Donald Trump lashed out as his Republican presidential rivals at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Friday evening…
“Carly was a little nasty to me,” Trump said. “Be careful, Carly. Be careful. But actually, I can’t say anything to her because she’s a woman and I don’t want to be accused of being tough on women.”
Trump then went into an extended riff where he imagined how he would attack Fiorina if he could.
“I promised I wouldn’t say that she ran Hewlett Packard into the ground,” Trump said. “I said I would not say it. That her stock value tanked. That she laid off tens of thousands of people and she got viciously fired. I said I would not say it. And that she then went out and ran against Barbara Boxer for senator of California, and it’s a race that should have been won and she lost in a landslide, and I said, I will not say that, ok? So I’m not going to say it.”
Speaking with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg on Friday, Trump said that Ailes “couldn’t have been nicer” when the two men spoke by phone on Monday.
Trump refuted a story published by CNNMoney earlier this week that said days of tension between his campaign and Fox News ended with a “very blunt” talk with Ailes.
At one point in the phone call, according to anonymous sources, Ailes said to Trump, we “can resolve this now, or we can go to war.”
Malzberg asked Trump about the quote, and Trump said “that story was a false story.”
[O]n Thursday, pro-Trump conservative radio host Mark Levin asked the frontrunner to share what it means to be a conservative.
We transcribed The Donald’s answer:
“It means to me, to be in terms of, you know, you have different types of conservatives but different types of worlds. In this world, it means socially conservative, pro-life, it means strong military, it means fiscally conservative. We want to guard our money, we want to guard our wealth, we have to have tremendous security, we have to do things right, and we have to live in a very conservative way. We have to get our debt back down. You know, we are fiscally ready to explode. As a country, we are fiscally ready to explode. We’re at $19 trillion — almost $19 trillion now, can you believe it? And at $24 trillion, as soon as we go up to $24 trillion, Mark, that is such a bad signal. So we’re up to about $19 now. We have to get our house back in order. Another thing, we have to rebuild infrastructure. So we need strength in military, we need social strength, we need military strength, we need all sorts of things. I mean, our country is a mess. It’s gotta be redone. And it’s gotta be redone really fast. And one more thing: We’re not respected in the world. The world is ripping us off left and right. Whether it’s Mexico, Japan, China, every country. The world is ripping us off left and right. And nobody likes us.”
“I worked at Plant 36,” said Jerry Hubbard, who retired in 2001, after outlasting his part of the vast “Buick City” complex that was dismantled as the auto jobs left. “It’s all gone. It’s all limestone. You can’t rape a place like that. General Motors jobs made this place.”
Only one presidential candidate seemed to care: Donald Trump. “A lot of what he says hits a chord with me,” said Hubbard. “Immigration and jobs going to China — this area’s really suffered from that. I just like somebody that stands up for what he speaks about.”
Trump’s rise and persistence as a presidential candidate has been credited to name recognition, to voter anger and to a specific contempt for the Republican Party establishment. But he is also the candidate talking most directly about the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries.
In the Democratic race, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has adopted a similar theme, but Trump’s appeal here captured something that went beyond policy: a brew of impossible nostalgia coupled with a pledge to destroy other countries, most notably China, in negotiations. On Twitter, “Make America Great Again” is a goofy, meme-ready slogan, best displayed on ironic hats. There are places, such as Michigan, where it makes real sense.
Mr. Trump’s critique of government differs greatly from that of most conservatives. The conservative argument for small government ordinarily rests on the idea that citizens necessarily know better what to do with their money and their lives than the government does, because the government lacks the local knowledge that individuals have. Under this theory, even a government run by smart people will do lots of stupid, costly things.
Mr. Trump is positing not a general, inherent failure of government but a very specific one. He nearly shouted it at last week’s debate: “Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid.” This is the core idea of the Trump campaign, and it does not necessarily imply that government should be smaller. It implies that somebody smart, ideally Mr. Trump, should run the government.
If Republican voters share Mr. Trump’s diagnosis that the main problem with our government is stupid leaders, and if they believe that Mr. Trump is much smarter and wiser than the politicians who have come before him, they may be fully prepared to forgive his apostasies on Medicaid, taxes and everything else. If their real beef is not with our leaders but with big government itself, his support should fade as his policy moderation becomes clear.
The final, and very important link between Trump and BLM is the over-the-top racial rhetoric employed by both. Trump’s recent statements about Mexican immigrants and past comments about blacks would disqualify any other GOP candidate. In fact, among the majority of voters in both parties it probably already has.
But for Trump supporters, his racist comments are a big part of his appeal. Every time Trump asserts that political correctness is the biggest problem facing the country, his supporters and everyone else know exactly what he means.
