Trump vs. Trump

[Geee]

National Review:

Can Trump get out of the trap of running against himself?

Donald Trump is not so much running against Hillary Clinton as against the inner demons of Donald Trump.

The 2016 election still should easily be his to win.

 

Americans do not historically like the twelve-year regnum of any party.

 

The termed-out incumbent Democratic president can win approval ratings of 50 percent only by staying quiet, out of the public eye, and doing as little governing as possible. Whenever Obama emerges from his hip cocoon and talks off his teleprompter, he reminds us that he is typically petulant, untruthful, and rambling. Witness his latest pathetic assurances that sending cash on pallets at night to obtain simultaneous release of hostages was not ransom. Even the obsequious pajama-boy D.C. press corps did not quite buy that. As so often, Obama’s soft-spoken prevarication comes across as being as coarse as Trump’s crudity.

 

Hillary Clinton is the weakest Democratic candidate since her moral superior Jimmy Carter in 1980. She reminds us of her liabilities daily, whether lying repeatedly that the FBI director had not systematically stated she had been untruthful about her unlawful e-mails, or, in a screeching voice, proclaiming her determination to raise taxes on the middle class — not to reduce the $600 billion deficit but to add more entitlements. Is a young lathe worker or forklift driver to pay more so that a Bernie Sanders supporter can get free tuition? Next, she seemed to have fallen into a bizarro world when she remarked, “The Trump kids have killed a lot of animals.” Pundits forget that at any given moment, a “short-circuited” Hillary Clinton can say anything — or do anything, such as discussing the fate of a soon-to-be-doomed Iranian scientist on an unsecured e-mail server. Never Trumpers often fail to appreciate that Hillary is quite capable of trumping Trump in controversy and self-destructiveness — with the force multiplier that she is not a potential public servant but someone who has been almost nothing but one.

[Valin]