“I am your voice,” bellowed Trump from the podium. “I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order”. The audience went wild, bursting into applause.
Hail Caesar! Hail Trump!
The day before Ted Cruz, calling on the spirit of Lincoln, implored voters to go out and “…vote your conscience….” That was, in the minds of Trump supporters, the ultimate tergiversation. So they booed him offstage. Perhaps by now it has finally dawned on Trump supporters that if people actually did go out to vote their consciences, candidate Trump would lose in a landslide. And rightly so.
Consider: The morning after his acceptance speech, Trump was back to implying that Ted Cruz’s father was vaguely connected to the Kennedy assassination. He did so by citing a story in the National Enquirer—yep—the very same National Enquirer that you see in the grocery store at the checkout counter.
According to Slate, Trump apparently referenced a story that had appeared in the National Enquirer with the headline: “Ted Cruz’s Father Now Linked to JFK Assassination”. About the Enquirer Trump went on to say “This was a magazine that, in many respects, should be well-respected”.
The man is simply unhinged. As are his supporters. After all, they are apparently willing to take seriously a man who cites lurid headlines from the National Enquirer as a legitimate source of information. Such is the mindset of Trump’s cult-of-personality following.
Behind every political personality cult lurks an authoritarian, and the followers, a mob. Putin or Peron, Mussolini or Mao—take your pick. It makes little difference. Switch the Mao jacket for an Armani suit and you still have an authoritarian. The only question: how far he will go? The answer: as far as he can. That is why we should be grateful the Founders created the separation of powers. And why we should vigorously resist the efforts of Republican central planners (Trump) as well as Democratic ones (Obama, Clinton et. al.).
Republicans used to argue that government was too big and too powerful; that the separation of powers was needed to prevent the concentration of government power in one place; that the market, which relied on voluntary transactions, was the best way to serve the needs of consumers and allocate resources. Most of all they argued that freedom depended on property rights, the sanctity of contract, the rule of law, a robust civil society and a culture of individual responsibility and accountability. That went out the window in Cleveland.
Vote your conscience.
JFB
