The Trump Nuclear Bomb, by Victor David Hanson. Other public figures won’t admit they agree with him — but they often quietly adopt his ideas.
Donald Trump has a frightening habit of uttering things that many people apparently think, but would never express. And he blusters in such an off-putting and sloppy fashion that he alienates those who otherwise might agree with many of his critiques of political correctness.
Nonetheless, when the dust settles, we often see that Trump’s megatonnage strikes a chord — and, with it, sometimes has effected change. In an odd way, the more personally unpopular he becomes for raising taboo issues, the more resonant become the more refined variants of his proposals for addressing these festering problems.
The Mexican immigrants:
For the last several months, anti-Trump demonstrators have sought to disrupt his rallies; they attack his supporters and wave offensive anti-American and often overtly racist placards, while burning American and waving Mexican flags — often with a nonchalant police force looking on.
Trump shouts back that their antics are only further proof of his general point: Illegal immigration and an open border have subverted our immigration laws and created a paradoxical movement that is as illogical as it is ungracious.
After fleeing Mexico, entering the U.S. illegally, and being treated with respect (try doing the same in any Latin American country), some foreign nationals have been waving the flag of the country they do not wish to return to, while scorning the flag of the country that they demand to stay in.
But apparently they are not fond of Trump’s larger point, disguised by his barroom rhetoric, which is that the old melting-pot protocols of rapid assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have been sabotaged — and now the American people can at last see the wages of that disaster on national TV. …
Until the approach of the Trump battering ram, outrageous developments like the neo-Confederate concept of sanctuary cities being exempt from federal law were off limits to serious criticism — even from the Republican congressional establishment. …
The media is ok with PC tribalism, but not Trump’s.
The present tribalism is unsustainable in a pluralistic society. I wish the antidote for “typical white person,” “punish our enemies,” “my people,” (only) Black Lives Matter, and “la Raza” [all instances of recent PC racism] were not Donald Trump, but let us be clear on the fact that his is a crude reaction to a smooth and unquestioned racialism that, in bankrupt fashion, has been tolerated by the establishments of both parties.
On NATO:
Trump in blunderbuss fashion has questioned the premises of the seven-decade-old NATO alliance. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic derided his simplistic critique of paltry European contributions to the defense of the West as a sort of know-nothing nativism. It may well have been. But then strangely, European governments — Germany’s especially — quietly began issuing statements that, in fact, they were planning to up their defense budgets. Why now such acknowledgments, if Trump were a mere buffoon? And how did it happen that Europe (in aggregate perhaps the largest economy in the world) has still relied on far greater U.S. defense expenditures 70 years after the end of World War II?
Muslims:
Two examples of Trump’s most controversial and in some sense reprehensible invective are his suggestions that we should temporarily bar Muslim immigration into the United States, and that we should hold the families of terrorists accountable for their silence. …
A chorus denounced him for his racism, nativism, and xenophobia. Yet, quietly, authorities now say that they may well bring up Omar Mateen’s wife and others on charges of conspiracy or accessory to terrorism, in a muscular fashion that we have not witnessed before in other terrorism cases, especially the outrageous exemption given the conniving girlfriend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. …
Meanwhile, lots of politicians are now either calling for a temporary cessation of immigration from the Middle East or confessing that they have no idea who is entering the United States.
His conclusion:
So we always return to the central truth of 2016: Trump is a symptom, not a catalyst. He was created by the hyperpartisan unconstitutional overreach of Barack Obama, and by the appeasement of much of the Republican establishment, who wished to be liked and admired for their restraint and Beltway moderation rather than feared for their insistence on adherence to the Constitution and the protection of the individual from an always growing and encroaching government.
