By DEXTER DUGGAN
In a presidential-election year that looks more like a wild rodeo for candidates, a former congressman from southern California was ready to predict who the major parties finally will put forward for the fall campaign: Donald Trump for the Republicans and Joe Biden for the Democrats.
Robert Dornan, an outspoken Republican conservative and Catholic, spoke with The Wanderer for an hour and a quarter during the day while voters were making their presidential preferences known in four states on March 8. Dornan served nine terms in the U.S. House and also worked as a television and radio talk host and actor.
By the end of the night, Trump had won three states, diverse Mississippi, Michigan, and Hawaii, and Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz won Idaho. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders each won one of the two states up for a vote by their party, Mississippi and Michigan, respectively.
In a separate development, Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu coincidentally held a bombshell news conference the same day about Barack Obama throwing open the U.S. border to Mexico after he failed to get “comprehensive immigration reform” through Congress.
This lawlessness may be acceptable to the liberal elitists within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, but not to most Americans.
Trump made opposition to massive illegal immigration a winning issue from the first day of his campaign last summer.
The president of the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, told the Arizona news conference that the Obama administration has manipulated data, improperly assigned officers to areas where there’s only low activity by illegal aliens rather than busy areas, and tried to stifle dissent by officers against his agenda, according to a report by Tucson ABC-TV affiliate Channel 9.
Phoenix independent news station Channel 3 quoted Judd: “We are either going to be a specialized law-enforcement agency dedicated to enforcing our nation’s immigration laws or a political arm of the administration.”
Dornan, who turns 83 in April, told The Wanderer that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s scandals will wreck her presidential aspirations.
“I think Hillary is living in a dreamland. . . . (The scandals are) one can of worms,” Dornan said. “. . . I gotta go on the record telling you this evil woman will not be the nominee.”
Despite possible issues about election deadlines, Democrats will write whatever rules are needed at their national convention to make Vice President Biden their presidential nominee, Dornan said. He added that the Democrats have such a weak bench of credible aspirants, their party is “so nonexistent. . . . They have nobody.”
Although Clinton’s serious misuse of government emails often is cited as a major political problem for her, Dornan said a bigger issue is the Clinton Foundation accepting financial donations from foreign governments while she served as secretary of state.
As one illustration, a story posted February 25, 2015, by The Washington Post said: “The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed.”
Even though the idea of on-the-sidelines Biden getting the Democrat nomination may seem strange, Dornan isn’t alone in raising that idea.
About four hours after The Wanderer spoke with Dornan on March 8, national radio talk host Hugh Hewitt observed on his program that Hillary Clinton is such a bad candidate, he wondered if the Democrats have an alternative Plan B.
Hewitt’s guest, Washington Examiner political writer David Drucker, replied it’s Joe Biden, aided by whatever rules changes may be needed for that party’s national convention.
As for Trump’s fight for the GOP presidential nod, Dornan said, “I don’t think there’s any stopping him, but he’s so crude and so unpresidential.” The former congressman said he hopes Trump will “clean up his act.”
Later in the interview Dornan added that Trump “has got to stop the personal attacks” on other Republicans. Instead, “his attacks (should) all be against the Party of Death,” the Democrats.
Trump can be “a civilized presidential candidate, and retain his fighting edge. . . . I think he’s capable of it,” Dornan said.
Dornan said he’d like to go into detail during a later interview about “the depth of the hatred Trump has tapped into” among voters.
Liberal writer Thomas Frank raised the same issue in an opinion article the liberal UK Guardian posted on March 7 about how the U.S. working class is seething over its future being destroyed by decades of free-trade deals from both Democrat and Republican presidents.
Because this kind of suffering is of no interest to elite opinion leaders, Frank wrote, the mystified commentariat concludes Trump simply must be riding a tide of racism.
However, Frank said, Trump seems to be obsessed by “the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the U.S.”
Although Trump’s language has been lacerating his GOP opponents, he knows there’s another foe down the road. The Guardian quoted Trump as results rolled in on March 8, “I have not even focused on Hillary yet. Hillary’s going to be very easy to beat. She’s a flawed candidate, she’s a very flawed candidate.”
In the presidential race, Dornan said, the Democrats will race to the gutter with wild accusations that the GOP will burn black churches and bring back lynching — such repellent sleaze that this will hand victory to the Republicans.
The Republicans “have a chance to educate the black precincts of America” about how the Democrats have ill-served them, the former congressman said, leading to some blacks either not voting for Democrats or voting for Republicans.
Dornan said he wants to make the case to the GOP that retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who dropped out of the presidential race, should be its vice-presidential candidate this year.
“I think that Carson is such a stunningly obvious choice, not just cynically for Republican Party electoral advantage,” Dornan said. He added that as the successful son of a single mother who couldn’t read, Carson on the ticket can “re-instill hope in every disillusioned but well-intentioned” young black and counteract “race-baiters like (Democrat Al) Sharpton.”
Dornan had marched for civil rights along with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
The former congressman also commented on other GOP presidential candidates.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie “destroyed Marco Rubio’s presidential run” during the February 6 New Hampshire GOP debate, Dornan said. Rubio, a one-term U.S. senator representing Florida, fell back on robotic talking points as Christie challenged him.
Dornan said he looks forward to Rubio serving as a governor “so he can get executive experience.”
Cruz is “the most easily caricatured candidate I’ve seen in a long time,” Dornan said, explaining that the Texas senator reminded him of the 1960s television comedy character Grandpa Munster.
However, Dornan said, Cruz is “obviously the smartest guy in the room on constitutional law,” and is “such a patriot.”
“I believe he will be one of the best speakers for Trump” in the general-election campaign, Dornan said, but if Cruz were to win the nomination, Trump’s backers would rebel.
More Dornan advice to Trump: “Get the heck off the Twitter equipment. . . . Your every tweet is a policy statement . . . a campaign issue…which is not presidential.”
Also, comb your hair back, and lose 20 pounds to get in fighting trim.
Different Views On Trump
On the March 7 Hugh Hewitt radio program, Beltway moderate conservative pundit Fred Barnes said he doesn’t agree with people who’d never vote for Trump, because Trump couldn’t be worse than Hillary Clinton.
However, some prominent Catholics including Princeton’s Robert George and author George Weigel issued a letter on March 7 calling on Catholics and “all men and women of goodwill” not to vote for Trump as he campaigns for the GOP nomination.
Posted at the National Review website, the letter said in part: “. . . there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.”
The letter added that Trump speaks about “issues of legitimate and genuine concern,” but there are better Republican candidates to address them.
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