Yet very little of what the conservatives in the hall were going wild over could be characterized as conservative, and most of it wasn’t political at all: The 54-minute address included zero mentions of taxes, the deficit, profligate spending, abortion, or any social issue, unless you count his inscrutable promise to “help on women’s health issues more than anybody, including on the Democratic side, you watch.” Or his put-down of the University of New Hampshire’s unofficial new “bias-free language guide.” “They don’t want you to differentiate between a man and a woman! If that ever passed,” Trump said, “I’m gone.”
He called himself the “most militaristic person in the room,” then added, “but you have to know when to use it.” And he also says not only that we should never have gone into Iraq, but that we were better off with Saddam Hussein in charge there. “You had Iran and Iraq and they were the same; they were twins…Well, we took one out and look at the mess we have; we destabilized the Middle East. I’m not a fan of Saddam Hussein, but he ran the place, and he had no weapons of mass destruction. And now, instead of Saddam Hussein, we have far more brutal.” No, this is not an unheard-of view, but it is one that has generally been heard only from Democrats. Yet when the Republican front-runner says these things now—that we have nothing whatsoever to show for all the blood spilled there—many heads nod…
Instead of Obama’s motto that “we’re all in this together,” what Trump is telling us, in effect, is “I’ve got this.” The point of most of his stories, like the one about how somebody paid him “hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a dinner,” is that it’s a law of nature that money flows to him, and will flow to the country if we elect him: “We will make great trade deals. We will have Social Security without cuts. We will come up with health care plans that will be phenomenal, phenomenal, that will be less expensive.”
We will make the country great by making it rich, and how appealing is that?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member