By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — From warning about elections being rigged to calling attention to how Republican candidates often passively have ceded black voters to the Democratic Party, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has put pressing topics on the table that need answers but normally seem to be ignored.
Maybe that’s how he got as far as he has with voters who felt voiceless in this year’s White House race.
Election deception is as old as sin, and as recently confirmed when leaked emails demonstrated that the Democratic National Committee was tilted unfairly against Bernie Sanders’ presidential-primary race with Hillary Clinton. National Democratic officials resigned in embarrassment — but Hillary still grabbed her party’s nomination.
With the general-election race now launched nationally, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website reported on August 23 that conniving left-wing billionaire George Soros hopes to increase the U.S. electorate’s numbers by at least 10 million more voters by 2018.
This would dovetail with longtime Democrat plans to overwhelm the U.S. electorate with other voters and cement left-wing domination of government.
The Free Beacon said the effort’s chairman is Marc Elias, “Hillary Clinton’s top campaign lawyer.”
The story quoted J. Christian Adams, president of a firm that litigates to protect election integrity, saying that “George Soros is involved in every aspect of manipulating the rules of American elections. . . . Soros dollars are doing all they can to fundamentally transform American elections.”
As for a feeling of futility on the right about election results, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham noted that after decades of conservatives turning out to deliver victories so the GOP could preserve this nation’s well-being, they keep being thwarted.
Writing on August 14 at her LifeZette site, Ingraham noted that some claim a Trump presidential victory would destroy conservatism.
She replied: “Really? What conservatism is that? The conservatism that ran up huge deficits in the 2000s? The conservatism that encouraged illegal immigration? The conservatism that pushed trade policies that led to the rise of China? The conservatism that rolled over for Obama on issue after issue? The conservatism that does whatever The Wall Street Journal editorial page wants? The conservatism of Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain? That conservatism won’t be around anymore? Good.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Arizona political turncoat McCain was dashing off to the White House to see how he could help his “bromance” buddy Barack Obama.
So why not give Trump a try instead?
“If ending this record of failure, and launching a new conservatism that actually tries to help working-class Americans, is one of the consequences of the Trump campaign, then that campaign will have been well worth it,” Ingraham wrote.
Employing the same idea, big businessman Trump made a pitch for black voters. What do they have to lose by giving him a try, after decades of economic frustration under the Democratic politicians they overwhelmingly vote for, and nearly eight full years under governance by their own Barack Obama?
“You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed,” the Los Angeles Times on August 19 quoted Trump making this appeal.
Indeed it seemed strange that before Trump, the Republican establishment — which theoretically could point to how aspirational capitalism works — had done so little to try to sell this message directly to some people hungry for solid economic improvement.
Could it be that the GOP establishment is more comfortable when blacks deliver valuable backing to Democrats, so that the two major parties are in more of a standoff, rather than empowering a new-style Republican Party instead of the one that obviously has been uncomfortable with a winning conservative message?
Time and again, the GOP establishment has shown it rather would endure campaigns by national losers like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney than paint those bold colors that mandate-maker Ronald Reagan favored.
In another demonstration of his willingness to try a different direction, Trump initially declined to endorse for re-election such prominent figures as U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, or McCain in their respective GOP primaries after Trump had secured the party’s presidential nomination.
The purpose of a primary is to determine who will be the party’s official choice for the general election. Why should Ryan or McCain think they were owed Trump’s backing against other Republicans opposing them in their party primaries?
Apparently under pressure to show he could be a team player, the Manhattan billionaire later said he was endorsing them both, and Ryan comfortably won his Badger State primary. McCain’s fate still awaited the Grand Canyon State’s August 30 GOP contest, which will be held the Tuesday after this issue of The Wanderer goes to press.
While Trump decided to give McCain his OK, not everyone on Trump’s side agreed. On August 23 the website of the strongly pro-McCain Arizona Republic, the state’s largest and generally liberal newspaper, headlined, “Donald Trump money man Robert Mercer funding TV attack on John McCain.”
The story said Long Island billionaire Mercer, a political funder of Trump and also former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, gave $200,000 on July 22 to KelliPAC, a third-party organization supporting McCain’s main GOP opponent, conservative former Arizona State Sen. Kelli Ward.
