It’s a done deal, True Believers. The GOP convention is wrapped up and The Donald firmly ensconced as the Republican nominee for the Imperial Mansion. With that done, let’s have a look at the ever-worth-reading Victor Davis Hanson’s take on why Trump may actually pull this thing off. Excerpt:
Hillary Clinton has outspent Donald Trump in unprecedented fashion. Her endorsements bury Trump’s. The Obama administration is doing its best to restore her viability. The media are outdoing their 2008 liberal prejudices. And yet in John Connally delegate fashion, Clinton’s vast expenditures of $100 million plus have so far earned her only a tiny, if any, lead in most recent polls. If each point of approval is calibrated by dollars spent, Trump’s fly-by-night campaign is ahead.
Nor has Trump matched Clinton’s organization or voter-registration efforts. He certainly has blown off gifts from a number of Clinton gaffes and misfortunes, usually by gratuitously riffing on off-topic irrelevancies, from the Trump University lawsuit to the genocidal Saddam Hussein’s supposedly redeeming anti-terrorist qualities. Pollsters, gamers, insiders — everyone, really — have written his political epitaph for over a year. Rarely have conservative voices at mainstream-media outlets vowed not to support the Republican nominee. And yet the longer he stays viable, the more likely it is that Trump has a real chance at winning the presidency, which may already be a veritable 50/50 proposition. So why is the supposedly impossible at least now imaginable?
Thumbnail: The Donald is like no other Presidential candidate of recent (or even not-so-recent) history. In a normal election, against normal opposition, he would have been a brief sideshow.
But this isn’t a normal election; it’s an election to replace the most feckless, inept and rudderless President since Jimmy Carter – maybe since Andrew Johnson. It’s an election where “direction of the country” polling indicates that the typical voter is damn sick and tired of the status quo. It’s an election where Congressional approval ratings are in single digits.
It’s an election where the common thread among almost every demographic is a disgust with the entrenched interests in the Imperial City. That’s why The Donald – the orange-haired, realty TV huckster – is suddenly an acceptable choice for the nation’s highest office to (at least) a plurality of American voters.
And as for his opponent: Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I is probably the best thing, election-wise, that The Donald has going for him. Highlighting the peccadilloes of the deeply and fundamentally corrupt, dissembling, shrill, bad-tempered Dowager Empress of Chappaqua may well be the best shot Trump has at winning – and Trump is just the guy to do exactly that.
Dr. Hanson concludes: Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, an unlikely Donald Trump has become a liberal’s worst nightmare, not so much for what he says or represents, but because he still could win — and win in a way, along with the Congress and the prospect of a new Supreme Court, that we have not witnessed in 80 years.
Indeed. Let me be the first to say I’m not delighted with this year’s electoral choices. I was a Rand Paul guy early on, and were I not in a swing state, I would seriously consider tossing a vote in the direction of Gary Johnson. But I live in a swing state, one where a few votes may decide the election. So I guess I am, reluctantly and not without reservations, on the Trump train.
This big gray cloud does have a small silver lining, though. Distasteful as it may be, a vote for Donald Trump is the American voter’s best way of taking a huge, steaming dump on the entrenched Imperial ruling class. That, if nothing else, makes it worth doing.
