Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

Win or Lose, Donald Trump Just Did the GOP a Yuuuuuuge Favor

English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fresh off his plurality win in the South Carolina primary, Donald Trump looks stronger than ever in his bid for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination. Whether or not he goes the distance to the nomination and then to the White House, he’s done the Republican Party a major service by helping it put the Bush dynasty in its rearview mirror.

Nobody doubts Trump’s willingness to say unpopular things in politically dangerous venues. But some observers felt that it might have been a bridge too far even for Trump to bust Jeb Bush’s “my brother kept us safe” balloon in South Carolina (uber-hawk Lindsey Graham’s stomping ground) the week before the south’s first major primary. Would this be the mistake that brought his campaign to grief?

Nope. Trump won the primary handily, Jeb ended his campaign … and from this point on Republican candidates for the presidency and other offices will finally feel free to openly disown — or at least quit feigning nostalgia for — the eight nightmare years of George W. Bush’s administration.

Dubya’s legacy — 9/11, two failed wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the  worst economic collapse since the Great Depression — may not have been entirely his fault. In fact, I think most reasonable people can agree that bad luck and bad advice were major contributing factors.

But what happened happened. It destroyed any chance of victory John McCain might otherwise have enjoyed in 2008, then dogged Mitt Romney’s heels in 2012 as well. Sure, Romney was the weakest Republican nominee since Wendell Willkie anyway, but the Bush legacy certainly didn’t do him any favors.

The GOP’s rut really goes back to 1990, the end of the Cold War, and yet another Bush White House. Ever since, the party’s establishment has had to work overtime, with the aid of convenient menaces (Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, 9/11, etc.) to keep its post-WWII raison d’etre — maintenance of an expensive gravy train for its military-industrial complex backers — on the rails. This meant marginalizing, at every opportunity, the party’s non-interventionist wing, most famously in the persons of Ron and Rand Paul over the last three election cycles.

Those non-interventionists could be marginalized, dismissed and put to pasture because they owed a modicum of loyalty to their party. But the Donald knows no loyalties except to himself, and perhaps to his own view of the truth. By stating that view and not paying for it with the loss of a major presidential primary, or with a hit to his overall nomination prospects, he has set the Republican Party free … if free is what it wants to be. Which remains to be seen, and is a question almost certainly weighing heavily on the minds of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Religion and Politics: Obama Visits the Mussulmen

Thousands listen to President Barack Obama's r...
Thousands listen to President Barack Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For 20 years prior to his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Since his election as president, Obama has attended Christian worship services numerous times, has spoken annually at the distinctly Christian National Prayer Breakfast, and has periodically issued messages of holiday solidarity (Easter, Christmas, etc.) to “my fellow Christians.”

But some people don’t believe he’s a Christian. He drinks beer, eats pork, and marks Islam’s holy month of Ramadan with good wishes to Muslims (in one, referring to “my own Christian faith”)  rather than with that religion’s required fasting, but some people believe he’s secretly a Muslim. And some Republican politicians actively encourage that belief.

The can of hummus got opened up again on February 3,  when Obama visited a mosque in Baltimore to tell American Muslims “you’re part of America too. You’re not Muslim or American. You’re Muslim and American.”

As expected, the smirkingest, most “I’m saying what you think I’m saying but am not actually saying” critique of Obama’s visit came from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who opined that “maybe he feels comfortable there.” In other words, maybe he’s a secret Muslim.

Comes now US Senator (and also presidential candidate) Marco Rubio, characterizing the mosque visit as “pitting people against each other.” Because, you see, telling Muslim Americans that they’re Americans is soooooo divisive (unlike, for example, asserting that America is “a Christian nation”). I wonder if Rubio isn’t maybe just jealous that he forgot to cover all his religious bases. He started off as a Catholic. Then he was a Mormon. Now he’s a Catholic again and a Southern Baptist too (yes, really).

I sometimes suspect that Donald Trump’s, Marco Rubio’s  and Barack Obama’s real religions revolve around, respectively, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama. But I digress.

Let me settle three questions for you as best I can.

Question #1: Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

Answer: No one can know another’s innermost thoughts, but going by Obama’s long record of public pronouncements and actions, no, he’s not a Muslim. He’s a professing Christian.

Question #2: Doesn’t that visit to a mosque make you wonder, though?

Answer: It shouldn’t. George W. Bush visited a mosque in Washington the week after 9/11, for exactly the same purpose as Obama did: To reassure Muslims that they are welcome in, and part of, America. Do you think George W. Bush is a Muslim too?

Question #3: Is America a Christian, or an anti-Muslim, nation?

Answer: I’ll let the first two presidents of the United States and the US Senate stand in for me on this answer. According to the Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated under George Washington and proffered to the Senate for ratification (it passed) by John Adams, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion … it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims] …”

Any more questions?

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Trump: A Joker in the GOP’s Presidential Deck

English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Some people,” as Barry Switzer famously declared (rather oddly for a football coach),  “are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” And then there’s Donald Trump.

Inheriting a $250 million fortune built by his father on government loans and housing contracts, Trump fell close to the family’s corporate welfare tree. He now claims a net worth in the billions and cultivates the myth that he is a “self-made man.”

His version of the story doesn’t mention the government subsidies, the “too big to fail” debt (continually restructured by bankers who feared going down with him if he defaulted) or the multiple business bankruptcies.

So there stands The Donald on third base, hamming it up for the cameras and periodically awarding himself MVP trophies. Home plate, he’s now decided, is the White House.

I have to hand it to the guy. Anyone who can go bust four times running casinos — casinos, for the love of Pete! — then suggest, with a straight face, that he’s the man to bring fiscal responsibility and business acumen to Washington, deserves credit for sheer chutzpah.

Perhaps his descent into xenophobic rant is an attempt distract attention from the weak “self-made man” narrative. Or maybe he’s a Democratic mole. Either way, he’s bad news for Republican prospects in 2016 and beyond.

Trump’s claim that a disproportionate percentage of Mexican immigrants are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” seems custom crafted to cost the Republican ticket double digit vote percentages.

The first problem with his assertion is that it’s flatly false.  As syndicated columnist Steve Chapman points out in Reason magazine, Mexican immigrant populations in the US correlate to lower, not higher, violent crime rates.  “If Trump wants to avoid rapists, here’s some advice: Head for areas with lots of residents who were born in Mexico.”

The second problem is that he’s throwing a bomb, fuse lit and hissing, into the GOP’s attempt to solve its voter demographic problem. White males (the party’s “base”) are a shrinking proportion of the electorate. Hispanic voters, on the other hand, are growing in number.

Smart Republicans understand this. At least three candidates  — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush — hope to move in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the strength of significant Hispanic support.

There’s a tightrope between the GOP’s opportunistic devolution into Know-Nothingism since the days of Reagan and George HW Bush (who competed in 1980 for the title of “most open borders candidate”) and an appeal to immigrant voters and their families.

And there’s Trump, doing unicycle stunts on the tightrope, jostling the other performers’ elbows, forcing the PR choice between supporting him, slamming him or trying to ignore him. It’s a long way down and the ground below is very hard. Choose carefully.

The Republican Party has two possible political futures: In one,  it gets libertarian on immigration. In the other it gives up its hopes for the White House not just in 2016, but for the foreseeable future.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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