This donation “partially explains” where KelliPAC got $400,000 for a TV ad buy against McCain, the Republic said, adding that the ad attacks McCain over amnesty for illegal immigrants and joining liberals’ bailout of Wall Street, among other issues.
Although one recurring media angle on the Trump campaign is that other Republican candidates fear being dragged down by him, McCain apparently valued Trump’s endorsement. The pro-McCain “Citizens for a Working America” organization produced a stiff-paper mailer for Arizona voters headlined, “Our Conservative Republican Team Agrees: Re-elect John McCain!”
It included mug shots of Trump and GOP vice-presidential running mate Mike Pence endorsing McCain. They were overshadowed by a larger photo of McCain himself wearing a ball cap and holding a microphone.
Although the context for McCain’s photo wasn’t explained, it may have evoked a memory of the misleading McCain ad for his 2010 Senate re-election campaign. In it, the open-borders senator strode along the international line with Mexico while wearing a ball cap and demanding completion of the fence against illegal immigrants.
And note those words in the mailer’s headline, “conservative Republican team.” Once again McCain is returning to the pose of being a conservative — his recurring tactic when hungry for votes, but not when trying to sell out to Democrats in Washington, D.C.
In fact, in both 2014 and 2016, GOP precinct committeemen in assembly in the Grand Canyon State strongly censured McCain for being untrue to the Republican Party platform. This embarrassment stirred his ire.
However, his failures to support the party platform endear McCain to Arizona’s powerful “moderate” establishment, which likes to dream of conservatives disappearing from the face of the Earth.
Criminal Contempt Charges
This establishment has been at war for years with popular Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Republican and Catholic, who enrages the powerful because he simply believes in enforcing the law against massive illegal immigration.
Arpaio was a very early and strong supporter of Trump’s candidacy, and Trump has had Arpaio on his campaign stage in Arizona and elsewhere.
The sheriff also is running for another term and appears on the August 30 primary ballot, too.
However, the sheriff’s nemesis Murray Snow, a biased federal judge in Phoenix who long has endeavored to remove Arpaio from the scene for opposing illegal immigration, referred Arpaio for criminal-contempt prosecution shortly before the primary election for disobeying court orders.
A report posted August 22 at National Public Radio quoted a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies policing: “It is just not a common thing at all for a court to use the criminal contempt powers and rarer still for a court to order criminal contempt charges against elected officials.”
NPR said the professor, David Harris, “can’t think of another case like this one.”
However, conservative Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that he wasn’t surprised at the ferocity of the attack against the sheriff. Haney recalled the local establishment’s carefully contrived assault on attorney Andrew Thomas, who had been chief prosecutor of Maricopa County and worked with Arpaio against illegal immigration.
As punishment, the conservative Republican Thomas was disbarred at a disciplinary hearing.
“The national as well as the Arizona state judicial systems and the bar associations are incredibly corrupt. This has been demonstrated innumerable times in recent years,” Haney told The Wanderer on August 22.
“But the most recent Justice Department rulings concerning the Hillary Clinton crimes and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions demonstrate how politicized the U.S. justice system has become.
“Arpaio didn’t have a chance from the beginning. As Trump would say, ‘The system is rigged and the fix is in’,” Haney continued. “The Arpaio supporters know how corrupt our judicial system is and will discount Snow’s action and still vote for Arpaio….Snow can’t get any lower. I do not think Snow’s actions will affect the primary election.”
It’s No Accident
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson, who repeatedly had Arpaio as a guest on her previous program on San Francisco’s KSFO radio, told The Wanderer that she thinks Arpaio is being railroaded.
“I think this is just part of a longstanding vendetta against Joe Arpaio, and the timing of it is no accident — the election is close by and his opposition will do anything to try to make him lose,” Simpson said on August 23.
“I believe the accusations are trumped up and he is hated because he believes in law and order in the original sense, which goes against the progressive attitude that strict law enforcement is passé,” she said.
“What Arizona voters should be most shocked at is that the judiciary is so influenced by politics that they don’t even try to hide it. This attempt at railroading Joe could happen to anyone — and that is a real danger,” Simpson said.
The Arizona establishment has fought Arpaio at every turn and is taking its opposition to him to new lows. A useful lesson for Trump about what his presidential candidacy still may face by a national establishment that hates both him and Arpaio for opposing the leftist agenda.
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