Is Trump Imploding – and What Would It Mean If He Is?

Tags

America, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, Blog, Civilisation, Coffee, Defend the modern world, donald, Donald Trump, DTMW, dtmw dtmw, Facebook, Internet, make america great again, National Rifle Association, nra, nra nra, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, radio, trump, trump 2016, trump clinton, trump news, trump nra, trump odds, trump rally, Trump rally latest, Trump rally schedule, trumpdonald, tv, Twitter, United States

According to the pundits of the mainstream media, it looks increasingly likely that the US election in November will be a landslide victory for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her only genuine rival, Donald Trump, is all but out,  they say, having wrecked his chances of winning over the ‘moderate majority’ with a series of astonishing lapses of judgement and discipline.

I wish I could say with certainty that these pundits are wrong, but I can’t. To do so would be to place hope over observable reality.

The truth is the past fortnight has been by far the worst of Donald Trump’s short (if dazzling) political career. In rally after rally, the New York mogul has allowed his tongue to get the better of his political intelligence, making statements that can at the very best be described as ‘ill-advised’ and at worst as ‘politically suicidal’. 

And of these clangers, surely none seems destined for greater infamy than the following comment the Republican nominee made in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, August 9th: “If she (Hillary) gets to pick her (supreme court) judges, (there’s) nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said,  before adding, “although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Now, there are two ways in which this remark can be interpreted. One interpretation – one that gives Mr Trump the benefit of the doubt – is that he was simply suggesting ‘2nd amendment people’ might be able to organise into a legal, peaceful political force and persuade the Clinton regime to pick pro-gun judges. Another interpretation – that which the media has uniformly preferred – is that Mr Trump was suggesting – jokingly or not – that pro-gun activists assassinate Ms Clinton before she gets the chance to pick any judges.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is gaining in momentum following a series of Trump controversies.

It doesn’t really matter which interpretation is correct – at least politically speaking. The remark, whatever its meaning, was stupidly vague, needlessly provocative and incredibly unwise.

Donald Trump is not the idiot many liberals make him out to be. He is a clever, competent businessman, a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Finance and the son of successful professionals. He must have known as soon as the remark left his lips that it was the vocalisation of a grave error of judgement.

Personally, I do not believe Donald Trump would ever sincerely advocate political violence. It just isn’t the kind of man he is. Those people who know him personally  are unanimous in their testimony that the billionaire is. at heart, a kindly, charitable and honest person; much softer and gentler in private than in public. He is not a Putin, in other words, let alone a Hitler.

But even his supporters must be honest enough to admit that remarks of this kind are a gift to the opposition. Even we should acknowledge (in the spirit of tough love) that if such provocations continue to issue from Trump’s mouth, the November election is almost certainly destined to result in a Clinton rout.

As I said at the top, the media (both in America and Europe) have been quick to interpret the recent controversies as signalling the death knell for Trump’s entire campaign. In the words of the (liberal and pro-Hillary) New York Times: “The effort to save Mr. Trump from himself has plainly failed. He has repeatedly signaled to his advisers and allies his willingness to change and adapt, but has grown only more volatile and prone to provocation since then, making comments that have been seen as inciting violence and linking his political opponents to terrorism… Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped… And (even) Mr. Trump has begun to acknowledge to associates and even in public that he might lose. In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, he said he was prepared to face defeat.”

Trump rally in Orlando, Florida.

Of course, no-one can really say for sure whether it is ‘all over’ for Trump at this stage. It is still far too early to jump to any conclusions. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Hillary Clinton enjoys a terrifying 8 point lead over the Republican in most national polls. That lead represents a massive turnaround from just a few weeks ago, when Trump led in most polls by an average of 2 points. To be honest – and there is no point in being dishonest – this looks very grim indeed.

We – the Western World as a whole – simply cannot afford for Trump to lose in November. If the New Yorker fails to resuscitate his campaign in the next three months, America will find itself led by one of the most corrupt, opinion-less and manipulative executives in living memory.

