The Palin endorsement of Trump

I usually avoid posting much about campaign stuff, as most of it is foolish childish blather. To me, what is important is what politicians actually do when they are in positions of power, not what they say while they are campaigning.

However, Sarah Palin’s endorsement yesterday of Donald Trump requires a few words, because this is an action by Palin that confirms a great deal about her (not Trump) that I have thought since the day she resigned as Alaska’s governor. To paraphrase one headline, yesterday’s endorsement was a Reality TV Star Endorsing a Reality TV Star.

Sarah Palin, the host of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and “Amazing America with Sarah Palin,” has endorsed the star of “The Apprentice” and “The Celebrity Apprentice”

This article is more blunt:
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A cold-eyed look at Trump’s actual record

Link here. Key quote:

While Sessions, Cruz, and others on the outside like myself were fighting the worst immigration bill of our generation in 2013, Trump was promoting the Dream Act. When it really mattered he wasn’t with us.

Moreover, what sort of judges would Trump nominate? Where does he stand on proposals to rein in the lawless courts? If he believes the courts are the law of the land, even when they violate the most fundamental rights or original intent of the Constitution, as he did with religious liberty, what will he do when the courts inevitably use the same phantom 14th Amendment legal theory to toss out his immigration proposals?

While I will vote for Trump in a heartbeat should he be the Republican candidate running against either Clinton or Sanders, he isn’t yet that candidate, and conservative voters have an obligation to look at him honestly. From my perspective, he is not the candidate I want, as he in the end will likely not really change anything as President, but instead continue the general policies that have gotten us where we are. He might make some radical changes around the edges, on hot-button issues like immigration, but overall his political philosophy is that of a traditional liberal East Coast New Yorker.

A detailed look at Trump’s positions

This link provides a very detailed but thorough summary of the political positions that Donald Trump has taken in the past year during his presidential campaign. Take a look, as it does a nice job of listing his stance on almost all the important issues that appear to concern Americans at this time. His conclusion is telling:

Except for immigration, foreign policy, and energy, all of Trump’s contemporary positions are more identifiable with liberal positions, which is not surprising, considering he has spent most of his life as a liberal Democrat. Now, if you’re a conservative and immigration is your number-one issue, you can still justify a vote for Donald Trump. But Ted Cruz is almost as good – promising to build a wall, oppose amnesty, and enforce the law – and he’s much better on just about every other issue.

Make Trump go away with software!

The coming dark age: Want to be hip, cool, and with it? Then what you need is the Trump filter, a Chrome extension that will block any access to any website that mentions Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Dubbed as the “Trump Filter,” the Google Chrome extension will filter all Trump-related articles while users surf the Internet. The extension is described as “part of the antidote for this toxic candidacy.” The extension will identify parts of a web page that contain Donald Trump and remove them from the Internet, according to the creator’s description on his Trump Filter website.

In another more enlightened age, this would have instead been called “putting one’s head in the sand” to avoid dealing with reality. Donald Trump is not my first or second choice for president, but he is leading the polls and could very well win. To make believe he doesn’t exist is the height of close-minded foolishness.

Trump’s real weakness

While Donald Trump has remained the leader in every poll for president since he entered the campaign, it still remains to be seen whether Republican voters will give him the nod when actual voting begins in the primaries. I have tended to believe that they will not, and I base this on Trump’s essential lack of understanding of the small government principles of conservatism. Though it is very clear that Trump has rejected the left and the big government ideas of the Democratic Party, it is also clear that he really doesn’t really believe in small government either. This story quoting a Trump speech from yesterday illustrates this very well:

Speaking during a town hall meeting in Iowa Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump told the crowd the way to make college affordable for students is “to start some governmental program. … Well the only way you can do it is you have to start some governmental program and you have governmental programs right now,” Trump told the crowd.

Click on the link to read the whole quote, which also illustrates the generally incoherent way in which Trump speaks. His incoherency however, is not what hurts him here, but his easy acceptance of the idea that government is the solution.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump is by far a better candidate than any of the Democratic Party options, and he would do a far better job then them as well. His business experience in the real world will make him a better president, and is also likely the reason he now generally favors conservative solutions. Nonetheless, when voting time comes I think the Republican voters are going to move away from him.

Cruz’s good positioning in campaign recognized by more pundits

It seems I am not the only person who has recognized the smart way Ted Cruz has positioned himself in the on-going presidential campaign.

This article notes that because of Cruz’s clever work, the Republican establishment might find themselves forced to choose between Cruz and Trump, and in that case they will go with Cruz.

By this point, we might be close to the March 1 “Super Tuesday” primaries, most of which will take place in Deep South states where Cruz has trained his focus toward developing strength. He’s been outshone by Trump in most of them to date, but Cruz is building more organization in those states than any other candidate.

We could see a situation where Trump is ahead on the strength of his performance in the early states and still leads in the polls, though he might have commenced fading in the face of the various challenges befalling a presidential candidate and the terror gripping the party of having to nominate a bull-in-a-China-shop like the real estate magnate has not subsided. But while the establishment might believe Trump is beatable, they could be without candidates to beat him. And at that juncture, the unthinkable might become inevitable; namely, that the RINO/Chamber of Commerce GOP establishment might well see Ted Cruz as their only hope to stop Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination.

The first paragraph in the quote above makes note of something I noticed clearly last week: While the other candidates have been spending a lot of time playing to the cameras, Cruz instead completed a recent campaign swing through the south to prep his campaign for those March 1 “Super Tuesday” primaries, what some are calling SEC primary because so many of them are located in the south. No one else seems to be prepping for this as he is.

Nor is this article the only analysis that has noticed this. Read this commentary of the above article at Hotair. While more skeptical, the author notes, as I do, that in the end the Republican voter is going to go with the more reliable conservative candidate. And that candidate is neither Donald Trump nor Jeb Bush.

So yeah, the establishment would go with the professional politician if they had to decide. And conservative voters, of course, would go with the true conservative. That was the significance of yesterday’s PPP poll out of North Carolina: When given a choice between Trump and Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, righties opt for the latter despite giving Trump fairly solid marks on favorability. Meanwhile, undecideds would line up behind the professional pol, knowing that he’d be less likely to alienate swing voters with his rhetoric in the general election and therefore would be more electable. And even some Trump fans, satisfied that the true RINOs in the race like Jeb Bush had been eliminated, would switch to Cruz knowing that he’s as anti-establishment in his own way as Trump is. I think Cruz wins the war with Trump easily.

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