Donald Trump is a counterfeit Republican and “an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began”
~ George Will
(Excerpt from Jeffrey Lord) Back in April of this year, two months before Trump announced his candidacy, Will was on the panel of Bret Baier’s Special Report at Fox and said this when the panelists were asked how much money they would place on various candidates in Baier’s “candidate casino.” When he got to Trump he said:
..”One dollar on Donald Trump in the hope that he will be tempted to run, be predictably shellacked, and we will be spared evermore this quadrennial charade of his”…
Suffice to say, Donald Trump not only announced his candidacy, he is – as this latest CNN Iowa poll re-affirms yet again – the front-runner. Repeatedly. Consistently. One Establishment prognosticator after another, now George Will included, has gotten Trump wrong.
Last week on Fox News Sunday George Will stated the “vulgar” Trump supporters needed to come to the Republican party based on the terms of the Country Club elite:
[…] These are voters the Republicans want, the Republicans want all voters, and particularly these voters, but to say that [Trump’s] tapped into something;… {shaking head} … Henry Wallace tapped into something, with the far left of American Politics in the late 40’s; the John Birch society tapped into something, George Wallace tapped into something, and it was up to the grown-ups in the labor movement in the late 1940’s, and the grown-ups in the conservative movement in the 1960’s to read those elements the riot act, and say: come back in, but come back in on our terms because we are not going down the road you want to go”…
[Returning to J Loyd] It is worth recalling here that once upon a time George Will was as down on Ronald Reagan as he is now on Donald Trump – and has been in the past on Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
In a November 12, 1974 column appearing in the Washington Post on a potential 1976 challenge by Reagan to incumbent Establishment GOP President Gerald Ford, (titled “Ronald Reagan, the GOP and ’76”), Will wrote of Reagan:
“But Reagan is 63 and looks it. His hair is still remarkably free of gray. But around the mouth and neck he looks like an old man. He’s never demonstrated substantial national appeal, his hard-core support today consists primarily of the kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun. And there’s a reason to doubt that Reagan is well suited to appeal to the electorate that just produced a Democratic landslide.”
“If a Reagan third party would just lead the ‘Nixon was lynched’ crowd away from the Republican Party and into outer darkness where there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be at worst a mixed course for the Republican Party. It would cost the party some support, but it would make the party seem cleansed.”
Four years later, Will’s first and second choices for the 1980 GOP nomination were Tennessee Senator Howard Baker and George H. W. Bush, neither seen by conservatives of the day as “devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable.” (continue reading)
Sorry George, the “Vulgarians” are coming, AGAIN:
Link to full Jeffrey Lord article