Let there be not a doubt in your mind, reader; Hillary Rodham Clinton is considerably more dangerous to America’s well-being than Barack Obama ever was.

Unlike the current CIC, Mrs Clinton is not an ideologue. She is something far worse than that. She is an opportunist, a beneficiary of funds and a puppet of the special interests that have so corrupted American politics for decades. She will not, as president, do as she wants. She will do as she’s told. And that (in my opinion) is a million times more unpredictable, dangerous and sinister than the stable, pedestrian liberalism of Barack Hussein Obama.

Barack Obama has been far less damaging to America than Hillary promises to be.

In Trump’s own words: “Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft… She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others… in exchange for cash, pure and simple. Pure and simple.”

At several of his rallies Mr Trump has listed many of the foreign countries known to have lent material support to the Clinton campaign – states which include such beacons of liberty as Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. What, I ask, do they have in common?

Like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton is notorious for refusing to use the words ‘radical Islam’ when talking of the crimes of ISIS, preferring to use more culturally vague terms like ‘terrorism’, ‘murder’, ‘criminality’ and ‘violence’. Perhaps the list of nations backing the Clinton effort goes some way in explaining this, but not all the way.

The UAE is friendly with the Clinton campaign.

While Clinton is not – as Trump needlessly alleged – the ‘co-founder’ of ISIS, she is nevertheless on the same page as ISIS in regard to certain vital regional issues. Clinton is, for example, quite fanatical in her insistence that Bashar al-Assad (a man who has done more to combat ISIS than anyone) is the greatest evil currently active in Syria and has spoken more often in criticism of his regime than of the band of maniacs currently at war with it.

This stance would appear to be in sync with a school of thought devised in the murkier corridors of the neo-conservative movement; one which argues that ISIS, far from being a grave threat to America, may ultimately be good for it; that if ISIS can overthrow the Assad regime, even by instituting a medieval theocracy in its place, then that will benefit the US by knocking out a long-standing threat to its regional interests  – (by which they presumably mean the Assad government’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, some – but not all – of which have been dismantled).

This is all hypothetical, of course; but given the intransigence of the Clinton campaign, we can only be hypothetical. And that, in many essential ways, is just the point, isn’t it? 

Nothing is for certain with Clinton. She has no clear agenda. Everything about her is blurred behind a film of dust, money and Middle-Eastern smog.

So please, Mr Trump – play a smarter game. Stop giving the press exactly what they want. Stop feeding them headlines. Stop lighting unnecessary fires. There is no honour in losing on principle in this election. The stakes are considerably too high for that.

D, LDN

Advertisement

The Banality of Terror

Tags

anti-islamism, antijihad, banal, BBC, blogging, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Coffee, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, DTMW, dtmw dtmw, Facebook, facebook twitter, france attack, france terrorism, hashtags, hollande, Internet, ISIS, ISIS France, Islamism, Jihad, Multiculturalism, nice, nice attack, nice france, No to Turkey in the EU, online, politics, radio, Television, Terror, Terrorism, Twitter, United States, War

The attack in Nice, France – which resulted in the death by crushing of over 80 innocent civilians – has hardly caused a ripple on social media.

After the news had come through the place-name ‘Nice’ trended on Facebook for little more than an hour or so, after which it rapidly tumbled out of the ranking, replaced by such stories relating to the appointment of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary to the UK government, speculation over Donald Trump’s VP choice, and the latest gossip relating to the Palin family.

There have been no diaphanous tricolours draped over the profile pictures of my friends this time around. Few have chosen to mention the incident in a status update, or even to share a relevant news story. And I have been no different.

I just can’t quite bring myself to be angry over this latest atrocity. I am not shocked, frightened, or agitated by it. The news of the attack has hit me rather like a report of sleet in Scotland, or wind in Wales. Terrorism, especially terrorism in France, now seems ordinary, banal, unremarkable.

