Mitch PerryWho says that Donald Trump doesn’t bring people together?
In what could very well be something The Nation magazine might publish next January if Trump runs the table to become our 45th president, the National Review’s newest edition contains a scathing editorial blasting the GOP front-runner, calling him a “menace to conservatism,” and contains short essays by 22 “prominent” conservative thinkers critical of Trump’s candidacy.
I use parenthesis in describing the contributors to the conservative bible, because, well, one of them is Glenn Beck.
Nevertheless, it’s obviously a last-ditch effort by Rich Lowry and the other editors at NRO to plead to their fellow conservatives that the New York City real estate magnate is not one of them.
So goes the essay by the editors:
“Indeed, Trump’s politics are those of an averagely well-informed businessman: Washington is full of problems; I am a problem-solver; let me at them. But if you have no familiarity with the relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you, you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled. Especially if you are, at least by all outward indications, the most poll-obsessed politician in all of American history. Trump has shown no interest in limiting government, in reforming entitlements, or in the Constitution. He floats the idea of massive new taxes on imported goods and threatens to retaliate against companies that do too much manufacturing overseas for his taste. His obsession is with ‘winning,’ regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power. The Tea Party represented a revival of an understanding of American greatness in these terms, an understanding to which Trump is tone-deaf at best and implicitly hostile at worst. He appears to believe that the administrative state merely needs a new master, rather than a new dispensation that cuts it down to size and curtails its power.”
Some of the essays read better than others — Here’s a link to all of them.
Jeb Bush tweeted out the cover of the magazine last night, writing, “Welcome to the fight, all. Trump is not a conservative.”
Like that argument’s been working so far.
Meanwhile, The Republican National Committee has already retaliated, disinviting National Review from a presidential debate partnership with CNN scheduled for next month.
In other news …
Kathy Castor says David Jolly’s proposal on stopping federal officials from fundraising isn’t nearly enough to stop the pervasiveness of “dark money” in the political system.
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Dana Young has made it official: The Tampa GOP state House member is running for the newly created state Senate seat in South Tampa/western Hillsborough County.
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Feeling the disappointment of a recently filmed major Hollywood production set in Ybor City actually filming in Georgia because of the state’s lack of tax incentives, the Tampa City Council is calling on the Legislature to replenish the diminished coffers of that tax incentive program this year.
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In reaction to the Hillsborough County Young Democrats taking a stance on the Go Hillsborough transportation plan yet to be approved for the ballot, the Tampa Bay Young Republicans are offering their varied opinions about the issue.
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Despite the spoken opposition of former Supreme Court Justice Major Harding and Democrats, the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee yesterday advanced a radical bill that would term-limit appellate and Supreme Court Justices to 12 years.
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And that same House Committee has advanced a bill that would likely lead to the removal of a Confederate statue from the halls of Congress.
