National Review is left to grasp at the hem of Trump's mantle-Diana West

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8/18/15, "Trump: Giving Voice to the American "Subconscious"," Diana West

"To say the Media-Political Complex has really lost its cool over Donald Trump, also every marble, is barest understatement.
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From lib's lib Chuck Todd, gasping for oxygen here, to Fox princess and former "W" spokesgal Dana Perino, exasperation disarranging her 'do here, their frustration and even apoplexy are perfect foils to Trump's calm (yes, calm). The Huffington Post has responded oh-so-rationally by relegating coverage of Trump's presidential campaign to its entertainment pages. Can you spell d-e-n-i-a-l? 

In fact, Huffpo Comix is hoping to ridicule Trump away. Others have more draconian ideas. Con's con George Will (whose wife works for Scott Walker's campaign) is so panicked by the possibility that Republican voters might of their own free will pull the lever for Trump that he writes GOP bosses "should immediately stipulate that subsequent Republican debates will be open to any and all — but only — candidates who pledge to support the party’s nominee." How democratic.

Invoking William F. Buckley's 1960s "excommunication" of conservatism's right wing, the John Birch Society, Will has also called for a Republican cordon sanitaire today -- a wall -- around Trump. If the Establishment only showed such passion for our own border, of course, Donald Trump's candidacy wouldn't be surging across the nation today.

But they haven't, they don't and they won't -- and this is one of the vitally important things that Trump's already consequential presidential run has revealed: the shared sensibility and outlook of media-political elites, regardless of the political spectrum comfort-zone they reside in.  

This is something to bear in mind as the right-side Elites now play catch up -- yes, catch-up -- with Trump.

Take National Review, which today praises, grudgingly, Trumps's excellent immigration plan.

Snob-screen aside, National Review is grasping at the hem of Trump's mantle--which brings to mind another point to think about. In addition to casting out the Birchers in the 1960s, and thereby relegating the existential fight against domestic Communist subversion to the dread "fringe," National Review would in the 1990s effectively surrender on the immigration issue, thereby relegating immigration restriction mainly to the fringe, too. This was cause for celebration by Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of the pro-immigration Wall Street Journal (via Peter Brimelow, author of the seminal Alien Nation). As Bartley declared in 2002, "The National Review has stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause." 

Tens of millions (who's counting?) of illegal aliens later, National Review would seem to have discovered a new "cause," today calling it "regrettable"--such a mincing word--that no American presidential candidate besides Donald Trump has articulated a cogent program for border control, immigration law enforcement and a policy of putting American workers first, not illegal aliens. 

In conclusion, National Review writes:
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"All that said, the rest of the Republican field would do well to take up Trump’s principles and supplement them with a fuller range of sensible policies. The best of Trump’s enforcement proposals should be the lowest common denominator in the GOP, and to them can be added better proposals for barriers at the border and for illegal aliens in the country — all to be articulated with the seriousness that Trump too often lacks. Immigration is too important to be left to The Donald." 

The salient point is, immigration was "left to The Donald" -- NR's obnoxiousness oozes -- and he did something with it that no Trump-Wannabe can do now.

Ben Domenech of the Federalist, one among the Trump-Discombobulated-Right, quite unintentionally identifies exactly what that is. In high dudgeon over Trump's rational, welcome call to end birthright citizenship -- not revoke it, as Domenech almost seems to think -- Domenech writes:

[Trump's] immigration plan is a perfect example of what Scott Adams has described as Trump’s clown genius ability to use intentional exaggeration to provide anchors for your brain, and persuade your subconscious to think things you would never originally think.

That's precisely it. Before Trump, the American "subconscious," circa 2015, would never "originally think" a US border was possible, let alone a wall; immigration restriction was possible, let alone a halt; immigration law enforcement was possible; the deportation of illegal families was possible; restoration of American citizenship as a privilege, not a stolen good, was possible; jobs for Americans were possible; and the rest.

Donald Trump, bless him, has changed the American subconscious, giving voice to Americans long conditioned into silence by this same Media-Political Complex. And there is nothing, but nothing, they can do about it now." via Free Rep.

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