The Mountebank Who Enthralled The GOP

The GOP primary season is coming alive and the state of play is abysmal. Front and center there is Donald Trump, while everyone else including a few real Republicans and several neocon fakers stumble along far in the rear.

And that’s a shame because the Donald is not remotely a conservative, let alone even a half-assed Republican. It is bad enough that he fluked into the Oval Office in November 2016, but rather than lock him out for the crucial election of 2024, the sad sack remnants of the Republican party have rallied to the banner of one of the most bombastic, egomaniacal, unfit mountebanks ever to appear on the American political scene.

What, oh what, are the good people of the GOP thinking?

To be clear, we have no objection to the Donald’s relentless and frequently unhinged attacks on the ruling elites of Washington, Wall Street, the mainstream media and the Fortune 500. Indeed, his one abiding virtue is that he had all the right enemies—the very people whose policies and ideologies threaten the future of America as we have known it.

But while Trump had the right enemies, he was hopelessly wrong on the substance of policy. Indeed, when it comes to what should be the GOP’s core mission amidst the on-going tussle of democratic governance— standing up for free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty and small government at home and non-intervention abroad—the Donald has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues.

Yet the situation is now so far gone that the election of a real Republican leader in 2024 is the only hope remaining. Literally, the very future of constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America cannot endure another four years of the Donald in the White House. Nor, worse still, can it tolerate another woebegone Democrat like Joe Biden, elected by default owing mainly to the virtue of not being Donald Trump.

So the essence of the moment is this: Lock him out of both the nomination and the Oval Office.

We will detail the Donald’s miserable record as a big spender, easy money-man, hard-core protectionist, immigrant-basher, militarist and all-around Big Government statist below and in future installments. But we need to puncture divisively the myth of the Great MAGA Economy right up front.

That’s because a lot of well-meaning Republicans are willing to overlook all of his egregious egotism and petty bombast and his endless departures from conservative economic principles because he purportedly delivered the Greatest Economy Ever.

In a word, he didn’t. Not remotely. On the bread and butter matters of growth, jobs, inflation and investment, in fact, his record is among the worst of modern presidents, not the best.