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.

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Trump's intellectuals -- out there beyond the Beltway

Fred Barnes writes at The Weekly Standard,

Charles Kesler, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University says, conservatives have the task of "offering advice and help, whether or not [Trump] has the sense to take it." To find out if he's willing to learn, "conservatives will have to engage him," according to Kesler. Abstaining in 2016, "in hopes of stimulating a recovery of full-throated conservatism in 2020, is sheer desperation."

Kesler puts Trump in the context of earlier presidents. "Do obscenities fall from his lips more readily than they did from Lyndon Johnson's or Richard Nixon's?" he writes. "Are the circumstances of his three marriages more shameful than the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's pathologically unfaithful one—or that matter, Bill Clinton's humiliatingly unfaithful one? Have any of his egotistical excesses rivaled Andrew Jackson's killing a man in a duel over a racing bet and an insult to Jackson's wife?"

..."If you compare different conservative presidents or would-be presidents to magazines," Kesler says, "Ronald Reagan was a National Review conservative. George W. Bush was a Weekly Standard conservative. Mitt Romney was a Wall Street Journal conservative. Trump will be the first tabloid conservative—the New York Post or Daily Mail. It's more a blue-collar or working-class sensibility."

...Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian, columnist, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wants conservatives to give Trump a chance to improve his act. What happens if by August, he's "reinvented himself into a more sober Trump and announced that if elected he'd like to appoint Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, John Bolton as secretary of state, Larry Arnn as secretary of education, and General Jack Keane as secretary of defense?" Hanson asks in National Review.

Conservatives may be forced to decide not between two bad choices—Trump and Clinton—but between "a bad Trump and a far, far worse Clinton," he writes. "If it is the latter, then it's an easy choice in November."

Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, was criticized by National Review's Jonah Goldberg for supportive words about Trump on Hugh Hewitt's radio show in April. In response, Arnn cited in the college's newspaper the "chief things" he'd said about Trump. He liked Trump's comments about "the regulatory state" and praised "his confidence, self-direction (he seems to say what he says because he thinks it, rather than having been advised to say it), his sense of humor, and fearlessness." About Trump's character, Arnn has a few doubts.

There is a major dissenter out West, Michael Medved. He's an author, columnist, and talk radio host whose show goes to 300 stations nationwide. "I've taken a lonely stand for the world of talk radio: I am not on board the Trump train and don't expect that I will get on board," he told me.

Medved's critique of Trump is withering. "The evidence—especially the man's own pronouncements—suggests that Trump would most likely be a disaster in every regard," he says. "The risks of Trump himself utterly shredding the Constitution seem to me more formidable than the risks of Clinton-appointed justices to the Supreme Court doing that sort of damage."

But Medved says he can imagine a cleaned-up Trump who appeals to "all thoughtful conservatives," including him. "I can imagine it, but I think it's a fantasy." Judgments on Trump are often tentative. Even Roger L. Simon says, "I could change my mind on a dime .  .  . if other information comes to light or if Donald starts to act loony or, more precisely, excessively loony."

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