The image is up there because 1) when is it not a good time for chocolate? and 2) you’ve got a truckload of Trump ahead. You deserve something nice. Click here for the full poster.
Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin on the last ditch effort to Stop Trump.
Republican leaders adamantly opposed to Donald J. Trump’s candidacy are preparing a 100-day campaign to deny him the presidential nomination, starting with an aggressive battle in Wisconsin’s April 5 primary and extending into the summer, with a delegate-by-delegate lobbying effort that would cast Mr. Trump as a calamitous choice for the general election.
Hmm. Does that make it sound like this is a detailed, carefully considered plan? Consider this.
Recognizing that Mr. Trump has seized a formidable advantage in the race, they say that an effort to block him would rely on an array of desperation measures, the political equivalent of guerrilla fighting.
There is no longer room for error or delay, the anti-Trump forces say, and without a flawlessly executed plan of attack, he could well become unstoppable.
The people who failed to recognize Donald Trump as a threat until he’d run most of their candidates off the stage and pocketed most of the delegates, now have come up with a plan that must be executed “flawlessly” to work. In that case… hello Nominee Trump!
But wait, they have one fall back position.
But should that effort falter, leading conservatives are prepared to field an independent candidate in the general election, to defend Republican principles and offer traditional conservatives an alternative to Mr. Trump’s hard-edged populism.
Step one: worry that Trump might run as an independent candidate and screw things up for your sure-fire winning conservative guy. Step two: insist that Trump swear to support the Republican nominee (and, incidently, have just about everyone else who is a potential candidate make the same pledge). Step three: run conservative candidate in an effort to thwart Trump.
Remind me again how the Republican Party is not completely screwed? Okay. I admit I wandered off the editorial page for this one, but I couldn’t resist.
Now, come on in. Let’s see what’s actually in the punditatory.
Sierra Thomas was one of those protesters who discovered what it was like to come to the attention of Trump’s MVSN.
It was as if my body was on autopilot. The next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the aisle on the steps, one fist in the air, yelling, “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” ...
People began to yell back at me, “All lives matter!” “Get out of here!” “Boo! Trump! Trump! Trump!” I wanted to tell them that of course “all lives matter” but that they weren’t dealing with the same struggles black people were — police brutality, an unfair justice system, generational poverty. ...
Trump looked my way and yelled into the mic: “Get out!” The people I’d been sitting and talking with cheered with the rest of the crowd as police came over.
That was far from the worst thing said to Thomas. Read the rest to get real insight into who these people are.
Eugene Robinson has his own review of the Stop Trumpers.
We can no longer pretend this isn’t happening. Donald Trump will very likely be the Republican nominee for president, and there is a non-zero chance he could win in November. ...
The stop-Trump “movement” in the Republican Party has been, thus far, a pathetic joke. The fecklessness of the whole endeavor was encapsulated by Mitt Romney’s performance earlier this month: He told voters why they should not vote for Trump but stopped short of endorsing an alternative.
The party establishment has no hope of defeating Trump if it is not willing to coalesce around one of his opponents. I understand that Cruz — the logical choice, since he has actually beaten Trump multiple times in primaries and caucuses — is widely disliked and almost certainly too conservative to win the general election. I understand that Kasich is seen as too moderate and has not demonstrated much appeal to the base. But if party leaders can’t bring themselves to choose one or the other, Trump will continue to roll.
Somewhere back there, I distinctly remember a line of pundits referring to how “deep” the “Republican bench” was this year. Just so much “talent.” So much that they can’t find one guy sane enough to gather round.
Peter Wehner on how there’s no there, there… except the hurting. There is hurting.
It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.
Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)
Short form of what I’m going to spend a few thousand words on about… three hours from now: the GOP never had many people interested in its arcane, unproven and unprovable economics. So they went and grabbed racists. And when racists weren’t enough, they grabbed the conspiracy theorists and gun nuts, and when they weren’t enough, they grabbed the xenophobes. And it was barely enough to win… for awhile. Then they went around wondering how their party was taken over by a racist, xenophobic, pro-violence conspiracy nut.
Colbert King on Trump’s obvious racism.
It’s happened before. The Republican establishment, recognizing the danger that the bigoted, demagogic candidate posed to the party, roundly opposed his election. On Election Day, however, the candidate captured a majority of the white vote. It was no fluke, as his odious views were well known. He had even once held elected office. A column I wrote almost 25 years ago refreshed my memory.
The candidate was David Duke, an ex-Klansman, neo-Nazi and former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991 and lost by a landslide to Democrat Edwin Edwards, thanks to a phenomenal black turnout.
The remarkable thing about the “Dukies,” as some of his supporters described themselves, is that they hardly resembled the caricature that might have been drawn of people who openly sympathized with a racist and anti-Semite. ...
They resembled the enthusiastic white women and men who attend Trump’s rallies.
I’m thinking that they did more than resemble the same people who attend Trump rallies.
Ross Douthat is limbering up his pointing finger.
When an old order is in crisis, something distinctive happens to the men who lead it.
