Conservative Kingmaker/Breaker George Will: We Conservatives Must Join in a Conspiracy to Destroy Donald Trump

 













In The Conservative Saloon, George Will squints at Donald Trump and declares, We’re gonna ride you out of this party, Trump. We’re not gonna kill ya,’ we’ll just rough ya’ up a little, and run ya’ out of town. Donald Trump responds, Kiss my ass, George.
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

In case anyone should argue, “It’s not a conspiracy, because it’s open,” I say: Although Will openly called for this undertaking, it would have to proceed secretly, as a conspiracy. If Republicans were to continue saying, “We’re blocking Trump,” their plan would backfire. Their announcements would give Trump publicity, which is the lifeblood of Trump’s candidacy (not to mention, his life). Thus, his numbers would rise or hold. Only through a conspiracy of silence can Conservatism, Inc. destroy Trump.

George Will and his Conservatism, Inc. confederates fail to grasp that Trump is running against them. Thus, their scorn is one of the two greatest endorsements Trump can secure. The other endorsement is that of racial socialists.

To George, Conservatism, Inc., and your commie friends: They hate you, they really, really hate you!

By the way, you won’t find any comments from me at National Review, because my good friend Rich Lowry (or was it my good friend, The Great Ta-Nehisi Coates?) has had me blocked again.
 

A party has a duty
to exclude interlopers,
including cynical opportunists
deranged by egotism.

George Will
 

[NR’s original title was: “Donald Trump—Conservatives Should Excommunicate Him from the Movement”]
Donald Trump is an Affront to Anyone Devoted to William F. Buckley’s Legacy
By George Will
@georgewillf
August 12, 2015 8:00 P.M.
National Review (Will’s syndicated Washington Post column)

In every town large enough to have two traffic lights there is a bar at the back of which sits the local Donald Trump, nursing his fifth beer and innumerable delusions. Because the actual Donald Trump is wealthy, he can turn himself into an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate. It is his right to use his riches as he pleases. His squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay.

When, however, Trump decided that his next acquisition would be not another casino but the Republican presidential nomination, he tactically and quickly underwent many conversions of convenience (concerning abortion, health care, funding Democrats, etc.). His makeover demonstrates that he is a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.

[Unlike, say, godless atheist George Will?]

He is an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable. Buckley’s legacy is being betrayed by invertebrate conservatives now saying that although Trump “goes too far,” he has “tapped into something,” and therefore . . .

[Central to William F. Buckley’s project at National Review was fighting the civil rights bill, on behalf of segregation. I wasn’t aware that George Will was an ardent segregationist.]

Therefore what? This stance — if a semi-grovel can be dignified as a stance — is a recipe for deserved disaster. Remember, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond “tapped into” things.

[Wait a cotton pickin’ minute! Will is pullin’ the old switcheroo. It’s Conservatism, Inc., one of whose most prominent members is George F. Will, that has been groveling to socialists and communists for at least a generation.]

In 1948, Wallace, FDR’s former vice president, ran as a third-party candidate opposing Harry Truman’s re-election. His campaign became a vehicle for, among others, Communists and fellow travelers opposed to Truman’s anti-Soviet foreign policy. Truman persevered, leaders of organized labor cleansed their movement of Soviet sympathizers [read: Communists; Will can’t express anything honestly], and Truman was re-elected.

He won also in spite of South Carolina’s Democratic governor [Strom] Thurmond siphoning off Democratic votes (and 39 electoral votes) as a Dixiecrat protesting civil-rights commitments in the Democratic party’s platform. Truman won because he kept his party and himself from seeming incoherent and boneless.

[Truman won because the hard-as-nails Missouri dirt farmer and failed haberdasher took a train, and went on a relentless “whistle-stop” tour, hitting small towns and big cities alike, all over the country, while New York Governor Thomas Dewey listened to false prophets, luxuriated in his “victory,” and quit campaigning early. What was that you were saying, George?]

