Daily Roundup - 3/18/2016 -- Zakaria

WAPO: Republicans are surrendering to Donald Trump, by Fareed Zakaria

"The Republican surrender has begun. Having described Donald Trump as an unacceptable, unconservative, dangerous demagogue, the party establishment appears to be making its peace with the man who keeps winning primaries."

Great title and criticism. The party elite is giving in to The Will of the Voters. How undemocratic can you get. He isn't right yet, the Elitists who have failed their voters consistently are bent of schemes to change the outcome, and these schemes may make this a democratic year instead of a triumphant republican one.

"Trump marks, in many ways, an even larger break from the past than Goldwater. The modern Republican Party has been devoted to free markets and free trade, social conservatism, an expansionist foreign policy and fiscal discipline, especially on entitlements. Remember that the speech that launched Ronald Reagan’s career was an attack on Medicare. On every one of these issues, Trump either openly disagrees or — as with abortion — has a past track record of disagreement." 

All of the above is bunk. Trump is for free markets and trade, just FAIR free markets and trade where we and our workers are not thrown overboard to line the pockets of the elite money backers who, like Trump when he was a businessman, butter both sides of the bread (Reps and Dems) giving more the the side they think will win. He is not for a meek foreign policy where we support our enemies and fail our friends, but he is not into "nation building." He believes that wars incur costs (how strange is this?) and that those cost need to be defrayed by the defeated, and by the protected. America shouldn't shoulder all of the costs of fighting, while others enjoy the fruit of our winning.


"Trump’s nomination would transform the party into a blue-collar, populist, nationalist movement with a racial element" 

Where is this "traditional" ad-hominem attack coming from? What racial element? When has Trump ever talked about Race? Is it because he is against illegal immigration? But he is for legal immigration, and the people involved are the same.  Is it because he believes Muslims hate us? But they do as shown by a the Pew study:

This indicates that a 19% of American Muslims and 28% of World Wide Muslems (over 300,000,000) believe that violence and suicide bombing is acceptable in defense of Islam. So shall Trump say all of these are the "extremists" or simply leave it unspecified and say Muslims represent a threat. They represent a threat either way, but the PC word parsing would have us spend our time arguing about the use of adjectives (good, bad, extreme, progressive) rather than the problem.

So is Trump a Racist? Not in my book, and not by any action he has taken.