Thread: Michael Gerson: Republicans are still in denial over Donald Trump

November 26, 2015
Michael Gerson: Republicans are still in denial over Donald Trump

Washington Post Writers Group

The presidential candidate who has consistently led the Republican field for four months, Donald Trump, has proposed: forcibly expel 11 million people from the country, requiring a massive apparatus of enforcement, courts and concentration camps; rewrite or reinterpret the 14th Amendment to end the Civil War-era Republican principle of birthright citizenship; build a 2,000-mile wall on our southern border while forcing Mexico to pay the cost.

He has characterized undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, and opposed the speaking of Spanish in America.

Republican candidates have proposed: to favor the admission of Christian over Muslim refugees from the Middle East; to “send home” Syrian refugees, mainly women and children, into a war zone; to “strongly consider” the shutting down of suspicious mosques; to compile a database of Muslims and (perhaps) force them to carry special identification showing their religion.

They have compared Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs,” ruled out the possibility of a Muslim president, and warned that Muslim immigration to America is really “colonization.”

There are, of course, Republican presidential hopefuls who have vigorously opposed each of these proposals, arguments and stereotypes. But Donald Trump has, so far, set the terms of the primary debate and dragged other candidates in the direction of ethnic and religious exclusion.

One effect has been the legitimization of even more extreme views — signaling that it is OK to give voice to sentiments and attitudes that, in previous times, people would have been too embarrassed to share in public.

So in Tennessee, the chairman of the state Legislature’s GOP caucus has called for the mobilization of the National Guard to round up Syrian refugees and put them in camps. Many Republicans are now on record saying that Islam is inherently violent and inconsistent with constitutional values (while often displaying an ironic and disturbing ignorance of those values).

Vin Weber, a prominent GOP strategist, told me that many Republicans remain in “denial mode” about the possibility of Trump’s nomination. “How can you be the leader in national polls,” Weber says, “and in the early states, and maybe even in money, and be counted out?” In spite of saturation media coverage, Weber thinks the Trump effect on the GOP is “understated.”

The attention of commentators has often been focused on the horse-race aspect of the campaign or on the narrative of insider vs. outsider, rather than on what Weber calls Trump’s “transformational message.”

That message comes in the context of a long period of political pessimism —more than 10 years in which polls have generally found more than 60 percent of Americans believing that their country is on the wrong track. There has been an angry decline in respect for most social institutions, including government.

This has left some Americans more open to radical political answers — more prepared, in Weber’s words, “to roll the dice on the future of the country.”

“We’re going to have to do things,” says Trump with menacing vagueness, “that we never did before.” And if disrespect for institutions is common, Trump is its perfect vehicle — combining the snark of Twitter with the staged anger and grudges of reality television.

But in all this, it is easy to miss Trump’s policy ambition. He would spark trade wars with China and Mexico and scrap the world trading system — which Republicans have helped construct since World War II — replacing it with an older kind of mercantilism.

He would make the seizure of Middle Eastern oil the centerpiece of his regional strategy — turning a spurious liberal charge into a foreign policy doctrine, and uniting the Arab world in rage and resentment.

And Trump would make — has already half-made — the GOP into an anti-immigrant party. Much of Trump’s appeal is reactionary. He has tapped into a sense that an older America is being lost.

In a recent poll, 62 percent of Republicans reported feeling like “a stranger in their own country.” This is a protest against rapid and disorienting social change, against an increasingly multicultural country, and against the changes of the Obama years.

It does not take much political talent to turn this sense of cultural displacement into anti-immigrant resentment. Only a reckless disregard for the moral and political consequences.

As denial in the GOP fades, a question is laid upon the table: Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/op...#storylink=cpy

In a recent poll, 62 percent of Republicans reported feeling like “a stranger in their own country.” This is a protest against rapid and disorienting social change, against an increasingly multicultural country, and against the changes of the Obama years.

It does not take much political talent to turn this sense of cultural displacement into anti-immigrant resentment. Only a reckless disregard for the moral and political consequences.

As denial in the GOP fades, a question is laid upon the table: Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?

The answer to your question is a resounding: YES.

Of course it is possible and morally permissible to protect our country from unwanted, unneeded and undesirable "change" driven by foreign interests at our expense. If you call that "nativism", then YES, it's time for native Americans to stand up for themselves, their country, culture, society, economy and lives. Why would it not be? This is our country, we not only control what happens here, we decide what happens here. If not US, then who? The Washington Post? The New York Times? Uh no, not the Post, not the Times, Americans decide what happens in the United States.

If Americans don't want any more foreign Muslims in the United States, that's our choice. If Americans don't want any more Mexican or other types of immigrants in the United States, that's our decision. If Americans want to protect our own jobs and businesses against the ravages of free trade treason and immigration, that's our obligation. If Americans are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own country, then it's our duty to fix it.

