Does President Trump deserve our respect?

David Gelernter writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...what I see on the left is often plain, unconditional hatred of which the hater—God forgive him—is proud. It’s discouraging, even disgusting. And it does mean, I believe, that the Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

...Granted, Mr. Trump is a parody of the average American, not the thing itself. To turn away is fair. But to hate him from your heart is revealing. Many Americas were ashamed when Ronald Reagan was elected. A movie actor? But the new direction he chose for America was a big success on balance, and Reagan turned into a great president. Evidently, this country was intended to be run by amateurs after all—by plain citizens, not only lawyers and bureaucrats.

Those who voted for Mr. Trump, and will vote for his candidates this November, worry about the nation, not its image. The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers, and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.

Read more here.

Ann Coulter answers questions about immigration

Weak, ineffectual and dishonest leadership in Washington D.C.

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

...Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Read more here.

The world would be better if more people were like Americans

Tom Krannawitter has a few things to say to college students who think the United States is a uniquely shameful source of social injustice:

For the coddled snowflakes enrolled in American colleges and universities -- especially the ones tempted to protest the United States as some uniquely shameful source of social injustice -- consider the following:

There are just over one million public charities in the United States today. There are just over one hundred thousand private foundations. And there are about four hundred thousand other types of tax-exempt, social service organizations such as fraternal organizations and civic leagues, for a total of over 1,500,000 individual charitable organizations!

Last year, American charitable organizations gave in donations over $350 BILLION DOLLARS! That's $358,380,000,000 to be more precise. Not far from half a trillion dollars in private giving!

* * * *

The United States tops all other nations in terms of charitable giving. And each and every dollar that is given by an American to someone who needs help represents the hard work of free citizens who make profits by producing goods and services that other people want, need, and value.

In other words, free American citizens make a profit by helping others and making others happy, THEN those same profit-making Americans turn around and help people yet MORE through charitable giving!

Just think: In little more than two short centuries, the United States went from a nation of poor, subsistence dirt farmers to the most prosperous and most charitable nation the world has ever seen! And how did Americans do this? The protection of property rights and individual freedom, and the entrepreneurship fueled by freedom, make all this prosperity, profit, and giving possible.

Isn't capitalism a beautiful thing?

* * * *

To boot, when people from the around the world were surveyed in terms of willingness to help a stranger, individually, Americans ranked number one. Which means: Americans are pretty decent people, at least compared to the rest of the world.

Our colleges and universities might encourage young Americans to be embarrassed and ashamed of their country. But the truth is, the world would be better if more people were more like Americans, and more nations were more like the United States.
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The sky's the limit

Did we just get an alpha male into the 2016 GOP presidential race? No, I'm definitely not referring to Jeb Bush. I am referring to "The Donald."


Did you know that Trump got his life plan from a hobo?

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PJ O'Rourke writes at The Daily Beast,

...During this endless grim, foggy, electoral season with its constant drizzle of wannabes, I intend to make little prose pictures of each candidatural dwarf until we are down to two.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that the two may be “Clinton” and “Bush.” Members of the electorate in their right minds will go into the ballot booth, see the names, think to themselves, “I did this already.” And leave with the ballot unmarked. Voter turn-out will be 6 percent. The shuttle from the local extended care facility will send a few memory-impaired Republicans to the polls. A DNC bus will collect some derelicts from skid row. And we will have the first President of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.

Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.

...Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.

...Many a candidate for president has fibbed on the subject of his or her economic circumstances—William Henry “born in a log cabin” Harrison and Hillary “dead broke” Clinton. But Trump will be the first candidate to — like the American legend that he is — tell tall tales about all the money he’s got. Trump is a financial Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Davey Crockett rolled into one, according to Trump.

If Trump’s critics don’t think this is typical of modern Americans, they haven’t looked at our online dating profiles.

Also typical of modern Americans is Trump’s bad taste. True, he doesn’t dress the way the rest of us do—like a nine-year-old in twee T-shirt, bulbous shorts, boob shoes, and league-skunked sports team cap. And Trump doesn’t weigh 300 pounds or have multiple piercings or visible ink. He puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie. And we like it. We’re a country that cherishes being individuals as much as we cherish being gauche.

We have to consider what kind of president he would make. What would his foreign policy be? What domestic priorities would he favor? How would he handle the economy?

On all three counts he’ll be—just like he says he is already—a big success.

...Imagine the strides Trump will make in American foreign policy. He’s crazier than all the other candidates put together. He’s under the illusion that he’s 20 times richer than he is. He thinks childhood vaccination caused the movie Rain Man. He believes Obama was born to the Queen of Sheba in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, ISIS, the Taliban, and Hamas will be paralyzed with fear. Who knows what this lunatic will do?

What he’ll do is build thousands of Trump casinos, Trump hotels, and Trump resorts in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Raqqa, Kandahar, and Gaza. Then all of them will go bankrupt the way Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts did. He’ll destroy the power of our foes leaving Russia trying to palm off Eastern Ukraine on angry bond-holders and China auctioning distressed property in the Spratly Islands.

Trump’s chief domestic policy will be to be on TV. That’s one more reason he’ll get elected. We can relate to Trump. The first and foremost goal of all Americans is to be on TV.

As President Trump will be able to be on TV all the time, 24/7. Just doing his hair in the makeup room during commercial breaks should keep him too busy to push other birdbrain domestic policies the way some presidents have. And he can yell “You’re fired!” as much as he wants. It will make for a healthy turnover in cabinet appointees such as Ivanka, Dennis Rodman, Larry King, and Vince McMahon.

And Trump understands the economy. He’ll push America’s economic growth forward the same way he pushed his own—with debt and more debt. Average American household debt is more than $225,000. The average American family’s credit card debt is almost $16,000. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. We Americans know a leader when we see one. And we love debt. Otherwise America’s national debt wouldn’t have gone from $15 billion in 1930 to $18 trillion today. Tomorrow, with Trump in the Oval Office, the sky’s the limit.

Read more here.

Who are we?

Victor Davis Hanson explains why in the America of 2014 affirmative action has come to an end.

the public, the Supreme Court, and state legislators increasingly believe that a multiracial United States is unique precisely because race and tribe — unlike most other places in the world — are incidental rather than essential to our American identities.

The advice of Martin Luther King — judge Americans only by the content of their characters — is not only the simplest but in the end the only moral standard.

Read more here.