Trump's Wasted Week that Was - Or Was it?

During the second half of March, Donald Trump pretty much unarguably had the worst two weeks any presidential candidate in modern times has ever had.  He was completely off-message, focused on the wrong things, constantly under fire from the mainstream [fake] news media, and just generally looked lost.  The "Trump is Hitler", "Trump is a racist", "Trump is a misogynist" memes were ubiquitous on all the talking head shows and across all social media.

The result of those two weeks came with a big-time loss to Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary.  This led all the "smart" people in Washington - like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer and George Will and all the pinheads who write for The National Review these days - to declare Trump dead as a doornail, proclaiming with certainty that Trump could never, never, ever even hope to get to the 1237 delegate needed to win the nomination, and that the GOP would end up having a brokered convention out of which Ted Cruz would emerge victorious.

Remember all of that?  If you don't, go back and do a little review, 'cuz that's exactly what happened during that period of time.

So what happened next?  What happened next was Ted Cruz never won another contested primary.  What happened next was Ted Cruz and the crazy party guest who just won't leave, John Kasich, finally dropped out of the race following Trump's huge win in the Indiana primary.  What happened next was Trump ran his delegate total all the way to 1542 as of this writing, with still more on the way.  What happened next was Bill Kristol made a clown of himself by pushing some blogger no one had ever heard of as his own stellar independent candidate.  What happened next was Trump already consolidating support in the GOP to the same level Mitt Romney managed to put together in the 2012 race.  What happened next was Trump taking a temporary polling lead over Hillary Clinton, something none of the "smart" people thought could ever happen in a million years.

That's what happened next, all of it after Trump had experienced the most god-awful two week period in the history of American politics in March.

And now we sit here at the end of another lost week for Donald Trump.  He was focused on the wrong things, completely off-message, creating controversy where none needed to exist, pounded 24 hours a day by the [fake] news media, needlessly giving rise again to the "Trump is a racist" meme.  His lead over Hillary is now a thing of the past, his campaign is supposedly out of money, and his millions of dollars worth of free weekly airtime on the 24 hour cable networks has all but disappeared.

So now what's happening?  Why, all the same "smart" people who declared him dead in early April are now declaring him dead in early June.  Bill Kristol and his gang of #NeverTrump circus clowns are busy huddling with Mitt Romney concocting yet another scheme to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention in July.  Normal people who see Hillary Clinton as the personification of evil in our time and want desperately to support Trump as the only viable alternative to four or eight years of resident evil in the White House are walking around with their heads down, despairing that Trump is blowing this thing.

That's what's happening now.  Everything is right back where it was in early April.

Given what has happened during the course of this campaign season to this point, what do you think is the most likely thing to start happening next?

Get your heads up, Trump fans.  It's a long way to November.

David Who???

That was my initial reaction last night when the rumor began circulating through the social media that the poor schlub who Bill Kristol has convinced to mount a doomed-to-fail third party presidential run is some guy named David French.

Before we get into Mr. French and his background, it is important to remember that, over the weekend, Mr. Kristol promised that his Chosen One would be a high profile individual who would have "a real chance".  Many of us took that to mean that he'd have a "real chance" to actually be competitive in the presidential race, but to be scrupulously fair to the shark-jumping Mr. Kristol, he did not specify exactly what it is that his sacrificial lamb...er, candidate would have a "real chance" of doing.  Maybe he meant that the candidate would have a "real chance" to fail miserably and cause Mr. Kristol to become forevermore a laughingstock in the nation's capitol - who really knows?

Now, none of that is meant to demean the actual character of Mr. French, who has bravely served his country in Operation Iraqi Freedom, earning a Bronze Star in the process.  He owns a law degree and currently is a blogger for the National Review.  He is married and is the father of three children.  Good deal.  I'm sure he's a very fine guy.

All that having been conceded, my reaction remains:  "David who???"

Seriously, this is the depths to which the 173 remaining bloggers and far rightwing DC writers who make up the final straggling remnants of the failed #NeverTrump movement have sunk, their collective influence so minuscule at this point that they couldn't convince any actual politician who someone might actually have heard of to head their Quixotic final effort to derail the GOP presidential nominee?

