Is Mr. Trump A Bad Man?

Monday morning, the Newster, clumbsily misreading Romney's intentions through the prism of his own blind ambition, went on Fox and Friends to declare Romney would never be the GOP nominee because of the anti-Herr Trumpf speech he gave. Gingrich, who has been sucking up to Trumpf the way he always sucks up to wealthy people who might write him a check, missed the point of Romney's speech: 1- to save the GOP and the nation from Trumpf (and an authoritarian and fascist turn) and 2- to help prepare the ground for a Paul Ryan nomination.

Republican fat-cats were buoyed by Herr Trumpf's wobbly performance at the Michigan debate last week and then his relatively poor showing at the GOP contests over the weekend, in which in lost Maine and Kansas to Cruz and Puerto Rico to Rubio and just scraped by in Louisiana and Kentucky (with an 18-18 delegate split with Cruz in Louisiana and a 17-15 split with him in Kentucky, 14 more delegates going to Rubio and Kasich). The Kansas loss was especially interesting:

• Cruz- 35,207 (48.2%) and 24 delegates
• Herr Trumpf- 17,062 (23.3%) and 9 delegates
• Rubio- 12,189 (16.7%) and 6 delegates
• Kasich- 7,795 (10.7%) and 1 delegate

Cruz won all 4 congressional districts, the 4th (Wichita) with nearly 60% to Trumpf's 22%. This doesn't look like a daisy-strewn path to the nomination. But tonight we'll find out if Michigan makes Herr look like a winner again. Although the Fox poll that was taken after the Detroit debate shows Trumpf lost 5 points in a week, he's still the prohibitive frontrunner:

• Herr Trumpf- 42% (down 5 points)
• Kasich- 19.6% (up 6 points)
• Cruz- 19.3% (up 5 points)
• Little Marco- 9% (down 6 points)

Still, the NY Times reported yesterday that the rich Republican sugar daddies are riding to the rescue of the GOP establishment, checks in hand, now that they sense Trumpf is wounded, perhaps fatally.

Republicans hoping to halt Donald J. Trump’s march to their party’s presidential nomination emerged from the weekend’s voting contests newly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s uneven electoral performance and by some nascent signs that he may be peaking with voters.

Outside groups are moving to deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger. Mr. Trump’s reed-thin organization appears to be catching up with him, suggesting he could be at a disadvantage if he is forced into a protracted slog for delegates.

Shane Goldmacher and Alex Isenstadt reported for Politico that the fat cats are ready to ante up $25 million, not $10 million! Half that money is actually pro-Rubio money trying to save his campaign from imploding in Florida. Nixon's former Jew counter, GOP in-house Nazi Fred Malek, scoffed from his perch at the Republican Governors Association that "it's too little, too late." But with Rubio rapidly sinking into oblivion-- having bravely taken a bullet by jumping into the sewer with Trumpf to take him on on his own terms-- the establishment lane is looking more and more like a road to nowhere... unless they can really pull off a deadlock, brokered convention and sneak Paul Ryan in as the "compromise" candidate.

Ted Cruz’s emergence as the best-placed alternative has complicated the anti-Trump movement’s push to find financiers. Many top Republicans, especially in those Washington, see Cruz as just as objectionable as Trump.

"It is why it has been so difficult to get an anti-Trump campaign together,” confided one top Republican strategist, who opposes both men. "If the ultimate beneficiary of anti-Trump efforts is Ted Cruz, the effort itself is probably not worthwhile.”

..."The establishment and the Right-- normally at each other’s throats-- have laid down their swords to prevent Donald Trump from hijacking the conservative movement and the Republican party in one fell swoop,” said the strategist. "I do think we have enough time. There’s a lot of paddles in the water but it's an extremely intense current and it’s upstream.”

Monday Jane Eisner, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, asked the question many American Jews have been worrying about: Is Herr Trumpf Really A Hitler-Style Fascist? She surveyed Holocaust survivors, who she found nervous, not only by what the buffoon says but by the ignorant and hate-filled following of aggrieved losers he's amassed.

“I am very worried about what he says. I am much more worried by how it’s received,” Münzer told me in a phone interview from his Washington, D.C., home, as voters in nearby Virginia went to the polls and handed Trump another Super Tuesday victory. “The fact that he’s been able to attract these huge numbers of people, so full of hate-- I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything quite like this.”

Münzer, 74, is a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and takes part in two different monthly groups with other survivors, who are politically engaged and vocal about it. “The topic [Trump] comes up all the time,” he said. “These are people of a variety of political stripes, but on this issue, I really think there is unanimity.”

Münzer, a retired physician, traces his abhorrence and fear of Trump back to his experience as a very young child when the Nazis targeted Jews for extinction. “I owe my life to a Muslim Indonesian woman in Holland who risked her life to save me,” he recalled. “Anyone who singles out any kind of community for hate, I find appalling.”

Another survivor who volunteers at the museum, Halina Yasharoff Peabody, told me that she, too, finds herself in a unique state of apprehension over Trump’s candidacy. She was seven when the war broke out in Poland and survived only by the sheer guts and cunning of her mother, who secured false papers so that she and her two daughters could live as Catholics.

“He wants to be a dictator. We’ve had dictators and that can’t be good,” Peabody told me in a phone interview. “It seems unreal, what is happening. I don’t understand how people can follow a person who doesn’t know what the law is.”

Intellectually, I can dismiss their concerns. My innate skepticism and, frankly, my respect for American culture and history, make me want to reject the simplistic analogies of Trump to, say, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was motivated by a clear, if twisted, ideology; Trump’s “policies” are often just spontaneous pronouncements, without any coherence other than to demonize the other and make himself the answer to all that needs fixing in America today.

Hitler exploited a nation brought to its knees by a crippling world war and a severe depression; America was brought back from economic ruin by the very president Trump seeks to succeed in office, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, this country still has the world’s most powerful economy and military. Hitler skillfully leveraged state-sponsored violence against its own citizens; Trump’s self-centered campaign, ugly though it is, has no such mechanism at its disposal.

What struck me in speaking with these survivors is the way the Trump phenomenon has shaken their otherwise persistent faith in an America that they fled to for its tolerance and its ideals. “I came here for freedom,” Peabody said. “I don’t want not to be able to express myself.”

Even at this raw moment, I don’t envision those freedoms disappearing-- and in fact, I’m proud of the many Jews, Republicans included, who are unequivocally repudiating Trump’s statements and tactics.

Still, I asked Peabody if she feels particularly vulnerable as a Jew. “I’m worried about every minority. I do know that my minority is always attacked. They always find me a good scapegoat,” she replied. “There is a lot of anger in the world, but this is no way to correct it.”