Jim Geraghty:
A Few Trump Fans Suddenly See the Man They’ve Been Defending
Something odd is going on among Trump’s most ardent defenders. Start with Ann Coulter in this podcast interview with Breitbart.com’s Milo Yiannopoulos.
COULTER: Moreover, I’m a little testy with our man right now.
YIANNOPOULOS: You are? Daddy’s annoyed you?
(Yes, Yiannopoulos calls Trump “Daddy.” Because that’s perfectly normal.)
COULTER: Our candidate is mental! Do you realize our candidate is mental? It’s like constantly having to bail out your sixteen-year-old son from prison. Let’s move past last night’s tweet — you know perfectly well what tweet I’m talking about.
This is the worst thing he’s done. I mean the McCain thing– I would say there are only really two, liberals would say “oh, every day”, no, everything else I could probably defend. I could. I think. Most of that is them overreacting… But the McCain thing, that was a dumb joke, it didn’t work. Oh, well. Didn’t kill him. But that tweet last night…
YIANNOPOULOS: And he’s retweeting these images that are, like, ‘I don’t need to make implications, you know, the pictures speak for themselves.’ And a picture of Cruz’s wife and a picture of Melania!
COULTER: That’s exactly the tweet I’m talking about! No, you can’t defend it! This is when we’re bailing out sixteen-year-old out of jail!
YIANNOPOULOS: It’s so outrageously funny!
Then Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity:
GINGRICH: Tweeting about, or repeating a tweet about Mrs. Cruz is just utterly stupid. It has frankly, weakened everything that Trump ought to be strengthening. It sent a signal to women that is negative, at a time when his numbers with women are already bad. It sent a signal to instability to people who may be beginning to say, ‘maybe I’ve got to get used to it, maybe I’ve got to rely on him, maybe he could be presidential.’ And frankly, it energized Cruz. The interview you just did is as good as I have ever seen Ted Cruz. He was clear, he was vigorous, he was prepared to be combative but at the same time he was getting into big issues and big ideas. My guess is he’s going to do well in Wisconsin. This ought to be a wake-up call for Trump that he had better rethink what seem to be the underlying patterns of his campaign.
HANNITY: For the life of me, I can’t understand when families and wives are brought into it. I’m sure he’s mad about the ad about Melania, I’m sure he assumed it was the Cruz campaign.
Gingrich added, “I’m not sure anybody in the Trump campaign understands yet what a big mistake this is. They can’t keep doing this stuff and think they’re going to get the nomination.”
Now look at Stephanie Cegielski, formerly the communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC:
He doesn’t want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some. If there is any question, take it from someone who was recruited to help the candidate succeed, and initially very much wanted him to do so.
The hard truth is: Trump only cares about Trump.
And if you are one of the disaffected voters — one of the silent majority like me — who wanted a candidate who could be your voice, I want to speak directly to you as one of his biggest advocates and supporters.
He is not that voice. He is not your voice. He is only Trump’s voice.
Trump is about Trump. Not one of his many wives. Not one of his many “pieces of ass.” He is, at heart, a self-preservationist.
Trump supporters, no one should let you off of that bandwagon now. You should be handcuffed to that Titanic you volunteered to crew.
Donald Trump didn’t suddenly change in the past few days, weeks or months. He’s the same guy he always was, the same guy that most of us in the conservative movement and GOP have been staunchly opposing for the past year. He didn’t abruptly become reckless, obnoxious, ill-informed, erratic, hot-tempered, pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, crude and catastrophically unqualified for the presidency overnight. He’s always been that guy, and you denied it and ignored it and hand-waved it away and made excuses every step of the way because you were convinced that you were so much smarter than the rest of us. You were so certain that you had received some superior wavelength giving you special insight into the Donald; only you could tell that it was all an act. Only you could grasp that his constant courting of controversy was just to get attention from the media. Only you could instinctively sense that his style would play brilliantly in the general election and win over working-class Democrats. (SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t.) You insisted that you could “coach him.”
You came to those conclusions not because you’re smarter than the rest of us, but because you’re actually more foolish than the rest of us. You insisted Occam’s Razor couldn’t possibly be true– that Trump acts the way he does because this is who he is, this is the way he is all the time, and he will always be like this. You fooled yourself into believing that Trump was playing this nine-level chess that only you and a few others could perceive and understand. Only you could see the long game.
There is no long game. He’s winging it. There is no grand strategy. There is no master plan. Trump doesn’t look ahead to the next sentence, much less the next step in getting elected.
“Our candidate is mental?” No Shinola, Sherlock, some conservatives said this from day one and all we got for it was the alt-Right vomiting forth endless vitriol and profanity and threats.
Big surprise.
After the National Review comes out “Against Trump,” a NR writer is still writing against Trump.
But picking on Yanos for whom EVERY older man is ”daddy,” for calling Trump ”daddy,” is just weird.
Yanos is the Right’s outest gay man.
That’s how he talks.
Then how about picking someone Donald Trump denied millions of dollars to as his next ”expert” against Trump?
Oh, don’t well me the NR writers and Jim G. specifically didn’t know why Stephanie Cegielski is formerly the communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC.
Donald Trump told his supporters he was having NO PACs working for him.
NONE.
He said they were simply a money funneling way for their leaders to enrich themselves off of the Trump name.
Certainly we saw that with Jeb’s PAKs.
And Carly has certainly benefited from having a PAC which Cruz gave $500,000 to just recently.
So, look.
Donald Trump probably cannot get the nomination.
But this isn’t because he’s more flawed than the next guy.
Its that he won’t play the game.
The GOPe will simply change the rules until he either quits or cannot gain the nomination.
