http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/09/20/vdh_nails_the_never_trumpersVDH Nails the Never Trumpers
September 20, 2016
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RUSH: There is a column today by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online, and the headline title... I don't know that he wrote the headline. I'm just giving you the identifier here. "Never NeverTrump."
This is the definitive piece criticizing the Never Trumpers for their decision to oppose Trump at all costs, even if it means the election of Hillary Clinton. And when I say it is the one, it's the definitive. It's the piece that everybody who is really bothered by the Never Trumpers and can't understand why in the world they would do anything that would facilitate the election of Hillary Clinton -- although we do know why.
You get in trouble mentioning why because it offends them. But, I mean, they're... I don't know. There are a couple dozen reasons, but three or four primary reasons why the Never Trumpers are Never Trumpers. But Victor Davis Hanson slices and dices it. It prints to 10 pages, so I can't read the whole thing. It's well worth your reading. So I'm sure by now Koko is gonna link to it, and I will highlight certain aspects of it as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today.
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RUSH: Here Jim in San Antonio. I want to grab a phone call as I always try to do in the first hour. Jim in San Antonio, I'm glad you called, sir. It's great to have you with us. What's up?
CALLER: Rush, it's a pleasure to speak to you, first off.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Yeah, my thought is I've been listening to a for an awfully long time, and I hear people talk about, "You know, if the Democrats win, we're gonna have to wait four years before we can do anything." My premise is that with Supreme Court nominees, with legalizing the illegals, with opening the borders and all that, my premise is that I do not think the conservatives can win another national election for the foreseeable future. You've got --
RUSH: You know, Trump --
CALLER: Sorry?
RUSH: Trump is saying that this may be the last election the Republican Party can win.
CALLER: I think this is --
RUSH: I know what he means by that. Who are these people that are saying we got four years? "Eh, if we lose we got four years to put it all back together." Give me the name. Can you tell me the type of people saying that?
CALLER: Well, I mean, I listen to you, I listen to Beck, I listen to Hannity, but, I mean, some of the No Trumpers right now, some of our leaders in the GOP party and all that, you know, your McCains, all those people and everything.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But, you know, I think this will spill over even to some of the statewide elections. You know, midterm elections we're gonna have a chance. I just do not think we're gonna have a chance with the electoral vote situation and everything. I think it looks pretty bleak.
RUSH: Oh, I think you're right. I don't... There is no... The people that are saying, "Hey, you know, if we lose, we're gonna really be setting ourselves up for a massive win in four years 'cause after four more years of this, it's gonna be so bad..." They're missing the boat entirely. This is it, in a lot of way. Not that there's not gonna be an America. There's always gonna be an America.
It's just what kind of America it's gonna be and who is going to be leading it and what kind of character and morality and value system is going to be dominant, and that's what's at stake. And some of the Never Trumpers don't think there's any such crisis at all like that. This is a good transition for me to lead the next hour with excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson's piece that I talked about earlier at National Review. It'll dovetail exactly with what you're talking about.
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RUSH: All right, stick with me, folks. This is really tough to excerpt. I tell you upfront because it deserves to be read in its entirety, and I simply don't have to the time or the ability to do it. It's tough, interpretative reading of others' words. There's probably nobody better at it than me. I could probably command your attention if I wanted to read the whole thing, but that would not be the best way to approach this. Excerpts and you following it yourself is.
It's "Never NeverTrump," Victor Davis Hanson, the phenomenal VDH, writing at National Review Online. Which is interesting in and of itself because National Review has many of the Never Trumpers who are trumpeting their Never Trumpism every day, multi times a day on the National Review site. Victor Davis Hanson is not naming any names, doesn't have to, but the people would read his piece would know who he's talking about. But let me do my best to excerpt this. It begins thus:
"Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red." Have you ever seen that map, red and blue counties? (scoffs) We dwarf 'em. We don't dwarf 'em in the population centers but, I mean, 98% of this country geographically is Republican. You go to the coastal areas and some state capitals like Chicago and other big cities, and it's all union Democrat. California, for example.
"Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views." That's exactly right. Ministry of Truth. State-Controlled Media. News isn't news anymore. News is what they do in order to move you to arrive to agree with the "correct" opinion of things. Story after story, person after person.
"In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney ... were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie," such as It's a Wonderful Life. "When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car.
"If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney ... chose the decorous path of dignified abdication." What this means is that these mild-mannered, moderate/centrist Republicans, when they were being systemically cut up and destroyed right there in front of their faces, sit there and let it happen because it's the polite and establishment way to do it. You simply do not fight back. You simply do not!
Candy Crowley asserts herself in that debate and saves and rescues Obama on the whole subject of Benghazi and foreign policy, and Romney sits there and lets it happen. Mr. Hanson here is saying: These are the people we think can beat these people? These are the people we think we'd rather have than Donald Trump? These are the people we think are gonna fight back against what's wrong? We already know Romney didn't fight back! We already know McCain didn't fight back, and even if they had chosen to they were destroyed before they would have started.
This is part of a slow buildup to his belief that Trump is the last hope that we have of stopping the path that we are on, that Victor Davis Hanson concludes is national suicide. And along the way he excoriate these Never Trumpers for their focus on the preservation of this movement or that movement or delaying the inevitable for four more years. "Maybe we can get it back in four years, but we can't ever do anything, if this guy becomes president.
"We will ruin our party! We will ruin conservatism if Trump wins." This is what they say. And Mr. Hanson here says (scoffs), if Trump loses, you aren't going to have anything. There isn't gonna be a conservative movement, and there isn't gonna be a Republican Party. Now, there will be a conservative movement, but it's not gonna have any political oompff. It's gonna be made up of the same figures that make it up now that can't even win a Republican primary. But he takes 10 pages to get there.
It's the final two-thirds of his piece where he really, really lays into what is going on. Here's a section called: "Never in My Name? The only missing tessera in Trump's mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather the 10% or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1-2% in one or two key states and spell his defeat. Some Never Trump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican party; barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial, spoilers in a 1-2% loss to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win."
Let me translate this, not take this out of context. He's really contrasting these people. He's saying these are the guys -- the Never Trumpers -- that long ago forecast Trump couldn't win diddly-squat and predicted Trump wouldn't win the primary and if he did win the primary, couldn't beat Hillary. He'd get shellacked by 70-30%, 40%. It was gonna be just a disaster. And Mr. Hanson is saying now that they're really concern is not being shown to be wrong.
For the sake of their reputations, they want the Trump to lose big so that they can say they were right, and a Trump landslide defeat is exactly what they want in that case. But what happens if Trump loses by just a point or two? Well, that's okay, as well. They would settle for being disliked, 'cause if he loses by a point or two, it could be said that it's their fault, the Never Trumpers. But Victor Davis Hanson concludes that they would still rather Trump lose than have Trump win and themselves become irrelevant.
Meaning if Trump wins after all this Never Trumper opposition, is Trump gonna offer them anything in his Regime? Is Trump gonna offer them anything? They're gonna be left out. They don't want to be left out. So Trump has to lose, Mr. Hanson theorizes, for the Never Trumpers to have a future. Notice it's not Trump has to lose so the country has a future. The proper question... Oh, let me read the preceding paragraph to this.
"To be fair, Never Trump's logic is that Trump's past indiscretions and lack of ethics, his present opportunistic populist rather than conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters (whom I think Hillary clumsily referenced as the 'deplorables' and whom Colin Powell huffed off as 'poor white folks') make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives -- or too gauche to admit supporting in reasoned circles."
So again I will explain this. He's acknowledging that the Never Trumpers have a logic and the logic is that Trump's past -- his bombast, his indiscretions, his apparent lack of ethics, his populism... Not conservatism. He's not a conservative. His populism and the Deliverance characteristics of his supporters. Mr. Hanson's saying it's not just Democrats that think Trump's supporters a bunch of hayseed hillbillies. It's the same Republicans who didn't like Sarah Palin. It's the same like Colin Powell calls "poor white folks."
