Could Trump win? Pat Buchanan predicts Donald will be part of 'the Final Four' 6 months from now July 27, 2015
The American political class has failed the country, and should be fired. That is the clearest message from the summer surge of Bernie Sanders and the remarkable rise of Donald Trump.
Sanders’ candidacy can trace it roots back to the 19th-century populist party of Mary Elizabeth Lease who declaimed:
Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”
“Raise less corn and more hell!” Mary admonished the farmers of Kansas.
William Jennings Bryan captured the Democratic nomination in 1896 by denouncing the gold standard beloved of the hard money men of his day: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
Sanders is in that tradition, if not in that league as an orator. His followers, largely white, $50,000-a-year folks with college degrees, call to mind more the followers of George McGovern than Jennings Bryan.
Yet the stagnation of workers’ wages as the billionaire boys club admits new members, and the hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs under trade deals done for the Davos-Doha crowd, has created a blazing issue of economic inequality that propels the Sanders campaign.
Between his issues and Trump’s there is overlap. Both denounce the trade deals that deindustrialized America and shipped millions of jobs off to Mexico, Asia and China. But Trump has connected to an even more powerful current.
That is the issue of uncontrolled and illegal immigration, the sense America’s borders are undefended, that untold millions of lawbreakers are in our country, and more are coming. While most come to work, they are taking American jobs and consuming tax dollars, and too many come to rob, rape, murder and make a living selling drugs.
Moreover, the politicians who have talked about this for decades are a pack of phonies who have done little to secure the border.
Trump boasts that he will get the job done, as he gets done all other jobs he has undertaken. And his poll ratings are one measure of how far out of touch the Republican establishment is with the Republican heartland.
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When Trump ridicules his rivals as Lilliputians and mocks the celebrity media, the Republican base cheers and laughs with him.
He is boastful, brash, defiant, unapologetic, loves campaigning and is putting on a great show with his Trump planes and 100-foot-long stretch limos. “Every man a king but no man wears a crown,” said Huey Long. “I’m gonna make America great again,” says Donald.
Compared to Trump, all the other candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, are boring. He makes politics entertaining, fun.
Trump also benefits from the perception that his rivals and the press want him out of the race and are desperately seizing upon any gaffe to drive him out. The piling on, the abandonment of Trump by the corporate elite, may have cost him a lot of money. But it also brought him support he would not otherwise have had.
For no group of Americans has been called more names than the base of the GOP. The attacks that caused the establishment to wash its hands of Trump as an embarrassment brought the base to his defense.
But can Trump win?
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For almost all of the candidates who will have dropped out by then will have endorsed the last man standing against Trump. And should Trump be nominated, his candidacy would make Barry Goldwater look like the great uniter of the GOP.
Still, who expected Donald Trump to be in the catbird seat in the GOP nomination run before the first presidential debate? And even his TV antagonists cannot deny he has been great for ratings
Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush Racetrack owners, bankers, and chicken kings: Meet the ultra-rich bankrolling the Bush and Clinton dynasties. A special report by Vocativ and The Daily Beast. For some wealthy donors, it doesn’t matter who takes the White House in 2016—as long as the president’s name is Clinton or Bush.
More than 60 ultra-rich Americans have contributed to both Jeb Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s federal campaigns, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Vocativ and The Daily Beast. Seventeen of those contributors have gone one step further and opened their wallets to fund both Bush’s and Clinton’s 2016 ambitions.
After all, why support just Hillary Clinton or just Jeb Bush when you can hedge your bets and donate to both? This seems to be the thinking of a group of powerful men and women—racetrack owners, bankers, media barons, chicken magnates, hedge funders (and their spouses). Some of them have net worths that can eclipse the GDPs of small countries.
Read more exclusive data stories at Vocativ
Larry Noble, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told The Daily Beast that it’s a common practice among a small number of people.
“Some of them will say they believe in the process, but the truth is you usually see them giving to people who will be most helpful to them if [the politician] gets into office,” he said. “They are not necessarily Republicans or Democrats, they are business people first.”
Some of them said personal connections are driving the double donations. Many work in industries that depend on the federal government for their continued operation. A few have had brushes with the law. One donor said he’s soured on Hillary, and is now on Team Jeb. Another claimed that he gave to Clinton by mistake.
John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, is a long-time—and promiscuous—political player. This year alone, his company spent half a million dollars lobbying Congress on everything from immigration reform and fuel taxes to food safety regulations. He himself has given $25,000 each to the political action committees supporting Clinton’s and Bush’s 2016 candidacies, according to the data parsed by Vocativ.
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******* The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil ... but by those who watch them and do nothing. -- Albert Einstein