George Will Surely Prefers Scott Walker Over Trump-- But Not Many Other Republicans Do

One of the most amusing columns over the weekend came from a Republican propagandist writing in the Washington Post and the National Review. George Will, a long-time Trump hater, is tearing his hair out of his head as he watches Trump's sociopathic behavior sink his beloved GOP. Trump has the support of nearly a third of likely Republican primary voters and Will wants to write him out of the party. 

Will doesn't seem capable of recognizing that his own pandering to extremists over the years has abetted the rise of Trumpism, a uniquely American brand of fascism that mirrors Mussolini's rise to power in the 1920s. "It has come to this," whined Will:

The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government’s size and coercive powers.

Will castigates the other Republican candidates for cowardice in their approach to Trump and then, uncharacteristically, comes to the defense of undocumented immigrants, while practically accusing Trump of being Hitler reincarnated!

“They,” the approximately 11.3 million illegal immigrants (down from 12.2 million in 2007), have these attributes: Eighty-eight percent have been here at least five years. Of the 62 percent who have been here at least ten years, about 45 percent own their own homes. About half have children who were born here and hence are citizens. Dara Lind of Vox reports that at least 4.5 million children who are citizens have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant.

Trump evidently plans to deport almost 10 percent of California’s workers, and 13 percent of that state’s K–12 students. He is, however, at his most Republican when he honors family values: He proposes to deport intact families, including children who are citizens. “We have to keep the families together,” he says, “but they have to go.” Trump would deport everyone, then “have an expedited way of getting them [“the good ones”; “when somebody is terrific”] back.” Big Brother government will identify the “good” and “terrific” from among the wretched refuse of other teeming shores.

Trump proposes seizing money that illegal immigrants from Mexico try to send home. This might involve sacrificing mail privacy, but desperate times require desperate measures. He would vastly enlarge the federal government’s enforcement apparatus, but he who praises single-payer health care systems and favors vast eminent domain powers has never made a fetish of small government.

Today’s big government finds running Amtrak too large a challenge, and Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent. But Trump wants America to think big. The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump’s project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion. There is precedent.

Birthright citizenship, established by the 14th Amendment and opposed by Trump and his emulators, accords with America’s natural-rights doctrine. Arguably, this policy is unwise. But is this an argument Republicans should foment in the toxic atmosphere Trump has created, an argument that would injure the next Republican nominee even more than Mitt Romney injured himself? Romney, who advocated making illegal immigrants’ lives so unpleasant they would “self-deport,” might be president if he had received ten points more than his 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.

About 900,000 Hispanic citizens reach voting age each year. In 2012, less than half of eligible Hispanics voted, but Republicans have figured out how to increase Hispanic turnout.

A substantial majority of Americans-- majorities in all states-- and, in some polls, a narrow majority of Republicans favor a path for illegal immigrants not just to legal status but to citizenship. Less than 20 percent of Americans favor comprehensive deportation.

This may, however, be changing now that so many supposed Republicans embrace a candidate who, six years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, disparaged Ronald Reagan as someone who tried to “con” the public. Looking on the bright side, perhaps Trump supporters are amiably broadminded in their embrace of a candidate who thinks we cannot presently be proud to be American citizens (he says his presidency will enable us to again be proud).

If, after November 2016, there are autopsies of Republican presidential hopes, political coroners will stress the immigration-related rhetoric of August 2015.

Scott Walker must’ve hit his head on quite a few counters lately

Will's wife works for Scott Walker, the Koch puppet from Wisconsin. But the cowardly, bumbling Walker doesn't seem likely to be the Republican to vanquish the Trump monster. Yesterday Salon even wondered if "this dope's campaign" can be saved. If Trump beats him in Iowa-- the caucuses were supposed to propel him to victory and he's now in 3rd place-- Salon will have been proven right to call him "a nonsense person and a ridiculous presidential candidate."

Yesterday Trump told George Stephanopoulus on ABC’s This Week why he thinks Walker would be a terrible nominee:

I’m not worried because the state is really in trouble. I mean it’s a fantastic place, and I love the people of Wisconsin, but if you look at what’s going to happen, there’s a $2.2 billion deficit. They were supposed to have a surplus of a billion… He’s stopped a lot of work because he doesn’t want to raise taxes, so instead of raising taxes he’s borrowing… and the state is thirty eight, number thirty eight out of the states, ranked number 38. That’s not very good. I’m honored that he wants to copy me, he’s a nice man. I gave him campaign contributions when he was running for governor. I like him very much, but his state has not performed well.

As for my assertion that "respectable Republicans" like George Will have enabled Trump and Trumpism, the National Memo hit the nail on the head yesterday by pointing out "how a conservative base nurtured on resentment and false promises is falling for a candidate who feeds them the shrillest and most unconstitutional policies imaginable," exposing "a Republican Party intent on proving itself incapable of and unqualified for power, as evidenced by both its acceptance of Trump and its wider embrace of destructive delusions."