There is little doubt that Donald Trump is a high-risk choice for president, but there is equally little doubt that the American enterprise is at a very dangerous crossroads. He’s not the obvious choice that Romney was in 2012, although to hear the story told today you would think Romney was about on par with Obama in his negatives. So let us do a bit of weighing up the two sides of the question.

Pro

• His central slogan is “Make America Great Again”, the very antithesis of the Obama creed.
• He wants to protect the integrity of America’s borders.
• He wants to strengthen America’s national defence.
• He understands that not all potential migrants are equal.
• He understands the importance of balancing the books and is more likely than any other candidate to bring fiscal sanity back into the American economy.
• He is non-politically correct and is unafraid to say things no one else will say.
• He is unafraid of the media and gives back better than they dish it out to him.
• He can do through force of personality things that no one else could do in his place.

Con

• He is half (three-quarters?) crazy.
• He is vulgar and intemperate.
• He knows little history.
• He is unanchored to the Republican Party.
• He has had no experience in dealing with foreign policy issues.
• No one knows, least of all him, what he would really do if he won.
• His background is in business which is among the worst places for anyone in politics to try to learn the trade.
• He may make either Hillary or Bernie more electable than they otherwise would be.

You would prefer that he were more like a Tony Abbott or a Stephen Harper, but then again, where are they now, pushed aside as they were by flea-weights.

UPDATE: From today, reported on Drudge.

I don’t know if this connects with you, but it does with me. And then this:

President Obama said today that he does not believe GOP frontrunner Donald Trump will make it to the White House, but the real estate mogul took the remark as a compliment, saying Obama has done a “lousy job.”

“I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama said while speaking at a press conference in Rancho Mirage, California. “And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people.”

Obama told reporters he believed Americans still see the presidency as “a serious job.”

“It’s not hosting a talk show, or a reality show. It’s not promotion, it’s not marketing,” Obama said. “It’s hard and a lot of people count on us getting it right.”

Obama did not, however, answer whether he believed Trump was capable of securing the GOP nomination.

The president also took a shot at the rest of the GOP field, saying “foreign observers are troubled” by the GOP’s rhetoric, specifically the doubting of climate change and proposals to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

Trump, speaking at a campaign event in South Carolina, immediately hit back, saying Obama is doing a “lousy job.”

“He has set us back so far, and for him to actually say that is a great compliment, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said.

That Obama can still show his face in public is what makes me most fearful about the future of the US and our way of life. Sanders is not a more extreme version of what Obama stands for, only someone who is more explicit and willing to say just what he thinks.

I have often thought of this post, Obama in the lead 68-7 – in Australia. It is the results of a round-the-world survey conducted by the BBC on how different countries would have voted in the American presidential election in 2012. The results were published right at the end of the campaign. And in Australia: Obama 68% – Romney 7%. The data are there at the end. They still look as gruesome as any set of data I have ever seen.

This, mind you, was after Obama had been president for four years. The world was disintegrating, but nowhere near the level it has reached today (see the story above on The Obama Legacy). Yet, I doubt that were the question raised again that there would be much regret among the 68%. Obama would still win an American election in Australia, perhaps he would even still win in the US.

My point. I seem to see political issues in a different way from most Australians. I regret Donald has not got quite the needed polish to go all the way, but no one else can make the difference he could. He ruined himself in his criticisms of George Bush and the Iraq war in the debate on the weekend. He is a New Yorker who inevitably reads The New York Times and watches NBC. Ted Cruz is right that Trump has “New York values”. He has seen how colossal his mistake has been but it’s now, I think, too late. If he wins the nomination, which he still might, although the odds have lengthened a long way, he will no longer have the support of the bien pensants, many of whom would vote for Hillary or Bernie instead.

And while we don’t elect presidents in 2016 to deal with the problems we faced in 2001, the continuity is crucial. He may even have opposed the war in Iraq, and given how things have turned out, he may even have been right to do it. No one contemplating on what to do after 911 could possibly factor a Barack Obama presidency into a Middle East policy from 2009-2017. Everything achieved has been thrown away, and matters made infinitely worse. The world I grew up in is disappearing. Something different is emerging. There will always be an elite – go to the poorest nation on the planet and there you will find an elite living extremely well – but for the rest, neither peace nor wealth nor freedom.

