By DEXTER DUGGAN
Romping presidential candidate Donald Trump has shown he’ll denounce anyone or anything he thinks is bad for the United States. He may be wrong or right on this or that, but he’s not bashful about bashing what he thinks is wrong.
The open-borders lobby? Despite its power in political, religious, and media circles, Trump says it’s on the wrong path.
Internationalist industrialists? They hurt American workers, he says.
Political correctness? Don’t even mention its shibboleths to him. Political powerbrokers? He’ll break their smugness into pieces.
No group or person seems too big or domineering to him if he thinks it needs to be told off — not even the papacy after Trump got the impression that Pope Francis was being politically minded and insulting him.
So it’s notable in this election season that one phenomenon Trump hasn’t attacked, even though it’s not a “fashionable” group in elitist eyes, is the pro-life movement.
Virtually all the Republican presidential candidates — those still in the running or having been winnowed out — are on board with pro-life standards. And Trump, the very candidate who seems to have gotten where he is because of his defiance of conventional wisdom, sometimes sounds as dedicated as can be to the pro-life cause. Other times, he sounds more like a novice. But not a foe.
Even if Trump were speaking from sheer political self-interest, he apparently decided pro-life support is indispensable. Or, at least, not worth the effort to challenge.
This article isn’t intended to be an endorsement in any way as the Republican primaries and caucuses get into full swing. It’s only pointing out that even the man known for rushing into the room and overturning all the tables, and all the expectations, apparently is persuaded to take the pro-life stand.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Before the South Carolina primary on February 20, some national pro-life leaders warned against voting for Trump. They included Marjorie Dannenfelser, Maggie Gallagher, Penny Nance, Jill Stanek, Melissa Ohden, and Star Parker. They wrote:
“On the issue of defending unborn children and protecting women from the violence of abortion, Mr. Trump cannot be trusted, and there is, thankfully, an abundance of alternative candidates with proven records of pro-life leadership whom pro-life voters can support. We have come to this conclusion after having listened patiently to numerous debates and news reports, but most importantly to Donald Trump’s own words.”
And Timothy Carney, senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner, posted on February 23: “Does anyone trust that Trump would even try to appoint to the court judges who reject the embarrassingly flawed reasoning of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey? Does anyone think Trump’s pro-life views would take the form of any action, were he to be elected?. . .
“If Trump is the nominee, the babies will have no advocate. If Trump is the nominee, pro-lifers will have no candidate,” Carney concluded.
The billionaire still has sounded like he has gaps in his knowledge of Planned Parenthood. Does it do that many abortions, or does it deserve some federal funding?
At other times, Trump’s language resounds with the exact inflection of pro-lifers. In a February 15 opinion piece posted at his website (donaldjtrump.com), he declared that when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized national permissive abortion in 1973, the majority “justices based their decision on imagining rights and liberties in the Constitution that are nowhere to be found.”
He immediately followed this up by saying tax funding for abortionists is unacceptable:
“Even if we take the court at its word, that abortion is a matter of privacy, we should then extend the argument to the logical conclusion that private funds, then, should subsidize this choice rather than the half-billion dollars given to abortion providers every year by Congress. Public funding of abortion providers is an insult to people of conscience at the least and an affront to good governance at best.”
The opinion article concluded: “The next president must follow those principles that work best and that reinforce the reverence Americans hold for life. A culture of life is too important to let slip away for convenience or political correctness. It is by preserving our culture of life that we will Make America Great Again.”
Trump’s approach to the issue suggests that pro-lifers can take pride at what their work, even though incomplete, has accomplished, both in the nation and in specific heres and theres.
Trump isn’t a perfect human being, but often such fallibility has made the flawed one, like the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), accept the embrace of the pro-abortion movement rather than be seen as “judging others” when he fears to be judged himself.
If anyone has been subject to a hammering by pro-abortion propaganda over the years, it’d be a billionaire working in New York, arguably the national headquarters of pro-abortion media and “politically correct” attitudes. Somehow their phony message didn’t convince Trump that choosing to be pro-life is a big loser. Trump automatically rejects what he regards as losing big-time.
And for a political hopeful like Trump who is savvy enough to have seen the demand for a defiant face like his own at the lectern, it’s hard to imagine that he would dare turn into just another errand boy for the Establishment, should he be elected president.
Voters were angry enough already, and to be betrayed by the man they regarded as the last hope to turn it all around could be the breaking point.
However, on the night of the Nevada Republican caucuses that Trump strongly won on February 23, a Ted Cruz volunteer worker in Las Vegas recalled for The Wanderer in a telephone interview that Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had excited a lot of hope when he ran for governor of California in 2003 to replace failed Democrat Gray Davis.
But when “The Terminator” encountered some opposition after he became California’s chief executive, he went wobbly and his term ended in disappointment. He was succeeded by disastrous Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown.
There are “plenty of warning signs” that Trump is another Schwarzenegger, the Cruz volunteer said, and the Establishment can learn to reconcile itself to Trump because he “has written them checks for decades.”
Even before Trump’s Nevada victory, some pundits were saying he had a clear path to the GOP nomination, at least as long as he had multiple opponents to fracture the vote rather than having to fight head-to-head against just one.
The big “Super Tuesday” contest was just a week away, on March 1, with its results being known by the time some Wanderer subscribers receive their hardcopy of this edition.
The Cruz volunteer predicted to The Wanderer that only Trump and Cruz will score victories in states making their choices that day, with Marco Rubio, who has been tussling with Cruz for runner-up status, left out in the cold.
Shortly before the Nevada results were in, The Hill political news site, among other media organizations, said the desperate GOP establishment was turning to Rubio in hopes he could stop Trump.
The Hill reported: “‘(Rubio)’s the last great hope for moderate conservatives,’ said GOP strategist Ryan Williams, a veteran of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. ‘There’s about to be a test of this grand theory that once the mainstream lane consolidates behind a candidate, it will be enough to overtake Trump’.”
Sometimes the voters are determined to have their way but reap disappointment. As one example, in the 1964 presidential election, Democrat incumbent Lyndon Johnson warned that his Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger. Johnson won in a landslide.
But by the time the next national election rolled around in 1968, Johnson’s — not Goldwater’s — Vietnam War had led to such tumult that Johnson declared he wouldn’t even try to run again.
The morning of February 22, conservative national radio talk host Bill Bennett and his guest, pundit Bill Kristol, both strong foes of Trump, were chatting about denying the billionaire the GOP nomination. They pondered Rubio as the “electable” alternative.
However, a pro-Trump caller from Atlanta said he’d just been at a Trump rally there, and the caller wished that losers like John McCain and Mitt Romney would stop being pushed on the voters. The caller said he was black, and certainly wasn’t the only black at that rally.
Limbaugh’s Suggestion
After months of anticipation and candidate debates, the Iowa caucuses began the Republican selection process on February 1, which Cruz won, followed by Trump victories in the New Hampshire primary February 9 and South Carolina primary February 20.
Trump was running a campaign on a different level than any of his foes, national radio host Rush Limbaugh said on February 22. While other candidates scrabble for donations, Limbaugh said, Trump just picks up the phone in Trump Tower and gets 10 minutes of free time with whatever media outlet he calls.
Limbaugh added that if the liberal media really believe Trump is such a loser, why don’t they promote his candidacy instead of dismissing him, so that their preferred presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, can breeze to victory over the billionaire?
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