National Review's attack on Donald Trump is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here). I've gotten more reaction to this column, both positive and negative, than to anything else I have written in quite a while.
Also on the Trump front, this analysis from Rush Limbaugh is interesting:
People are so threatened by what's happening. Folks, in one sense a lot of this is easy to understand, easily explained from even the psychological and standpoint of human nature. Politics is like anything else. Let's call it a business just for the sake of it, just to call it something. It has its own rules. It has its own stars. It has its own wannabes. It has its own power cliques. It has its upper strata. It has its worker bees. It has its people that everybody else makes fun of. I mean, the whole gamut.
Politics is thought to be different from that, though, because we learn from the early days in school that politics is civics and it's policy and it's the best people with the best ideas, campaigning and receiving support for those ideas and integrity and character. It looks good on paper. But this business is as cutthroat -- it's like any private club. You golfers, you want to join Augusta National, forget it. You don't have a prayer. The requirements to get into Augusta National are things 99.999% of the people who play golf in this country will never, ever accomplish or qualify for.
You can dream all day long. Politics is the same way. The people who run it are not interested in new blood. They're not interested in it unless they bring the new blood in themselves and shepherd them and mentor them. But if you're an outsider and you've never been in the business before and all of a sudden you want to come in and run the show and assume the leadership, people are not just gonna back away and let you have it, no matter how great you are, no matter what you might do for them.
Let me put it this way. Forget the name is Trump. If a candidate could guaranteed fix everything that's wrong in this country the way the Republican Party thinks it's wrong, if it were a slam dunk, if it were guaranteed, that candidate will still be opposed by the Republican Party establishment. If they've never heard of him before or if he's never been in politics before, if he's not part of the structure, the infrastructure, if he hasn't paid his dues, if he's not part of the clique, they don't want him in there. It's exclusionary and it's got all kinds of people who want to get into it, who want to climb that ladder, who want to be at the top, and you just don't get there.
At least one of the National Review contributions that I did not write about in my column is remarkably direct on this front; L. Brent Bozell faulting Mr. Trump because unlike Reagan, he had not "raised money for countless conservative groups."