THOUGHTS ON TRUMP, from Roger Kimball:

I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016, and I don’t think he would win if he were.  But he has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder. Moreover, he has done it in a way that, though terribly, terribly vulgar, is catapulting Trump to first place in the polls. What does that tell us?  That the people are stupid and need to be guided by the suits in Washington?  If you believe that, I submit, you are going to be profoundly disappointed come November 2016.

Though does anyone think Trump will be a laissez–faire kind of president if he actually won? To borrow from the Spy magazine gag line on Trump that Roger quoted in his post, wouldn’t President Trump likely be a “short-fingered vulgarian” clone of Michael Bloomberg or Jimmy Carter? Perhaps not in terms of specific policies (such as Bloomberg’s obsession with bike lanes), but in terms of wanting to micromanage everything? Generally, that’s been a recipe for failure in the White House, whether it’s LBJ or Obama personally choosing bombing runs to Carter’s legendary micromanagement of the White House tennis court. It’s only a matter of time before someone like that thinks he knows what’s better for the American people than the people themselves.