This attitude (which is largely involuntary) is especially disturbing when one contemplates the gruesome manner in which the victims of the Nice attack perished. Unlike the more professional attack of last November, the victims this time were not put out of their happiness by a painless bullet to the head. They were crushed by several tonnes of metal and rubber; flattened, deformed under wheels. As banal as the observation might be, this must have been a hellish way to die.

But still, I’m not outraged – only bitter and depressed. I want all this to stop, but I really don’t think it will. And if an anti-Islamist blogger is becoming desensitised to terrorism, how on Earth can we expect the average Joe to maintain the required level of interest?

The man suspected of carrying out the Nice truck attack: French-Tunisian – Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel

The official response to Nice has been just as lacklustre as the public reaction. Boris Johnson, (whose appointment as Foreign Secretary must rank as the worst national embarrassment in years), has expressed little more than sadness at the news. In America, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton offered only cheap, hollow solidarity on her personal Facebook page. Even Donald Trump has been more muted than usual.

The only exception to this icy disregard has been (or seemed at one point to be) former US house speaker Newt Gingrich, who used the aftermath of the attack to suggest a very sensible policy by which the US would quiz individual Muslims upon entry to America on their views of Sharia Law.

Unfortunately, if also inevitably, when this commonsensical notion received the usual abuse from the usual abusers, Gingrich promptly drained the idea of its force, over-clarifying the concept to the point of retraction. How pathetic; how telling.

The reaction of the Western media (or at least the UK/US media) was to dampen out any loose sparks of anger that might have escaped the general apathy described. The ever-reliable ‘don’t panic’ libertarian Simon Jenkins, for example, hot-footed it into the Guardian offices to inform us that: “A Nice truck driver does not remotely threaten the security of the French state, any more than such acts do the security of America or Britain. The identification of the nation state with random killings of innocent people has become a political aberration….The implication that leaders can somehow prevent such attacks by armed response is a total distraction from the intelligence and police work that might at least diminish their prevalence. It nationalises and institutionalises public alarm. It leads governments into madcap adventurism abroad and “securitises” the private lives of citizens at home…What has happened in France is tragic and calls for human sympathy. Beyond that, there is nothing we can usefully do – other than make matters worse.”

Though this argument has the flavour of reasonableness, the implication of it is surely that we should do absolutely nothing in response to terrorism; indeed, that we should actively prevent our governments from doing anything about it – on libertarian grounds.

Someone should really inform Mr Jenkins that Western states in fact need little encouragement to under-react to terrorist atrocities. Doing nothing has been standard operating procedure ever since the twilight years of the Bush administration.

I personally have no doubt that Francois Hollande’s bungled security measures (including his declaration of an extended state of emergency) will end up doing more harm than good. Nevertheless, the general preference of the public must surely be for the state to do more to address this threat, not less. Jenkins and his ilk appear obsessed with getting the masses to calm down and to put things in a rational, non-emotional, context. We have been doing that for over a decade. A bit of non-rational rage really wouldn’t go amiss at this point.

French President Francois Hollande

All things considered, Nice has been an unmitigated triumph for ISIS. Not only have the swinish degenerates managed to send dozens of unbelievers to perpetual hellfire, they have also further diminished the life-force and rage-reflex of the continent on which they resided.

(On a side note  – It is worth noting that Westerners have not become incapable of getting angry about anything. We are still liable to go ape over the unlawful killing of gorillas and lions. It is only the value of human beings, and of Western culture, that is collapsing. One might justly speculate that if a dog or a cat had been caught under the wheels in Nice the reaction would have been rather more vigorous.)

Europe seems ever more like a wounded animal, yelping and moaning, bleeding and weakening. The old spark, the energy behind colonisation and empire, has been all but exhausted. The deathly prefix ‘post’ is now attached to every formerly noble concept: post-modern, post-national, post-racial, post-Christian etc… Everything is watered down and submissive enough that even the most barbaric challenger can overcome it.

I have nothing original to say about Nice. I will simply close by reiterating that Islam does not belong in Europe and never will. It is backward, violent, boring and false down to the letter. It must be resisted with everything with we have.

If indeed we still have anything at all.

D, LDN