For the relatively small number of white voters who feel that the pendulum of racial justice has swung too far, Trump is a champion. His candidacy promises not only to staunch the flow of brown people into the United States, but to give cover to white racial grievance in general.
Those on the right who have become Trump defenders have, I think, made a serious error in judgment that is the result of a rather profound misunderstanding of conservatism (for more, see here). You can cherish and champion conservative principles, or you can support and praise Donald Trump. But you can’t do both.
(It hasn’t gotten enough attention, but Trump has consistently opposed conservative reforms to entitlement programs, changes that are absolutely essential if we are to address our massive fiscal imbalance, prevent a collapse of these programs and re-limit the welfare state. How can those who claim to believe in limited government cheerlead for a man who supported a single-payer health care system and to this day attacks Republicans who want to reform our entitlement system in order to align with demographic realities?)…
In the New Testament, we’re told that love covers a multitude of sins. Some on the right believe that, when it comes to Donald Trump, vulgarity and intemperance cover a multitude of past political sins. The more crude and insulting Trump is, the more dispensation he’s granted. The lower he goes, the uglier he gets, the louder they cheer. (Fortunately there have been some exceptions.)
It’s regrettable that some figures on the right now view politics in this way, to the point that ideas don’t seem to matter, but (boorish) attitude and affect do. The Conservative Mind is passé; the conservative id is in.
Remember that moment in the Republican debate where he talked about giving money to politicians so that, if he wanted them to do something, they would? Then he was asked, you gave money to Hillary Clinton, so what, exactly, did she do for you? He replied that when he called and told her to come to his wedding, she did. If you were getting married, would you want Hillary Clinton sitting in the front row? While pondering what he wanted his wedding day to be like, he decided he wanted one of the biggest political-establishment insiders in America sitting there as he said ‘I do,’ and you, who hate political insiders, think that he is going to destroy them if elected?…
Granted, Trump has all the money he’ll ever need, yet that’s been true for decades, and he’s continued to expend a lot of effort to earn still more money. Like other men with significant, diversified business holdings––some of them hotels and golf courses, no less!––a large supply of cheap immigrant labor is in his personal financial interests. If the business elite is for illegal immigration, he is the business elite! And he’ll face the exact same political incentives as every other elected Republican from George W. Bush to John McCain.
Perhaps that would be nothing for you to worry about if he’d spent all his life inveighing against illegal immigration; or if he’d held a lower office, like congressman or senator or governor, in which he’d consistently voted as you’d have wanted on the issue.
Instead you’re just taking him on faith. Why? Does Trump strike you as a person who is unusually inclined to keep his word? Someone who never flip-flops? Come on.
In my few chats with him over the years, I’ve found him to be thoroughly self-aware, knowing just what he’s doing, understanding that many people find him obnoxious. He’s fine with that. It all keeps the machine going.
What’s new is that, as a presidential candidate egged on by thousands of cheering supporters, he’s saying things that damage the brand. Slandering immigrants, demeaning John McCain, insulting women – such statements can’t be brushed aside, and they live forever on YouTube. NBC isn’t the only organization to have severed relationships with Trump; so have Macy’s, ESPN, and Nascar. Two high-profile chefs have backed out of deals to open restaurants in new Trump properties.
It’s easy to imagine that, after all these years, living in a Trump building could suddenly flip from being prestigious to being totally uncool. Trump is now at the apogee of his fame, but the process of getting there could damage his vaunted wealth. He may be doing something no leader should ever do: letting adulation wreck his judgment.
Ever since announcing his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has topped polls, dominated headlines and hovered over the Republican field like a dirigible. Panicked rivals, story-chasing journalists and thrilled supporters have treated him like some momentous (or monstrous) one-off. But he is actually an old thing in American politics—older even than the republic itself. Mr. Trump is the latest incarnation of the Patriot King—the hero who swoops into the political system from the outside to save it from its own vices…
Bolingbroke argued that only a public-spirited royal could rise above this dirty traffic. In his most influential book, he named this paragon the Patriot King. High birth would guarantee such a ruler’s independence; he would “put himself at the head of his people in order to govern, or more properly to subdue, all parties.”…
Comes now Mr. Trump, real-estate magnate, TV host and mouth for all seasons, whose appeal flows from his defiance of conventional political norms. He scatters opinions and insults with a free hand and uses his wealth as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
The Patriot King is a fantasy that lives on because of our discomfort with parties. Parties are hackish, opportunistic and timid; the two major ones rig the system as best they can. Yet parties are a genuine political innovation, almost as old as the Constitution and an important supplement to it. They organize Congress and facilitate the selection of presidents.
Today’s tycoons are not party men, but Mr. Perot came to grief, and Mr. Bloomberg stayed local. Mr. Trump will learn from their example—or repeat it.
Via the Daily Caller.
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