Intellectual support for Trump? Still looking.

Jonah Goldberg responds to the Fred Barnes piece I excerpted Monday about intellectuals for Trump.

So Barnes’s stated thesis strikes me as just plain wrong; with the possible exception of Simon, none of these figures approaches the kind of Pro-Trumpism one finds regularly on many Fox shows or even on CNN and MSNBC. Using the term intellectual broadly, the hotbed of intellectual Trump support remains inside the Beltway and in New York City (and, contrary to Barnes’s claim, these “dissenters” are plenty noisy).

Now, I may be wrong about Barnes’s unstated motivation — to make intellectual support for Trump more acceptable on the right. But if I’m correct, I don’t think this piece does the job on that front either. No conservative intellectual needs much convincing that Hillary Clinton is a bad choice. What Trump really needs is someone to make an unequivocally affirmative case why Trump is a good choice on the merits. That Fred Barnes — a legendarily talented and seasoned reporter — couldn’t find any (non–East Coast) intellectuals to offer such a case should have been the lede. Instead it’s the piece’s most significant silence.

Read more here.