Forfeiting the ideals of Never Trump, National Review is starting to embrace, slowly and awkwardly, the Republican president out of fealty to the party. This was perhaps an inevitable development. The magazine was born in 1955 as a revolt against…
#NeverTrump
Jeet Heer: National Review’s Sad Surrender to Trump – New Republic
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Politics Tagged with: Conservatism, NeverTrump
@MBGlenn: ‘Stand Up Republic’ is exactly that, to the chagrin of Erick Erickson… – The Collision Blog
Erickson is so busy thrusting his arm down into the sewer of this Presidency, in hopes of finding a quarter, that he can’t even see the big picture anymore. The cornerstone of “Never Trump” was the knowledge that the dangerous…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Politics Tagged with: NeverTrump, Republican Party
Conor Friedersdorf: “The Flight 93 Election” Signifies a Turn Away from Founding Principles… – The Atlantic
I believe conservatives know deep down that supporting Trump is antithetical to what they purport to believe––that hysteria and hyperbole in forecasts about putting a Clinton is back in the White House for four years is more a function of…
James Antle III: The biggest battle ‘Never Trump’ won – Washington Examiner
If they ran, there was a very real possibility they’d get an embarrassingly small percentage of the vote (think Pat Buchanan as the Reform Party nominee in 2000). Alternatively, they could do better, be blamed for electing Clinton and then…
Adam Gopnik: The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump – The New Yorker
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us…
Ben Howe: Trump’s nomination needed to happen so we could see what we’d become. – RedState
It’s time to accept that we didn’t just lose to Trump’s wing of the party because we deserved to. We lost to them because we needed to. To quote so many on our side these last several months: we needed…
Jonathan Chait: Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken – NYMag
Most of America, including a significant minority of Republicans, have seen Trump’s candidacy exactly for the con it is. Trump for President is a category error. He is, as his rivals have described him, a charlatan, a con artist, a…
On the matter of your moral inferiority…
A self-serving moral judgment is always implicit in any political judgment, for the simple reason that a politics without morality would be the physics of randomly colliding human atoms, of no meaning to anyone, or not authentically political at all.
Citizen Trump’s Path of Least Resistance to a Classy Profitable Exit
Should Trump, facing unfavorable and deteriorating political prospects, seek to humiliate himself leading a fractured Republican Party to an “epic” defeat in November? Should he prefer to “do all he could to destroy Cruz and the GOP” – turning himself into a hated loser and maker of losers? How would either alternative profit him – or preserve and burnish his all-important brand – at all?
Federalist, Libertarian, Conservative, Republican, or Insensate?
Opinions may differ as to whether “keep[-ing] options open” is not already the classic strategic sin of dividing one’s forces in the face of the enemy. On the other hand, if the conservative moment already possessed the unity of command necessary to make and implement any singular and exclusive decision, or a single general or general-in-waiting head and shoulders above all peers, then it would not be in so much trouble.