I don’t want to get out over my skis here, but I think I see a ticket coming together.

No, really, though: What did people expect Trump to say?

“When you have people that are beheading if you’re a Christian — and frankly, for lots of other reasons. When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security,” Trump said…

The 2016 GOP front-runner went on to tell Hewitt that he would be “fine” with a return to the practices that were in place before the passage [of] the USA Freedom Act, which Cruz supported. Rubio has repeatedly argued that Cruz voted to “weaken” U.S. intelligence efforts by supporting that bill

“I think that would be fine,” Trump said. “As far as I’m concerned, that would be fine.”

He’s running as a national-savior strongman. He describes himself as “militaristic,” something no other politician in America, up to and including superhawks like Rubio, does. He promises to “bomb the sh*t out of ISIS” because merely bombing ISIS isn’t quite anti-jihadi enough. Of course he’s going to choose the maximalist position when asked about data-mining in the name of counterterrorism. Beyond that, as a big-picture matter, Trump is running the most anti-libertarian campaign in recent Republican history. Other Republicans may not govern like libertarians but they all pay lip service to libertarian ideals: We need to shrink government, we need to get government out of the way, we need to empower individuals, and so forth. Trump doesn’t talk like that. Trump’s core argument is that the government would work fine, even great potentially, if we didn’t have imbeciles running it. He’s not opposed to statism, he’s opposed to “dumb” statism. On trade, he’s protectionist; on illegal immigration, he’s restrictionist; on entitlements, he’s opposed to cuts; on eminent domain, he’s willing to break a few eggs in the name of making an omelette. (One point on which Trump broadly agrees with libertarians is in opposing nation-building, but that’s more of a Jacksonian impulse at work than an isolationist one.) Go figure that he’s also not a civil libertarian when it comes to the government harvesting Americans’ data.

Incidentally, does he even know what it is that the NSA does?

https://twitter.com/MichaelRWarren/status/671776491823374336

When he says he errs on the side of security, apparently that erring goes as far as tolerating what he believes is the feds actually listening in to his phone chats instead of simply gathering the metadata. Yesterday Greg Gutfeld criticized Trump fans for routinely giving him a pass on stuff which, if said by Barack Obama, would cause an outrage meltdown in conservative media. Is he wrong?