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QUESTION EVERYTHING should be our motto. Particularly when it comes to politics. The following column presents some ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump. Please read it, whether you will be voting or not. A similar game could be played for the rest of us too.
Some key ideas explored on this article:
- (1) Don't you get the strange feeling that this has all been suspiciously easy?
- In light of this consistent pattern of vicious preemptive assault from the "left" and "right" against all anti-establishment GOP candidates in past elections, isn't it odd that Trump has been given a pass?
- As for the "conservative media," in the fall of 2011, Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter put all their weight behind the establishment's preferred candidate, Mitt Romney. And over the past several months, those same two bigwigs have invested all their savings in Trump stock.
- As for the old guard establishment itself, days before the Iowa caucus, when support for Cruz appeared to be surging, several GOP elder statesmen issued public statements (via mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Atlantic) saying they could work with Trump, but that Cruz was unlikeable.
- The true believers' claim that this showed the establishment cowering before the mighty Trump is rose-colored nonsense. On the eve of Iowa, it was obvious that their conditional endorsement of Trump was an effort to undermine Cruz.
- (2) Don't you find it odd that Trump, who habitually says the harshest, crudest, vilest things he can think of about anyone he perceives as an opponent or threat, never substantively criticizes the key players in the establishment at all?
- On the contrary, he boasts about his willingness to work with them, trumpets their willingness to work with him, and promises he'll make deals with them.
- Even a diehard Trump supporter, if he has retained any glimmer of objectivity, can see that the candidate most hated and feared by the entire Washington establishment, both Republican and Democrat, is Cruz.
- So everyone, from mainstream "liberals" Robert Reich and Bill Maher to mainstream Republicans Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, and Trump himself, acknowledges that Cruz is the only candidate so anti-establishment as to cause real hatred and fear among the bipartisan progressive zeitgeist.
- (3) If you were Rove, McConnell, and the rest of the GOP elite, and you wanted to end the growing grassroots threat to your power and influence once and for all, how would you go about it?
- Here's what I would do. Accepting that the grassroots will no longer succumb to my superior funding, and that they have rejected the "safety" of the status quo, I would try to gerrymander the grassroots movement itself.
- The key to my strategy would be to find and exploit a viable stalking horse who might demolish the grassroots conservative movement from within more effectively than any external assault.
- But at the same time this man should be so charismatic and unscrupulous that he will happily pitch his campaign at the very people he has long ridiculed and set out to thwart, or at least at those among them who are so blinded by anger that they are prepared to jump on any bandwagon whose leader seems to share that anger, regardless of whether he consistently stands for anything they actually believed back when they were thinking rationally about saving their country.
- Through this agent of destruction, I would factionalize the Tea Party movement, turning long-time allies against one another.
Read the whole article by Daren Jonescu, and others including video by leftist Robert Reich favoring Donald Trump over Cruz.