Conservatives who flinch from forthrightly marginalizing Trump mistakenly fear alienating a substantial Republican cohort. But the assumption that today’s Trumpites are Republicans is unsubstantiated and implausible. Many are no doubt lightly attached to the political process, preferring entertainment to affiliation. They relish in their candidate’s vituperation and share his aversion to facts. From what GOP faction might Trumpites come? The establishment? Social conservatives? Unlikely.

[Facts? Since when does George Will welcome facts? If he did, he would welcome Trump and his followers. In 1980, Ronald Regan gave the world the concept of “Reagan Democrats.” They were exactly the kind of people Will is today vituperating against. All they did was carry Reagan—whom Will supposedly reveres—two landslide victories.

John McCain and Mitt Romney followed the Will game plan in 2008 and 2012, respectively. How’d that work out? Millions of voters who wanted to vote Republican either “undervoted,” by leaving the presidential race blank (as I did in 2008), or simply stayed home.]

A party has a duty to exclude interlopers, including cynical opportunists deranged by egotism. They certainly are not tea partyers, those earnest, issue-oriented, book-club organizing activists who are passionate about policy. Trump’s aversion to reality was displayed during the Cleveland debate when Chris Wallace asked him for “evidence” to support his claim that Mexico’s government is sending rapists and drug dealers to America. Trump, as usual, offered apoplexy as an argument.

A political party has a right to (in language Trump likes) secure its borders. Indeed, a party has a duty to exclude interlopers, including cynical opportunists deranged by egotism. This is why closed primaries, although not obligatory, are defensible: Let party members make the choices that define the party and dispense its most precious possession, a presidential nomination. So, the Republican National Committee should immediately stipulate that subsequent Republican debates will be open to any and all — but only — candidates who pledge to support the party’s nominee.

[What a coward and a vain fool! Following huis advice would guarantee yet another Democrat victory, should “Obama” even permit one, and the end of the GOP.]

This year’s Republican field is the most impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856. [Huh? I have no blessed idea what Kingmaker George is talking about, unless he means that the GOP has historically had weak fields of presidential candidates.] But 16 candidates are experiencing diminishment by association with the 17th.

[The diminishment is due to his dwarfing them!]

Soon the campaign will turn to granular politics, the on-the-ground retail work required by the 1.4 percent of the nation’s population that lives in Iowa and New Hampshire. Try to imagine Trump in an Iowa living room, with a macaroon in one hand and cup of hot chocolate balanced on a knee, observing Midwestern civilities while talking about something other than himself.

[Who balances a cup of hot choc on his knee? Wouldn’t that guarantee the cup falling off, and making a bloody mess on the candidate and the rug?]

Television, which has made Trump (he is one of three candidates, with Mike Huckabee and John Kasich, who have had television shows), will unmake him, turning his shtick into a transcontinental bore. [He couldn’t possibly be more boring than his rivals. And since when has George Will been concerned about boring people?] But not before many voters will have noticed weird vibrations pulsing from the GOP.

[They’ve been noticing something wrong with the GOP for years. But Will hasn’t!]

So, conservatives today should deal with Trump with the firmness Buckley dealt with the John Birch Society in 1962. The society was an extension of a loony businessman [Robert Welch] who said Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” In a 5,000-word National Review “excoriation” (Buckley’s word), he excommunicated the society from the conservative movement.

[And wasn’t that wonderful? After Edward S. Murrow succeeded in demonizing Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, domestic anti-Communism suffered one wound after another. Will should be ruing what Buckley did. But circa 1963, Buckley fought tooth-and-nail against the Civil Rights Bill, and in favor of maintaining segregation, so I suppose Will took, and still takes solace from that.]

Buckley received an approving letter from a subscriber who said, “You have once again given a voice to the conscience of conservatism.” The letter was signed, “Ronald Reagan, Pacific Palisades, Cal.”

Will is apparently unaware of the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
“Ronald Reagan, Pacific Palisades, Cal.”

— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. Editor’s Note: The author’s wife, Mari Will, works for Scott Walker.