What I don't understand is why any newspaper that wants to sell newspapers in the United States would believe otherwise and call what Americans both want and need "repugnant". So it seems to me that you're the one with the "raw and repugnant" problem because you lack any loyalty to our nation and have no respect for our citizens.

michael Gerson
why don't you & every one get off the soap box & listen to what trump said about 11 million illegal immigrants & not sure of the count .he said he will do it he can do it
so just listen to what he said he told about 9./11 was true . he don't lie like the rest of you do

I stopped reading at the words "concentration camps" because that told me very clearly that Michael Gerson is a lying socialist piece of crap that is not worth listening to. But Im not at all surprised coming from the full blown communist Washington Post!

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

I stopped reading at the words "concentration camps" because that told me very clearly that Michael Gerson is a lying socialist piece of crap that is not worth listening to. But Im not at all surprised coming from the full blown communist Washington Post!

W

His background might come as a surprise:

Michael Gerson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Gerson
Born Michael John Gerson
May 15, 1964 (age 51)
Occupation Presidential speechwriter, political columnist
Political party Republican
Spouse(s) Dawn Gerson

Michael John Gerson (born May 15, 1964) is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, a Policy Fellow with the ONE Campaign,[1][2] a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice,[3] and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.[4] He served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.[5] Gerson is considered to be a leading figure of the evangelical intelligentsia movement.

Background and family

Gerson was raised in an Evangelical Christian family[6] in St. Louis, Missouri. His paternal grandfather was Jewish.[6] He attended Georgetown University for a year and then transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois, graduating in 1986.[7]

He resides with his wife and their two children in Alexandria, Virginia.

Speechwriter

Gerson joined the Bush campaign before 2000 as a speechwriter and went on to head the White House speechwriting team. "No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2007 article otherwise very critical of Gerson in National Review. According to Ponnuru, Bush's speechwriters had more prominence in the administration than their predecessors did under previous presidents because Bush's speeches did most of the work of defending the president's policies, since administration spokesmen and press conferences did not. On the other hand, he wrote, the speeches would announce new policies that were never implemented, making the speechwriting in some ways less influential than ever.[12]

On June 14, 2006, it was announced that Gerson was leaving the White House to pursue other writing and policy work.[13] He was replaced as Bush's chief speechwriter by The Wall Street Journal chief editor William McGurn.
Lines attributed to Gerson

Gerson proposed the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" mixed-metaphor during a September 5, 2002 meeting of the White House Iraq Group, in an effort to sell the American public on the nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff,

The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase – and the administration would soon make maximum use of it.[14]

Gerson has said one of his favorite speeches was given at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, a few days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which included the following passage: "Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn."[15]

Gerson is credited with coining such phrases as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and "the armies of compassion".[16] His noteworthy phrases for Bush are said to include "Axis of Evil," a phrase adapted from "axis of hatred," itself suggested by fellow speechwriter David Frum but deemed too mild.[17]
Criticisms of Gerson as a speechwriter

In an article by Matthew Scully (one of Gerson's co-speechwriters) published in The Atlantic (September 2007) Gerson is criticized for seeking the limelight, taking the credit for other people's work and for creating a false image of himself.

It was always like this, working with Mike. No good deed went unreported, and many things that never happened were reported as fact. For all of our chief speechwriter’s finer qualities, the firm adherence to factual narrative is not a strong point.[18]

Of particular note is the invention of the phrase "axis of evil." Scully claims that the phrase "axis of hatred" was coined by David Frum and forwarded to colleagues by email. The word "hatred" was changed to "evil" by some one other than Gerson and was done because "hatred" seemed the more melodramatic word at the time.[19]

Scully also had this to say about Gerson:

My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s ( McConnell's) office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.[19]

Washington Post columnist

After leaving the White House, Gerson wrote for Newsweek magazine for a time. On May 16, 2007, Gerson began his tenure as a twice-weekly columnist for the Washington Post. His columns appear on Wednesdays and Fridays.[20]

Gerson, a neo-conservative, has repeatedly criticized other conservatives in his column and conservatives have returned the favor. One of Gerson's first columns was entitled "Letting Fear Rule", in which he compared skeptics of President Bush's immigration reform bill to nativist bigots of the 1880s.[21]

At a conference at the Atlantic Ideas Fest, Gerson said that Saddam Hussein was "comparable to Pol Pot", which brought jeers from the audience.[22]

In February 2009, Gerson published an editorial criticizing Pope Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of the Holocaust-denying conservative bishop Richard Williamson.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerson

ah ! So he is right there in the Treason lobby with Bush and Rove and the other GOP sellouts around the Bush Dynasty that threw our borders wide open after 9.11

He served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.[5] Gerson is considered to be a leading figure of the evangelical intelligentsia movement.

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

ah ! So he is right there in the Treason lobby with Bush and Rove and the other GOP sellouts around the Bush Dynasty that threw our borders wide open after 9.11

YES.