Angelo Codevilla's Take on Trump

RUSH: Angelo Codevilla and Trump. As you know, Mr. Codevilla is a renowned academic and has served as special advisor to various Senate committees. He has written a piece that actually became a book on "the ruling class," his term to describe the Washington establishment, but it's not limited to Washington. It really is the political establishment that compromises members of both parties, and instead of calling them the establishment, he called them "the ruling class" or "the political class."

It was so well written, I read the whole thing on this program. It appeared in the American Spectator. He turned it into a book. So I'm reading Power Line today and I saw a post by Stephen Hayward where he says he had gotten hold of Mr. Codevilla and asked him what he thinks of Trump, and Angelo Codevilla sent back something he had written about it and published it, and this is it.

"'In the land of the blind,' so goes the saying, 'the one-eyed man is king.' Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world.

"Trump's attraction lies less in his words' grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous," which goes exactly to the questions I was asking in the opening monologue of the program today, and trying to explain what has happened to the Republican opposition. There's nobody that can say that what Obama's doing with immigration is making America better.

Nobody can say what Obama's economic policies are doing is making America better. Life is not better in America the last 5-1/2, six years, and they don't even claim that it is! They tell us that we must manage the decline. "This is the new normal," whatever. "We must lower our expectations." Even the opponents of Obama, the so-called opponents, do not ever attack any of these things being done by Obama, the ruling class, whatever you want to call them, because they're not making life better.

Is immigration policy making life better in America? It isn't. Is it making the country better? It isn't. So Codevilla here says, "Trump's attraction lies less in his words' grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous. Trump's rise reminds this class's members that they sit atop a rumbling volcano of rejection.

"Republicans and Democrats hope to exorcise its explosion by telling the public that Trump's remarks on immigration and on the character of fellow member John McCain ... place him outside the boundaries of their polite society. ... Now what? The continued rise in Trump's poll numbers reminds all that Ross Perot -- in an era that was far more tolerant of the Establishment than is ours -- outdistanced both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton before self-destructing, just by speaking ill of both parties before he self destructed."

So what he's saying here is that the ruling class, the Washington establishment, they know they're governing against the will of the people, and they don't care. Especially they don't care when there's no opposition to 'em. Hello, Republican Party going silent. But now somebody like Perot is out attacking them and doing so on the basis of attacking both parties, and it's resonating. Therefore the ruling class knows that they are the minority governing against the will of the majority, and they're sitting atop an explosion waiting to happen.

Mr. Codevilla writes, "have the greater reason to fear. Whereas some three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do. If Americans in general are primed for revolt, Republican (and independent) voters fairly thirst for it. Trump's barest hints about what he opposes (never mind proposes) regarding just a few items on the public agenda have had such effect because they accord with what the public has already concluded about them."

In other words, Trump is simply validating what a lot of other people already think and feel. He just happens to be the only one in public running for office saying it. "For example, Trump remarked, off the cuff, that 'Mexico does not send us its best.' The public had long since decided that our ruling class's handling of immigration (not just from Mexico) has done us harm. The ruling class -- officials, corporations, etc. -- booed with generalities but did not try to argue that they had improved America by their handling of immigration."

There it is again! They don't even try to tell us that what they're doing is making America better. And it isn't. And everybody paying attention knows it. "Our ruling class was sure that Trump had discredited himself by saying that John McCain, whom [the ruling class] treat as an icon, is not an optimal personification of heroism regardless of what suffering he endured in captivity. But they were mistaken. Because Americans are sick of celebrating victims of defeats, and naturally eager to enjoy the kind of peace that only victories can bring, Trump's expressed preference for heroes who 'don't get captured' resonated" with the American people who want victory, and do not celebrate defeat.

"Trump may or may not know any of the unsavory details about McCain's actions as a POW and, as a public official, in regard to POWs and MIAs. But it does not take much research to find out why nobody will defend [McCain] other than by trying to prevent discussion those details." That is McCain closing off debate and exploration and investigation of missing POWs, MIAs, finding them and bringing them home, which was one of Perot's big causes, by the way.

So Codevilla here is saying, "Trump may or may not know any of the unsavory details about McCain's actions as a POW and, as a public official, in regard to POWs and MIAs. But it does not take much research to find out why nobody will defend [McCain] other than by trying to prevent discussion those details. Surely Republican 'architect' Karl Rove, who organized South Carolina's military vote against McCain in the 2000 primary, knows them.

"The families of Vietnam POWs-MIAs pour onto anyone who will listen to their bitterness at McCain's role in denying the existence of abandoned POWs and sealing information about them. ... Moreover, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical about their celebrities' integrity. With good reason. McCain is just a minor example of a phenomenon that characterizes our ruling class: reputations built on lies and cover-ups, lives of myth protected by mutual forbearance, by complicitous journalists, or by records deep-sixed, including in government archives.

"Ever wonder," Mr. Codevilla writes, "for example, why the establishment of Martin Luther King as a national icon superior to George Washington, as the only American with his own national holiday, was accompanied by sealing government records about him for seventy five years? Because those records reflect well on him and his partisans?" meaning Martin Luther King. No.

"Countless other figures -- need one mention Barack Obama? -- live by images sustained by denigrating questions about their factual bases while restricting access to those bases. As they lord it over us, they live lives that cannot stand scrutiny." All these ruling class people cover up and hide every detriment about themselves, and each other, create myths that everybody is supposed to celebrate, even to the point of burying facts and burying records.

"The point here is simple: our ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society's commanding heights," academia, media, pop culture, "by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has coopted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily [the ruling class] may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated."

