As Wisconsin casts its very important vote, here are two pieces on Mr. Trump

Last updated on: April 5, 2016 at 9:40 am by Dan Peterson

As Wisconsin casts its very important vote, here are two pieces on Mr. Trump 2016-04-05T09:40:04-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Evita Perón (d. 1952)
She was a very glamorous First Lady for Argentina.
(Wikimedia Commons)

If Mr. Donald Trump wins today’s Wisconsin primary, it will be very difficult to prevent him from getting the 1237 delegates he needs to seize the presidential nomination on the first ballot at July’s Republican convention. If he loses the primary today, it will be very difficult for him to get those 1237 delegates for the first ballot. And — so it strikes me, anyway — if he fails to win on the first ballot, the odds of his being the Republican nominee fall dramatically. And they fall further, I think, if the convention goes to a third or even fourth ballot.

I myself am holding out for the sixth ballot. If there’s anybody who can unify the party after all of the chaos and bitterness of this presidential campaign, surely c’est moi.

Anyway, pending my nomination, here are two pieces on Mr. Donald Trump that, very much in the manner of a freedom-denying Nazi brown shirt (as one Trumpist describes me for engaging in such terrible behavior), I’ve chosen to share on my blog:

The first is a critique of one element of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, to the very limited extent that we can discern anything of what his foreign policy might be.

The second points to his history of seeking to intimidate others, and shows how he’s using that technique in his relations with the leadership of the Republican Party.

Finally, as a bonus, I throw in one of my own (very many) reservations about Mr. Donald Trump:

If Mr. Trump stood for a coherent or even visible set of specific ideas (besides, of course, making America great again, being really smart himself, and someday having the best people as advisors and negotiators), it would be at least theoretically possible to replace Mr. Trump as a candidate with some other person. (He does, after all, as one Trumpist acknowledged yesterday on my Facebook wall, have some “human frailties.”) But Trumpism doesn’t seem to be so much a set of ideas or principles or policies as it is trust in a particular person. In other words, Trumpism seems inseparable from quasi-messianic fervor for Mr. Donald Trump himself. And this is one of the aspects of it that I find most troubling: It really does seem to me to resemble the Nazi Führer-Prinzip far more closely than I’m comfortable with. That “leader-principle,” which gave the world not only the Third Reich but Il Duce (“The Leader”) in Italy and a host of caudillos in fascist Spain and in Latin America — think of Juan Perón and his glamorous wife Eva Duarte (aka Evita) — strikes me as deeply foreign to the spirit of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution of the United States.

But these are silly quibbles, because . . .

Er wird Amerika wieder groß machen!

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