Aug 30^th

“Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomena injures the chances of a Republican presidency.” Thus speaks George Will, prominent Republican intellectual. On this point, as on few others, George Will gets enthusiastic bipartisan approval. Liberals, I among them, hope Trump continues to trumpet, for it will surely offset the right’s cudgeling of Hillary Clinton about her emails.

Will goes on to flesh out his point that Trump is not really a conservative; but everybody knows that, and none of his conservative supporters care; other, traditional, conservatives do care, and care very much. Equivalently, Hilary Clinton’s supporters don’t believe that she is very trustworthy and few of them care very much about that either. Bill Clinton wasn’t seen as a choirboy and he won elections anyway; but Hilary Clinton is not Bill Clinton, not by a long shot.

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders draw crowds to their appearances and this is remarkable because the messages from each of them changes very little from one appearance to the next. It is also noteworthy that these two draw largely homogenous crowds. They are of various ages but they are all largely white. Trump will usually have a black face or two in the background of his speeches, but the percentage of Latinos, Asians and African Americans are not advertised by his campaign crew. Trump will cost Republicans the election by driving minorities away and this will be whether he runs as a third-party candidate or as a Republican.

Trump has also picked up support from some of the white supremacist movement folks. From a New Yorker article we have,  “Twelve days after Trump’s announcement, the Daily Stormer America’s most popular neo-Nazi news site, endorsed him for President: ‘Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it’s time to deport these people.’”  Richard Spencer, president and director of the National Policy Institute, a think tank founded by William Regnery, a member of the conservative publishing family that is “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of the European people in the United States and around the world” is another Trump enthusiast. Another ardent supporter is Michael Hill, of the Alabama based “League of the South,” a secessionist movement dedicated to an independent southern republic with “Anglo Celtic” control.

This support from the bigoted fringe is hardly a surprise and Trump has by no means rejected their support when it was called to his attention. After all his dear friend is Ann Coulter whose book “Adios America” bemoans the darkening of the American public. That sentiment is also right in line with the white supremacist movement. Do we hear the strains of “Deutschland Uber Alles” in the distance? If it happened there; it can happen here.