http://www.nationalreview.com/node/436717/print Trump Is Running As Trump. Surprise!
What did you expect?
By Charles Krauthammer — June 16, 2016
When in his 1964 GOP acceptance speech Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a reporter sitting near journalist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!”
Six weeks into Donald Trump’s general-election campaign, Republicans are discovering that he indeed intends to run as Donald Trump. He has boasted that he could turn “presidential” — respectful, respectable, reticent, reserved bordering on boring — at will. Apparently, he can’t.
GOP leaders who fell in line behind Trump after he clinched the nomination expected, or at least hoped, that he would prove malleable, willing to adjust his more extreme positions and tactics to suit a broader electorate.
Two problems. First, impulse control: Trump says what he actually feels, whatever comes into his head at any moment. Second, a certain logic: Trump won the primaries Sinatra-style, his way — against the odds, the experts, and the conventional rules. So why change now? “You win the pennant,” Trump explained, “and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?”
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