T. Belman. Stephens certainly didn’t convince me. Stephens argues that we shouldn’t be voting for a policy menu. What? Instead “My fundamental objection to Mr. Trump is that he is unfit, as a person, to be president.” And Hillary is more fit?
Q: How can you call yourself a conservative columnist when you’re rooting for Hillary Clinton in this election?
A: Because Donald Trump is anti-conservative, un-American, immoral and dangerous.
Q: And Hillary Clinton is a conservative who personifies all that we hold dear as Americans and has a terrific record in government?
A: Not at all. She’s conventionally liberal, politically opportunistic and ethically challenged.
Q: And you support her?
A: I wish it weren’t so. But what’s the choice?
Q: The choice is a Republican candidate who may disagree with Wall Street Journal orthodoxies on trade and immigration but otherwise wants to cut taxes and regulations, strengthen defense, appoint conservative judges, and take advice from people like Mike Pence and Paul Ryan.
A: You seem to think we elect a policy menu. My fundamental objection to Mr. Trump is that he is unfit, as a person, to be president.
Q: Oh, please. I’ll grant he’s a bit rough around the edges, but that’s because he’s a nonpolitician. He’s also a brilliant businessman who made billions of dollars.
A: I might believe that claim if he would release his tax returns, or if six of his businesses hadn’t gone bankrupt, or if he hadn’t been involved in more than 4,000lawsuits, or if he didn’t routinely shortchange his suppliers or stiff his charities.
Q: Spoken like an elitist who doesn’t know what it’s like to run a business.
A: The successful entrepreneurs I know run their businesses with prudence, openness and integrity.
Q: Still, you can’t argue with success.
A: What Mr. Trump has achieved isn’t success. It’s notoriety. He has more in common with Kanye West than he does with Steve Wynn. And he isn’t just rough around the edges. He’s rotten to the core.
Q: Why, because every so often he says something ill-considered or politically incorrect? We’ve all said things we regret. Hillary lies all the time.
A: The difference is that Mrs. Clinton lies tactically to protect herself politically. Mr. Trump lies compulsively to aggrandize himself or belittle vulnerable people, whether it’s a handicapped reporter or a bereaved mother.
Q: They’re both flawed characters. But we’re electing a president, not the pope. And as a conservative, his views are much closer to mine.
A: Mr. Trump’s nativist brand of politics is much further removed from conservatism than Mrs. Clinton’s mainstream liberalism.
Q: And how do you define conservatism?
A: A principled commitment to limited government, free markets, constitutional rights, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, e pluribus unum and Pax Americana.
Q: Trump believes in most of that.
A: Except he doesn’t, starting with the Constitution. His plan to end birthright citizenship runs afoul of the 14th Amendment. His threat to “open up those libel laws” so he can sue his critics is a threat to press freedom. His attack on “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo Curiel was an assault on the American creed.
Q: That was just Trump spouting off.
A: What you call “spouting off” is an insight into Mr. Trump’s mind. It betrays an instinctive illiberalism. That’s why he attracts so much praise from Jean-Marie Le Pen and David Duke. It’s why he keeps praising Vladimir Putin.
Q: Trump praises Putin because he’s popular at home, respected abroad and gets things done. That used to be true of U.S. presidents like Eisenhower, but it isn’t true of Barack Obama. Isn’t it time we had an effective leader?
A: Putin isn’t respected. He’s feared. Any thoughtful conservative would sooner have an incompetent democratic government than an efficiently autocratic one.
Q: We’ve got $19 trillion in debt, a murder rate on the rise, Islamic State on a rampage, and millions of working-age men who have given up looking for work. Sorry, but these are not normal times.
A: We’ve overcome worse—think of the 1970s. What isn’t normal is the sudden taste for buffoonish leaders preaching drastic remedies. It’s one thing for the Philippines to elect a character like Rodrigo Duterte. It’s another for his American equivalent to become leader of the free world.
Q: This is America, with institutions to provide checks and balances against an overreaching president. Speaking of institutions, what have you got to say about the fact that we’re one justice away from losing the Supreme Court to liberals for a generation?
A: What makes you so sure that a man who disdains a strict interpretation of the Constitution would appoint strict constructionists?
Q: Look, with Hillary I know what I’m getting and it’s a disaster. With Trump, there’s a chance he’ll keep his promises and grow in office.
A: If you’re truly confident in American institutions, then we’ll ride out Mrs. Clinton just as we have Mr. Obama. As for Mr. Trump, the man you see as nominee is the man you’ll get as president, only with more vanity and vastly more power. As the man himself likes to say, “You think I’m going to change? I’m not changing.” That’s one promise you know he’ll keep.
I guess Soros has operatives posing as conservatives, to be brought out in times of “crisis”.
Steph was curiously unsympathetic to releasing Pollard as was Commentary Magazine’s Tobin.
Both write fairly well, but…….hey folks if a journalist who wears support for Israel on his sleeve and at the same time cannot support the one candidate who is courageous and calls out radical Islamic terrorism, you are a tool of the terrorists and should never ever be trusted.
One Stephens’ big complainst, to denigrate Trump, was that he has had 6 bankruptcies. Well, with a man who is running, or has run literally hundreds of businesses 6 bankruptcies is like comparing a minnow to a whale. None of the bankruptcies was earth shaking, and he seemed to have forgotten that hankruptcies are a legal remedy for certain situations where businesses get overextended and can’t meet their liabilities. THESE BANKRUPTCIES ARE LEGAL. Otherwise he’d be mired in fraud charges over them. And that he isn’t.
Stephens is a puff. hard to know if he’s a true coservative or a subterranean Liberal. He’s definitely one of the clacking clique who follow each other like ducklings in a line, repeating whatever is the popular rant. And with the GOP Establishment, Trump is Enemy No.1
I knew Bret Stephens was no good,from moment he supported the Gaza Disengagement. He shares this dubious distinction with his fellow conservative Charles Krauthammer, by the way. This indicated his cravenness, shallowness and need to be part of the establishment. Just ignore the religious nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the blatant Antisemitism of making Gaza JudenRein because the corruption-compromised Former-Hawk Sharon is in the good-graces of the Bushies and the Israeli elite. Only now Stephens admits he may have been mistaken about Gaza. Big deal! Bret, you are not any better than the liberal sycophants of Obama and Hillary.
bret actually said nothing except that he did show what a lying hypocrite he and many establishment conservatives really want when they pretend to be for the american people.
Its quite simple, the conservatism that bret speaks of is the firing of american workers, shipping all the jobs to china, flooding the US with cheap labor for his corporate employers….. bret follows the money with his open purse but the GOP voters chose the hybrid Trump. Of course Bret and the other media paid whores would choose anyone but Trump because Trump is not on the payroll of Brets masters.
Brets “conservatism” is simply a prescription for the continued raping of the american people by the establishment elite and their bought and paid whores in the media…. like Bret.
Hillary would be bad for Israel to be sure, but Bret Stephens captured the essence of Trump brilliantly. And he is completely right about the only promise that Trump will keep. And it is the only promise that Trump ever kept.
What Stephens doesn’t address, nor was it apparently pointed out to him, is that the idea that you could ride out a Clinton presidency like we supposedly rode out Obama for eight years and wait for the next election begs the question of “what would your republican/conservative vote in 2020 mean if the country has reached a point of no return?” He points out that he doesn’t want to vote for a TV celebrity for president, but, why not, if his policies are so starkly better for the country to the point where one could say that even if Trump can’t make America as great as one would like, he certainly will save it from destruction. I think Stephens has an ego somewhat elitist that can’t overcome his difficulty of swallowing the medicine for the long term benefit.