A strange paralysis sets in, a curious mix of denial and resignation. W. B. Yeats’ famous line about the best lacking all conviction captures part of this, but only part. What really goes missing isn’t conviction itself but the capacity to act on it — to adapt swiftly, resist effectively, or both. Instead the tendency is to freeze, like mice under a hawk’s shadow, and hope that stillness alone can save you from the talons.
Yeats has been getting such a workout lately. The gyre is definitely widening, the center is long given up on holding, and that blood-dimmed tide is starting to look about as familiar as cherry Kool-Aid. Why don’t we ever get political situations that put people in mind of Coleridge? I could use a stately pleasure dome or two. Though I guess it could be worse. People aren’t quoting Eliot. Yet.
Though it wanders a bit off topic, I couldn’t resist including this ode to Jake Kemp from Douthat’s column.
Kemp was a famous tax cutter, but also thought of himself as a “bleeding heart conservative,” a passionate believer in the power of free markets and free trade to lift up the poor and dispossessed.
See? He wasn’t just a Austrian School data-free trickle-down voodoo economist… Or he was… except he honestly thought giving money to the rich was good for the poor. He was an houngan with a heart.
Douthat wobbles around this week, feeling sad that Paul Ryan can’t exorcise the Trump. Admitting that Trump represents a white nationalist viewpoint. Then wishing that The GOP could absorb all the enthusiasm about Trump, without… Trump. And presumably without the white nationalist thing. The whole column is really an exercise in Douthat calling every other Republican a coward. Without using the word coward. Because he’s a coward.
Yang Jianli, Fang Zheng and Zhou Fengsuo have seen Trump’s type before.
By now, many people who remain haunted by the horrific slaughter of protesters in 1989 in Tiananmen Square have expressed shock and disgust at Donald Trump’s outrageous characterization of that tragic event. During the March 10 Republican presidential debate, Trump said that it was “a strong, powerful government that [reacted] with strength. And then they kept down the riot.” Though he hastened to add that he wasn’t “endorsing” the crackdown, it was too late: In one breath, he both smeared the students’ peaceful protest as a “riot” and characterized their murder as an illustration of “strong” leadership.
Even Trump’s most outlandish and crudest previous exclamations did not prepare us for such an astonishing mischaracterization of the Tiananmen massacre…
We three, who were lucky enough to have survived, still wrestle with the vivid memory of the brothers and sisters we saw mowed down by tanks and machine guns and who were left lying in the streets. One of us (Fang Zheng) lost both his legs when a tank ran over them. …
Trump has reminded us of a larger lesson. It is that the strong leadership he so admires, if untethered from a firm moral compass, can wreak terrible havoc upon innocent victims.
The are people who have seen “strong leadership” first hand. Let’s hope they’re not going to see it again.
Patricia Leigh Brown has somewhat less serious concerns about Trump.
As he seeks membership in the ultimate club at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a question nags: How might Mr. Trump’s brand play out within the staid and stately confines of the White House, America’s most hallowed home? The historian Douglas Brinkley, whose book “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America” came out this week, noted that Mr. Trump’s excess contrasts with other eras in politics, when candidates “tried to tamp down the perception of wealth.”
… “Trump is like a one-man Gilded Age, carrying opulence wherever he goes. We’ve never had someone running for president who is a bling artist.”
Who is the biggest manufacturer of tacky gold paint? I think I want to make an investment. Just in case. Hey, maybe someone is building a stately pleasure dome! Way to ruin that one for me.
Dana Milbank draws the connection between Flint and conservative ideas of pushing functions down.
In a hearing this week about the poisonous water in Flint, Mich., Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) tried to blame the lead-tainted water on the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained that, under the law Congress passed, states are in charge of enforcing drinking-water standards.
“The law?” Carter replied, contemptuously. “The law? I don’t think anybody here cares about the law.”
It was an awkward and inadvertent moment of truth. Congress has hamstrung the federal government, giving states the authority to enforce drinking-water standards and all but eliminating the EPA’s power to intervene. This is a pure expression of the conservative doctrine of federalism: States handle things better than the feds because they are closer to the people.
I’m still reeling at the idea that a Congressman, in a public hearing, stated that no one in the Congress “cares about the law.” Forget Eliot. We’re going straight to Kafka.
Leonard Pitts and the “justice” system.
In 2000, Jane, trying to raise two young daughters on $15,000 a year and an $80 weekly child-support check, was recruited by her then-boyfriend for an insurance scam. They staged a car accident and tried to collect on a claim.
It didn’t work. Jane was convicted on fraud charges and sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was released in 2004.
That’s when her ordeal began.
Her debt to society paid, Jane set out looking for work. She was rehired by a former employer and worked there two years.
Then the state Office of Professional Discipline suspended her license for two years for professional misconduct — not because she had done anything wrong, but because of the old conviction.
Speaking from personal experience, being convicted of a crime means being stripped of a hundred things you didn’t think about beforehand. One big category is essentially any job that has a professional licensing body. It doesn’t matter if you were a CPA, a nurse or paramedic, just about anything. And it doesn’t matter how much time or effort you put into that career. It’s over.