But who knows? Nothing is certain. 2030 is as far from us now as we are from 2001 so maybe things will turn around. I’m sure serfdom didn’t look all that bad to the serfs.

From Around the World Who Would You Vote For?

October 2012

The choice of who to support for president has never been more difficult. Trump is wildly different from the norm – another Andrew Jackson. He will be hated by everyone on the left, but he also is not liked or respected by many within the Republican establishment and those whose support he will need.

He may have had what is required but he may also not have the mental discipline, never mind the background knowledge, to do what’s needed. Trump might have been able to do what’s needed but you can’t do it by alienating everyone in your path. A leader brings people together. A businessperson makes everyone do what they want because a decision has been reached. And his sensational thin skin is a massive worry. And now with the death of Antonin Scalia, only one of a number of Supreme Court justices who might end up being chosen in the next 4-8 years, the stakes are extraordinary. You might be willing to compromise on a less adventurous president if it raises the probability that a Republican gets to choose.

With the appointment to the Supreme Court right there in the mix, there will be no doubting in anyone’s mind, that this is not just a decision for the next four years, but for the next 20-30 years. Everything about the future of the US will be in the mix. And while I think the Republican establishment is bizarrely out of touch – Jeb Bush is their chosen vehicle, for heaven’s sake! – I am hopeful that there will be a coming together among the candidates about what must be done.

The major impression I received in listening to Donald Trump at the debate in South Carolina was that he has spent too many years reading The New York Times. It is what Ted Cruz has said, about Trump being infused with “New York values”. I’m not sure it was the best way to put it, but I knew what he meant. There is a smarmy left-liberal condescension towards any other way of thinking that is tearing down the world we have built. We live in the freest, most tolerant society that may ever have been, but that freedom is being ground to dust by a liberal intolerance that if left unstopped will be our ruin. I thought Trump might have done something to stop it, but I am becoming less sure he can. I don’t think anyone else can, so I will just have to wait on events.

I read the comments on Donald Trump in 2013 with some dismay. We are now down to seven people who might become President of the United States:

Jeb Bush
Hillary Clinton
Ted Cruz
John Kasich
Marco Rubio
Bernie Sanders
Donald Trump

Maybe Joe Biden might get into this at some stage, or Michael Bloomberg, or Ben Carson may come back into it, but that’s all that’s left. That’s it. No one else. It is one of the above and no other.

Then there are the problems the United States now confronts – the US being our last hope for a defence of the West – problems from open immigration, a rapidly descending economy and a clueless millennial generation who you could easily imagine voting in a Hugo Chavez. And so I said, after watching the video of Trump in 2013, that Trump is the best of the lot. He not only has sentiments that match my own [92% as it happens] but he has the force of personality that might actually bring it off. He is our Churchill circa 1940.

I can see just as easily as anyone else that he is not your standard issue highly polished product of the elite establishment in the US. He is crass and loud and bumptious and vulgar. All true, but he is also smart, and shrewd, and tuned in and hard edged. But most of all, the things he wants are the things I want, the most important ones being the preservation of the United States as the land of the free and the defender of our values. He also has the one element none of the others on the Republican side have, a fighting will that will not be pushed around by the media and the left.

And I am not even going to say something like he’s not perfect, because, for all I know, given the way things are and what now needs to be done, he may well be exactly what is needed. He may exactly suit the times we are in.

There’s the list above. If it’s not Donald Trump then who among that list should it be instead? If you think it’s any of the others, then we will just have to agree to differ. But in my view, it will be a tragedy if he does not become president because all other choices will either hasten the ruin of the US or at best delay the now almost inevitable by a year or two. He may end up unable to stem the tide of history, but given the moment we find ourselves now in, Trump is the only candidate who has even a ghost of a chance to pull it off. Why others cannot see the same is absolutely beyond me. First, though, he has to win. Then we can worry about the rest.

