Spoiler Alert! If you a Trump true believer, this may be a tedious screed to be ignored. On the other hand, if you are a principled conservative, you might find this op/ed perspective at least a bit interesting, if not informative.
CNN's debate at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, among 11 Republican presidential hopefuls will be moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, along with .... hold on ....Hugh Hewitt, who threw Trump into a tizzy days ago while interviewing Trump on his radio talk show in southern California. Hewitt is an accomplished lawyer among other endeavors and he is also a professor of Constitutional Law. You may be interested in Hewitt's academic background and his political background, both of which can be found at Wikipedia
Hewitt had the audacity of asking Trump about a few of the leaders of the foremost radical Islamist terrorist groups in the world. Not many names, but enough to stump the Trump. Of course Hewitt asked Trump if he could talk about the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah and their nation state backers. Trump had to timidly admit he did not know these individuals, which organizations they led and who their supporters were. Trump, in a weak attempt to defend himself, said that it really didn't matter because they probably wouldn't even be around for the next president. Yep, that was Trump's scathing rebuttal. So much for foreign policy expertise. If you don't know your enemies, how are you going to formulate a foreign policy to deal with them?
Moving on.
The debate should be interesting, since we already know that the other 10 candidates will be out to get Trump. I know this because Trump has repeatedly told this to the world in his attempt to capture the victimhood card before anyone else can. My advice to the other 10 participants is to stick to the political issues that concern voters and let viewers know where they stand on those issues and how they would address those issues and what specific actions they would take to implement their policy positions. It's not enough for candidates to tell people what they stand for in general terms. They need to get some specifics out as what they would actually do, if elected.
Of course that's always a problem for politicians. They seldom like to commit to specifics that they can later be held to account for.
Finally, my impression of Donald Trump is that he is not the man Americans really want to represent the United States internationally or domestically. He is simply too divisive. Speaking one's mind without deliberation beforehand, may seem to make Mr. Trump "authentic" to some, but to me it simply illustrates someone with a motor mouth more interested in shock value than substance.
Also, I cannot see Donald Trump working effectively with either political party. It's essential that he be able to work with Republicans, some of which may well be distasteful to deal with. But, considering that Trump wrote a bestseller titled "The Art of The Deal", he has yet to demonstrate any political negotiating skills and seems fundamentally ignorant of the principles of a constitutional republic and its cornerstone of "the rule of law", rather than the rule of arbitrary leaders and despots in training. We already allowed one despot to receive on the job training in undermining America and its principles and values. I'm not anxious to see this replicated again with Republicans just for the sake of being able to say there is a Republican in the White House. Look what happened with the great expectations of George W. Bush.
We've already seen how President Obama has diminished our constitutional republic through Executive Orders in order to run around Congress and the rule of law and how he has selectively chosen to ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to his ideological ends. I cannot see how a Trump administration would be any different, since Trump has already pandered to the emotional demagoguery of populism over conservative political principles, substance and the rule of law.
What confounds me is that Trump has been proven to be all over the political spectrum in his political positions and his positions have mostly been liberal on issues traditionally critical to conservatives. