the reflexive anti-Christian and anti-conservative animosity in the academic world; Megan McArdle spotlighted a good example recently. What other perches of intellectual elite are conservatives supposed to attempt to infiltrate? The New York Times editorial board? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? The editor-in-chief positions of Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New Yorker? It would probably be easier to successfully get a secret agent to infiltrate the Iranian mullahs or North Korea. Matt echoes and underlines Andrew Breitbart's observation that "politics is downstream from culture." But conservatives have known for a long time, and keep discovering anew, that reaching a position of cultural influence is really difficult. Making a cultural creation -- whether it's music, a book, a movie, a television show, art -- that resonates with a wide audience is probably one of the hardest things you can do. Each year, millions of people of every political stripe try it and either fail, or achieve quite modest success. There's no shame in that. Separately, it is almost impossible to be a cultural influencer, particularly in the creative arts, when you have a day job -- and a lot of conservatives who would like to create a work that influences the culture are busy with those day jobs. Just about every cultural icon with influence that conservatives envy -- the movie stars and filmmakers, the rock stars, the bestselling authors, the talk show hosts, the television stars we invite into our living rooms each week -- achieved their status this because they dedicated themselves to a craft and spent a good chunk of their life honing it. It is their job; it is how they make money (often, a lot of money). From those heights, they command enormous resources to promote their ideas -- massive budgets for movies and insane advertising budgets to bring in an audience. Throw in the largely liberal-mindset in Hollywood and the fear of being blacklisted, and you have considerable obstacles to conservatives reaching a position of large-scale cultural influence. A line like "ditch their 5-irons, put down their remotes" feels really dismissive of conservatives who are trying to influence the culture and feel like they're always running uphill. ADDENDA: Today, at 4 p.m. I'll be moderating an event at the Heritage Foundation featuring Florida Governor Rick Scott, discussing how his state has created 1 million jobs in five years; I'll be joined by the brilliant economist Steve Moore.  | 
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