And because Trump has "those kinds of people" supporting him, he just can't be trusted. He'd be too reckless to be commander-in-chief. This is so bad! These kinds of people supporting Trump, we can't join them. That's what he's saying here. The Never Trumpers are looking at people at the Trump rallies and people that support Trump and they see a bunch of Deliverance hayseeds and they're compared. They can't acknowledge being for Trump and being in the same group with that crowd!
You know what? There's an analogy. The establishment pro-choice Republican who hate the Christian right -- always have -- are embarrassed to be at the Republican convention with 'em. They always have. You know, here comes Falwell's Moral Majority and these other family rights groups, and the Republican establishment, the moderate Republicans always say, "Ew, ew! I just wish they weren't in my party." Mr. Hanson's saying there is a strain of that among today's Never Trumpers.
They just can't imagine being in the same group of people that they see at a Trump rally. And then he says, "Perhaps. But the proper question is a reductionist 'compared to what?' Never Trumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments." Mr. Hanson says, "That is simply not a sustainable proposition."
You cannot say that Trump is less conservative than Hillary, and he is aghast that there are Never Trumpers on the right who are trying to claim Trump's disqualified 'cause he's not conservative enough, when compared to Hillary Clinton, he is. Which is a point I tried to make last week and apparently got savaged for it. Conservatism isn't, as we know it, on the ballot this time. So what do we do? Well, we have to start making comparisons.
And we know that Hillary isn't, and we know that Trump is much closer to it than Hillary will ever be because she will never be it. And Trump, when it comes to his policy statements on border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, Supreme Court? Compared to Hillary, there isn't any comparison. So why are the Never Trumpers still insisting that Trump's not conservative enough for 'em when the question is: "Compared to what?" Yeah, maybe Trump versus Cruz, yeah. Trump's not. Maybe Trump versus Rubio. Trump versus -- I don't know -- Huckabee. Pick a name out of the group that lost in the primary. But Trump versus Hillary? What are we talking about here?
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RUSH: There's another very, very interesting paragraph. Now, remember, the Never Trumpers, they can't stomach Trump because he's so odious, he's so uncouth, he's so unsophisticated, he's so intemperate, he's so ill tempered, he's so rude. He just speaks like an uneducated dimwit. So Mr. Hanson writes, "Is Trump ... all that much more odious than the ... present incumbent," Barack Obama, "who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials"?
Barack Obama who has "serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi," Barack Obama who "ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school," Barack Obama who "oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA," Barack Obama who "has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Yeah, "Trump on occasion did not recognize the 'nuclear triad,' but then he probably does not say 'corpse men' either or believe we added 57 states."
So this paragraph is sort of another little stick of dynamite to the Never Trumpers. Okay, you guys think Obama is Mr. Sophisticated? You think Obama's the gold standard? Yeah, he went to the Harvard, Ivy League, is properly spoken, very intelligent sounding? He's lying, conniving, dividing, unproductive. Just go through all the things that Obama has said or done.
How in the world, the question is, can you Never Trumpers look at Trump and see this big blob of unsophistication and boorishness and look at Obama and not be similarly appalled? And that is the question, folks. You know, in all of us, the acceptance of all of these negatives and problems of Barack Obama because he's "one of us," he's an establishment guy. He's got his Ivy League pedigree. He went to Harvard. He represents himself well when he speaks. He sounds intelligent. But look at what he's done!
Does that not matter?
So Mr. Hanson is wondering how in the world can a guy like Obama, who has really demonstrated that he knows how to destroy things and divide people and split this nation wide open and promote the division and promote the hatred -- how does a guy like Obama -- get a pass and Donald Trump is held up to some standard that nobody could meet? He has his answers to his questions. If you'll read the whole piece, you'll found out why he thinks the Never Trumpers are doing this. It's essentially self-preservation and fundraising and a number of other things. But in the process he says if this goes on -- if there's four more years of this with Hillary and everything that she's gonna bring along with it -- we are committing national suicide.
We are killing that America that was founded and that we have all grown up expecting to exist in perpetuity.
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