They are already trying to unpin delegates awarded to him in various states.
If they succeed, who will they run?
Who have their got their strings on the strongest?
@Nanny G:
Yet, I don’t remember you gritching about FoxNews turning into TrumpTV with Sean Hannity and Eric Bolling constantly p!mping for Trump.
So now you’re an expert on how gay men talk?
Then how about picking someone Donald Trump denied millions of dollars to as his next ”expert” against Trump?
Has he dumped her for the phony conservative, Katrina Pierson, who couldn’t get elected in Texas?
Then how do you explain the “Make America Great Again” (which Trump stole from Ronnie Reagan) PAC?
Oh, believe me, Trump plays the game. You just don’t want to admit it. I guess you think he wasn’t “playing the game” when he was buying off all those politicians, like Mitch McConnell, Bill DeBlasio, Hillary Clinton, et all, with all his donation money? You’re delusional.
How would you know? Ever been a delegate to a Republican National Convention? You’re just repeating the crap spewed by Trump.
Wrong, Trumpeteer. The rules are written by each state on how to nominate delegates. You just seem to think the rules were made so Donald Trump could come along in 2016 and ignore them.
Who ever takes the most delegates when voting is over in Cleveland.
I suggest you brush up on how things are actually done instead of being Trump’s FA mouthpiece.
Went out to dinner with my sister and Pro Trump Bro in law, the steak was great. I asked him his reasons for backing his candidate, the standard he cant be bought answer. I answered him with my standard Cruz has the best resume and solid conservative. No arguments, I just made sure he was going to vote in the general.
Truly pointless to argue with someone that doesn’t back your candidate, by this time their mind is set. The goal is the White House and the opposition should they win because of infighting then we can point fingers at ourselves its your fault you backed that A$$ and wouldn’t vote cause blah blah blah.
I may bash Trump, but his followers are OK, some have gone a bit over the edge on social media, they can get a bit crude. But that is what the mute, block or unfriend options are for. Thank them for being a patriot and tell them OH HILL NO, then block them from the feed.
To the White House!
@retire05: I can’t stand Eric Bolling.
Wish that man would do some homework.
Kind of expect him to enter re-hab any time now.
I’ve read and listened to videos of Yanos for over a year now.
I know how HE talks.
Plus, some of the gays in LB talked the same way as to older men being ”daddy.”
Donald Trump had NOTHING TO DO with that PAC which is now defunct.
Look at its website. All the links are about a year old.
The woman Jim G. used was one who would have been paying herself out of that PAC’s cash, had Donald Trump not disavowed it (along with all so-called Trump PACs.)
She has a big axe to grind.
Why are y’all even bothering to your waste time talking about Trump?
You KNOW he’s not going to be the next president, right? He CAN’T win a National Election. Period!
So the only issue you have left to ponder is: CAN the GOP win the election WITHOUT him?
At this point, the short answer is: NO.
The GOP is caught between a rock and a hard place. Trump has the nomination just about sown up, and he can’t win. If the GOP manages to take the nomination away from him, he’ll run on the side and throw the election to the Democrats by siphoning off enough votes of the Republican Base to spoil the chances of whoever DOES get the GOP nod. You can’t win WITH him, and you can’t win WITHOUT him.
What a mess!
All because SOME Republicans have a lingering fascination with this wing-nut who NEVER wanted to be president in the first place. You have THEM to thank.
Oh, and you can also thank yourselves for being such hard-nosed purists pulling yourselves in multiple directions all at once – you’ve picked the worst possible time to fracture the Grand Old Party with a schism that has left no fragment big enough or strong enough to win a national election by itself.
The next time the RNC assesses the reasons why you lost the last election, you might want to take their recommendations seriously, because if you want to win in 2020, you’re going to have to start right after you lose this November. You can’t wait for the White male evangelical base to die off (and why were THEY supporting Trump in the first place???) and you can’t replace them with a different demographic, because everyone else is either already Republican or irreversibly Democrat. You have to EDUCATE those stupid, hateful, obstructionist, anti-establishment rebels – nothing less will work. Successful governance of a diverse populace requires compromise and consensus-building, things that are currently abhorred by the GOP “base.” That has to change, or the party, and particularly conservatism, will perish.
Where is the outrage on Kasich pizzagate His opportunity for NY delegates just tanked.
@retire05 #2:
Depressing, isn’t it?
Trump, THE DEMOCRAT, is a few delegates shy of successfully sabotaging Republican hopes for a presidential victory in 2016.
What amazes me is that he’s done it without Democratic help, although I cannot discount the possibility that HRC was in at the planning stage.
Why do you suppose the GOP “base” finds the cartoon character that is Trump so much more appealing than a pandering conservative like Ted Cruz?
Certainly you can’t blame the MSM for sugar-coating Trump.
@George Wells:
The democratic Republic died with the election of Barack Obama. His election showed that people are more interested in getting something for nothing than they are interested in having a free nation. Look at those supporting Sanders, all because he is promising them that he will take all the money away from Rich people and give it to them so that they can live a good life without having to work. They are perfectly willing to give up their freedom to live off of the labors of others..
While I hear all this flailing around about Trump, I hear no one saying what it is about what he advocates that they specifically don’t like. While some may say some minor issue, it is usually something much less detrimental than what the other candidates advocate that would be much worse. I know of no sensible human in the US that does not want better border control. Certainly travelers from terrorist nations should not be allowed in until they have been properly vetted.
‘pandering conservative’? Good summation. What you see with Trump is what you get. With Cruz, you get a wife that if a CFR member that advocates one North American country, a union of Canada, US and Mexico. Will she be able to persuade Ted? Is Ted a Canadian citizen or a US citizen, or do we know?