The great Mark Steyn is in Australia and has a posting on his website with the cryptic title Wanted: More Warts. Read the post, and then read the interview with Christian Kerr his post is based on: Europe’s open doors are a civilisation death wish (so, by the way, are America’s). This is from the interview:

Free speech is at the heart of Steyn’s message. He is surprised that the controversial section 18c of our Racial Discrimination Act is still standing when his own country successfully repealed the equivalent parts of its Human Rights Act in 2013.

“Free peoples are losing the habit of free speech,” he says. “They’re taught, not really just at university but in fact from kindergarten, that there is a correct view of certain subjects and that incorrect views are distressing. The last two generations raised in the Western world, they don’t do that thing, the apocryphal Voltaire line, ‘I disagree with what you say but I’ll fight to the death for you to.’ They’ll fight to the death for you not to be allowed to say it.”

The consequences can be disturbing. “People can actually lose the spirit of liberty and once you’ve lost that there are not a lot of easy paths back,” he cautions.

How stupid we are in not protecting what we have from marauders. It is not too late, but it is getting later by the day.

This is the conclusion from someone who has written a book with the title, 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America–and Four Who Tried to Save Her. The article is titled, Which candidate will screw up America the least, and this is what he said at the end:

Trump may not be able to “make America great again” on his own, but he would be the one who would screw it up the least. The others would eventually have to be added to a Volume 2 of my 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America. Trump, at least, would have a chance to be considered for the “Four Who Tried to Save Her.”

If you’re the sort of person who thinks that Obama has had his good points and his bad points, you are not the sort of person who will see how necessary Donald Trump is. But he is. In a normal world Hillary would have zero chance of being president but this is not that world. If you don’t want Hillary to win, Trump is the only candidate who might stop it from happening.

[My thanks again to Autumn Baroque.]

This is Donald Trump receiving an award from the American Spectator in 2013, long before he was running for President. Listen to not just what he says – which are themes he has been discussing since entering the race – but also how he says it – which is temperate, balanced and filled with common sense. And he knows a thing or two about budgets, deficits and getting value for money. There is no doubt in listening to this that he is not a Democrat and is a Republican, but of a kind not hitherto seen. From this point on, for me it is Donald Trump for President. America’s problems may be too large to fix, but if they can be fixed, he is the only person in public life who has the potential to do it.

Not the high probability choice a year ago but now a very real possibility. A capitalist from the .01% versus a socialist of the most Chavez variety, each representing their parties. This satire on The First Trump-Sanders Debate is from Politico and therefore from the left. Nevertheless, satire though it may be, has a certain plausibility. A sample of what is worth reading in full. And do note that while Trump’s version is a wild exaggeration of what he would say, Sanders actually reads precisely like something he might really say. The left cannot make fun of its own.

Ifill: Now to our closing statements. Sen. Sanders, you are up first.

Sanders: This has been a very illuminating debate. We’ve seen firsthand the anger, the aggression, the last gasps of the 1 percent. They see a revolution coming. We are going to seize the tools of the state and bring prosperity to millions of Americans who have been oppressed for so long.

Trump: Bye-bye, Santa. Bye-bye, Jesus. Bye-bye, Easter.

Ifill: Sen. Sanders, please finish your statement, sir.

Sanders: The system is rigged, folks. That’s it. Thank you.

Ifill: Mr. Trump?

Trump: We are going to make America great again. I’ve said this many, many times throughout this campaign and people nod their heads. I don’t know—I guess no one’s ever said something like this to them before. We don’t think America can be great anymore. But we can be. I see this guy, Bernie Sanders, and I think about what the Russians tried to do to us in “Rocky IV.” And Sylvester Stallone—and I love Sly who has endorsed me, by the way—and he wouldn’t put up with it. Neither should we. And Mexico will pay for our border wall. We are going to start winning and make everyone else lose. And we are going to save Christmas and Santa Claus from the Hunt for Red October over here. Thank you.

That’s how it ends. Now read what comes before always mindful of the state of mind of the journalist who put it together.