"Having failed to destroy Trump, Republicans and Democrats are left to hope that he will self-destruct as Perot did. Indeed, Trump has hardly scratched the surface and may not be able to do more than that. Yet our rulers know the list of things divide them from the American people is long. They want to avoid like the plague any and all arguments on the substance of those things. They fear," the ruling class, "the rise of an un-intimidated leader more graceful and precise than Trump, someone whose vision is fuller but who is even more passionate in championing the many resentments the voicing of just a few channeled so much support to Trump.

"Here are some examples: Justice Kennedy's majority opinions in Windsor and Obergefell preemptively accused anyone who opposed redefining marriage to include homosexuals of being 'offensive,' 'hateful.' Refusal to honor homosexual unions, he wrote, is not 'explicable by anything except animus.'" That was in a Supreme Court decision, a justice claiming that opposition had to be rooted in hate!

"What if a statesman, speaking for the American people, were to ask what, precisely, is so honorable about anal intercourse that those who refuse to honor it should be so stigmatized" as haters? "Before 1961, all 50 states criminalized anal intercourse, heterosexual as well as homosexual." It didn't matter. "Why precisely were they wrong in doing so? By what right does anyone place such questions 'out of bounds'?" now and why is it that anybody who opposes that in a Supreme Court ruling is stigmatized as a hater?

Codevilla is saying if somebody, anybody, eloquently could stand up and just point out opposition to all this, there'd be an army of support. Not just about that but everything's that's happening.

RUSH: "After a video showing officials of federally-funded Planned Parenthood taking orders for body parts of babies to be custom-slaughtered for that purpose, House Speaker John Boehner deflected demands for legislation to stop this by saying he needed more information. An unintimidated statesman might ask: Do you not know that each of these little ones' DNA shows him or her to be an individual son or daughter of an individual mother and father?"

"Like Lincoln, [this unintimidated statesman] would argue that no one has the right to exclude any other human from the human race and demand that Boehner answer why he continues to sanction so to dispose of millions of little sons and daughters? Republicans and Democrats profit personally and through their corporate cronies by a welter of legislation and regulation by which they command what we must eat, how to shower, what medical care is proper and what is not: mandating that a third of the US corn crop be turned into ethanol," which ruins engines, destroys gas mileage.

It's another classic example of the ruling class dipping into the federal Treasury for its own benefit and everyone else be damned. "They justify these predatory intrusions into our lives by claiming that peculiar knowledge of science unavailable to others. They refuse to justify their scientific conclusions with the likes of us." They simply say: A consensus of scientists exists; shut up.

"An unintimidated statesman, reiterating that science is reason, public reason, not pretense, would throw the notion that 'science R us' back into their faces," and tell them to shut up. "At increasing speed, our ruling class has created 'protected classes' of Americans defined by race, sex, age, disability, origin, religion, and now homosexuality, whose members have privileges that outsider do not.

"By so doing, they have shattered the principle of equality." while demanding equality, while talking about it, while preaching it, they are destroying equality, which is "the bedrock of the rule of law. Ruling class insiders use these officious classifications to harass their socio-political opponents." That's pretty much it.

Alright! Someone’s opinion on Trump. Haven’t seen a story like this before.

...and we have another year of this.

They tell us that we must manage the decline. "This is the new normal," whatever. "We must lower our expectations."

This was the Jimmy Carter message in his fireside chat address to the nation. It destroyed him.

Now everyone is singing it...

Good grief...

That last bit about the babies gave me the shivers. Planned Parenthood has long disgusted me, but I can’t bring myself to watch the video. I’m not understanding how or why we are tolerating John Boehner.

Rush, it’s more than an uprising against the Ruling Class/Political Class, whatever. It’s about reaching the low information voter (LIV).

The only candidate that has the DNA to be President is Ted Cruz but Ted can’t reach the LIV so well as Trump.

Trump is loud, boisterous, brash and importantly charismatic to LIVs. LIVs see in him the ‘power’, the man that can ‘get it done’, as do the frustrated intellectual voters who are shaking their heads in bewilderment at the Iran Deal, as do the patriotic class that have had enough of the stupidity, incompetence and deceit of the Left.

But mostly it’s about the LIVs because as a class they can suck all the air out of the democrats. When they go over to the Trump camp, democrats are grounded. And of course the democrat subsidiary known as the GOP Establishment are grounded as well.

I didn't get that sense. I sensed that Trump is not the ideal answer, but he may be enough.

What he's saying is that ruling class is sitting atop a house of cards that may not be as sturdy as at first thought, given how much Trump rattled it with such little ammo. He's saying that others who are more stately might take the lead and advance further, but don't count on Trump to simply flame out.

-PJ

"So, Trump is the barker leading the circus...."

Precisely.

But, somebody HAD to do it lest we continue this corrupt regime.

I heard the very end of the segment....which is not in this posting....and Codvilla did indeed say that Trump is not the answer. As to flaming out, I don’t think he spoke yay or nay to that.

I'm wary of Trump as well.

He is a Trojan horse.

I think at some not so distant point he pulls the rug out from everything he's now doing w/ the intention of making all of those that believed he was honest look like fools.

And in so doing ending the debate.

I didn't hear it. I only know this transcript. Thanks for the rest if it.

I do think that Trump could do it, but he has to perform well at the first debate. If he does poorly, the MSM will savage him. If he does well, the MSM will still savage him, but he will have the evidence to punch back.

-PJ

He is not reliable, and he will implode. Now, he won’t implode for the reasons the Jurassic media and the GOP sissies say he will.....he’ll implode because people will realize that he’s not reliable...like this weekend when he jumped on W and Walker from the leftist perspective....

“Donald Trump is not trustworthy any more than the establishment”

This isn’t about Trump, it is about why Trump has traction.

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