Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Matt Cover thinks Donald Trump is talk radio's Frankenstein

Here, saying Trump is the by-product of an ignorant expectations farce deliberately played on the public by the scheming, self-serving jibber-jabberers Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin:

However, by organizing the GOP base around this fictional system of legislative combat, Movement leaders would lay the groundwork for the ignorant populism of Donald Trump.

Voters, having been told that Congress just lacked strong leaders willing to fight for principle, would flock to a figure who embodied exactly the kind of fiery machismo they had been told was needed.


That's almost amusing, but blindly discounts the "non-ideological" character of the Trump phenomenon's success with the illegal immigration and trade issues. These are conservative issues with a long and storied history but, unfortunately, are not granted legitimacy by today's current crop of so-called conservatives, for whom "principles" and ideology are paramount because they are at heart libertarians, not conservatives.

Trump's immigration and trade crusade may eventually come a cropper, but it won't be because he and the people don't believe in it. It'll be because it has no support from the establishment which runs a "system" organized around antithetical ideas, but also because it has no support from the "anti-establishment" either.

Represented by Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin on the radio, the preferred element of the contemporary demagogue, the anti-establishment has been just as much for open-borders and free-trade as the establishment has been. None of them can even imagine a limited, small American federal government starving from its very beginning on the measly tariffs, excises and land sales with which the founders stuck it. And none in the establishment even wants to.

Laura Ingraham has been waging the lonely battle against illegal immigration almost single-handedly for years on her little radio program in the mornings, with great success, while Michael Savage has had to beat the dead horse for almost twenty-five years as a misunderstood New York Jew.

But the cool thing about 2016 is that New York values are finally getting some respect in the rest of the country for a change, thanks to one Donald John Trump.

"Anti-establishment" talk radio has yet to catch up.