For identifying the hypocrisy, inconsistencies, and, at times, opportunism of Donald Trump\u2019s critics, both readers and acquaintances have concluded that I have endorsed Trump. The truth is that I\u2019ve as yet endorsed no one.<\/p>\n
There are indeed reasons for a conservative or libertarian to recoil from Trump.<\/p>\n
(1)As I noted near the beginning of this contest, Trump is most certainly not <\/em>any kind of traditional or classical conservative<\/a>. There simply isn\u2019t anything in his history to suggest that he\u2019s ever had any kind of curiosity about, to say nothing of commitment to, the conservative intellectual tradition. Nor has Trump at any time indicated any kind of sympathy for libertarianism.<\/p>\n In fact, until relatively recently, Trump seemed to have had more affinity with the Democrat Party than he ever had with the GOP.<\/p>\n Trump spent decades fattening the coffers of such loathsome Democratic politicians as Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Charles Rangel, and Charles Schummer. He also supported Rahm Emmanuel\u2019s run for mayor of Chicago. Neither Trump nor, evidently, any of his proponents seem to be bothered by this, accepting as unproblematic the Donald\u2019s assertion that this was the price that he had to pay in order to do business.<\/p>\n But this <\/em>rationale of Trump\u2019s is <\/em>problematic: It\u2019s no justification at all.<\/p>\n (2)Actually, it\u2019s worse than even this, for routinely<\/em>, over a period of decades<\/em>, elevating his own self-interest above that of the well-being of the country, Trump in effect vindicates the judgment of many that he\u2019s a narcissist. <\/em><\/p>\n In funding the very party that he\u2019s now running against, Trump facilitated their agenda\u2014which he now claims to recognize is destructive of America. Yet he traded off these down payments on the destruction of his homeland in exchange for building his empire.<\/p>\n Trump has long been both a billionaire and a celebrity. In other words, he is a man with much influence. However, though he is approaching 70 years of age, Trump has never deployed any of these resources of his toward reversing the disastrous course upon which America has been plunging for much of his adult life. Quite the contrary: he\u2019s used them to fund politicians who are all too eager to lead us down this path.<\/p>\n (3)For all of the talk of Trump being a straight shooter, he has not infrequently contradicted himself. For example, while he now insists that he only gave to Democrats for business-related purposes, as recently as 2004 he told Wolf Blitzer<\/a>: \u201cIn many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat.\u201d The economy, he continued, \u201cseems\u201d to do \u201cbetter under the Democrats than the Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n (4) Trump has, in fact, openly supported various ideas that have been perfectly at home among liberal Democrats.<\/p>\n While claiming to \u201chate the concept of abortion,\u201d Trump at one point nevertheless self-identified as \u201cpro-choice\u201d\u2014actually, as \u201cvery pro-choice<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n He also expressly favored a single-payer healthcare system. In his book, The America We Deserve, <\/em>Trump said that while he\u2019s \u201ca conservative on most issues, I\u2019m a liberal on this one<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, as he reiterated as recently as the New Hampshire debate last week, Trump is an impassioned advocate of \u201ceminent domain,\u201d i.e. the enterprise of compelling private property owners to sell their holdings to the government for both public and<\/em> private purposes.<\/p>\n Even when it comes to what\u2019s become his signature issue, immigration, Trump\u2019s position sounds essentially like amnesty by a longer route: Those who are here illegally must leave, though as long as they aren\u2019t criminals, they will be permitted to return. As he told Joe Scarborough<\/a>: \u201cI believe in the merit system. If somebody\u2019s been outstanding, we try and work something out.\u201d<\/p>\n Americans for Legal Immigration Pac (ALIPAC) has added Trump to their \u201c[Eric] Cantor List<\/a>\u201d\u2014their list of amnesty proponents. Numbers USA says that Trump is \u201cHarmful\u201d on the issue of amnesty and \u201cUnhelpful\u201d when it comes to reducing legal <\/em>immigration. The organization assigns Trump an overall grade of \u201cC.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Trump also blasted Jeb Bush for once intimating that taxpayers needn\u2019t spend half-a-billion dollars a year on \u201cwomen health issues.\u201d Trump implied that \u201cwe\u201d\u2014the taxpayers, that is\u2014should be spending at least that amount and possibly more<\/a>.<\/p>\n That Trump is every bit as much a lover of Big Government as is any other liberal Democrat (or Republican<\/em>) is abundantly clear not only from the foregoing considerations but from the fact that he is forever telling us how he<\/em> is going to restore order to the cosmos: Trump never talks about liberty <\/em>or freedom. <\/em><\/p>\n (5)Not only isn\u2019t Trump appreciably distinct from your average run-of-the-mill social liberal; to the extent that neither are his neoconservative Republican critics appreciably different from their leftist Democrat counterparts, Trump isn\u2019t significantly different from the very \u201cEstablishment\u201d that his legions of followers think <\/em>he is going to undermine.<\/p>\n To repeat: Trump\u2019s history betrays sympathy for leftist causes. The GOP is as unpopular as it is among its base of support because it is (rightly) perceived by them to have aided and abetted leftist Democrats in pursuit of basically one and the same leftist agenda.<\/p>\n Ergo, politically speaking, in effect, Trump shares essentially the same worldview as that of \u201cthe Establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n