This is pathetic, really.

Mr. French:  you should really reconsider your decision to associate yourself with these people.  It's like becoming the leader of Pig Island in the Angry Birds movie.   Trust me, you have more productive things to do with your time.

What's the Deal With Bill Kristol?

No doubt many of you are wondering what the deal is with Weekly Standard Editor and long-time neo-conservative columnist Bill Kristol and his single-minded efforts to hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton by convincing some poor, unsuspecting schlub to mount a run as a third-party candidate.  I don’t know Mr. Kristol personally, but this is really not all that hard to figure out.

There are two main motivations at play here:  Vanity, and a maniacal desire to protect Israel.

Kristol obviously wants us all to believe that it’s all about political principles with him, that he just can’t stomach the thought of a man he considers to be a low-life, Donald Trump, occupying the White House for the next four to eight years.  And that would all be well and good and perfectly acceptable as an explanation had Mr. Kristol not on several occasions uttered with his very next breath that he’d be perfectly fine with Mrs. Clinton obtaining the presidency as the results of his own actions.

Note to Bill:  There simply is no conservative political principle that can turn Hillary Clinton into a preferable president over the GOP nominee.  There just isn’t.  Sorry, but that cat don’t flush.

No, principle isn’t it.

A big part of Kristol’s motivation is obviously vanity – or hubris might even be a better word for it.  For the last few months since he became the titular leader of this doomed-to-fail cause, he has suddenly become the liberals’ favorite conservative in Washington, and he obviously delights in all the attention he is getting.  He obviously relishes his daily appearances as the fake-conservative talking head of choice on MSNBC.  He no doubt loves being the lead story at times on CNN and NBC.  He probably even finds himself suddenly being invited to fancy dinner parties and receptions from which he has been excluded for decades, and finds he really enjoys the high dollar hors d’ouevres that are being served.

In other words, he’s become John McCain circa 2006 or Lindsey Graham circa 2012, and he likes it.  No shame in it, really – it happens to lots of “conservatives”.

But Kristol’s biggest motivation always has been the protection of the state of Israel.  Advocating for U.S. maintenance of its special relationship with Israel has always been a centerpiece of his writings throughout his career. 

That’s a noble cause, and one with which I entirely agree. 

The problem with Kristol is not the cause, but the methods.  He obviously believes that the best way to ensure that the U.S. will never abandon its most loyal ally is to ensure that our country becomes entangled in every bloody conflict that erupts in the entire Middle East.  At the rare times in which no such conflicts present themselves, Kristol invariably advocates that the U.S. invent them, as he did with his tireless advocacy for the invasion of Iraq.  Involvement in all of these conflicts ensures that the U.S. must maintain a major military presence in the region, thus ensuring our ability to quickly intervene on Israel’s behalf should it be attacked by the hostile nations that surround it.

The truth here is that Kristol realizes that Donald Trump understands that the U.S. no longer needs to be dependent upon the importing of millions of barrels of crude oil each day from Middle Eastern producers, thanks to our ability now to extract oil from previously inaccessible shale formations.  For the last 70 years, that need has created a strategic national interest for the U.S. in ensuring the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

Trump understands that that strategic national interest no longer exists, and that, in Kristol’s mind, makes him a very dangerous man who must be defeated by any means necessary, even if that means handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and giving her 3 to 4 appointees to the Supreme Court.

The other truth here is that Kristol loved the foreign policy decisions made by Mrs. Clinton and President Obama while she was Secretary of State.  He was all for getting the U.S. tangled up in a civil war in Syria, even though that meant literally arming and creating ISIS as it exists today.  And he was all for our disastrous military involvement in Libya, even though our country had zero strategic interest to intervene in that country.  And he was all for U.S. promotion of the “Arab Spring” movement, since it destabilized several governments in the Middle East, and destabilization always ensures the creation of more bloody conflicts.

Because all of those horrible decisions and all of those disastrous policies work to ensure the U.S. maintenance of a major military presence in the Middle East.

This is how Bill Kristol’s mind works.  Don’t kid yourself otherwise by attributing some principled motivation to him.  But do pity the poor schlub he has apparently convinced to become his own personal sacrificial lamb in this election season.