Watching Donald Trump rise in popularity within the GOP is like watching a train wreck, with the train being the GOP.
Right now, Democrats must be on their knees thanking God for Donald Trump, because the 2016 presidential election was going to be lost by them until he jumped into the contest.
Trump would be a side-show attraction in the current political circus if it weren’t for the alleged Republicans who are cheering him on. The latter are behaving like Minions in search of a villain to serve. Well, they have found one.
Are Trump’s supporters oblivious to the fact that Trump’s rantings are as toxic as Gru’s jelly?
In a Washington Post column, George Will says this:
It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government’s size and coercive powers.
Most of Donald Trump’s normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit of, the police measures necessary for and the cruelties that would accompany his policy.
In a Weekly Standard blog post, Jay Cost explains just how amateurish Trump is.
The winning political position for conservatives is to insist on proper enforcement mechanisms and a visa program that works for the whole country, and then to deal compassionately with the people who are already here illegally – some form of legal status that falls short of citizenship. To whatever extent they constitute a public policy problem, it does not justify the draconian measure of mass deportation. Instead, conservatives should focus on fixing the system that let them in.
But Trump seems incapable of such nuance. For instance, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that illegal immigrants in this country “have to go,” including the DREAMers (i.e. those illegal immigrants who were brought here as children, have no criminal backgrounds, and gone to college or joined the military). This is an unequivocal loser for conservatives. The DREAMers, after all, are a small cohort who receive outsized national attention because they are a politically sympathetic group. A skillful politician would gladly compromise on the DREAMers, knowing that the real goal is to ensure that effective enforcement mechanisms take effect before any legalization.
But Trump is not a skillful politician. He is an amateur, and a vain one at that. Todd baited the hook, and Trump eagerly took a chomp. He couldn’t help himself, even though it makes him look like a nativist, not to mention a statist. How many federal police officers would be needed to track down 11 million illegal immigrants? More than I care to hire, that’s for sure.
It used to be that angry villagers would attack a monster with torches and pitchforks, but the Howard Beale wing of the GOP is cheering the monster of Manhattan, despite the damage that Trumpenstein is doing to the GOP village.
Oh well, if Dr. Nefario can create a cure for Gru’s Minions, then perhaps he can create a cure for Trump’s. It’s too bad that a fart gun won’t work on Trump, because he stinks already.
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This post sponsored by the maker of Pérez’s Churros, the churros that make little kids go
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Featured Image created by post’s author.
Images from the movie Despicable Me 2 are the property of Illumination Entertainment and are used in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine.
The “Wanted” posters say the following about David: “Wanted: A refugee from planet Melmac masquerading as a human. Loves cats. If seen, contact the Alien Task Force.”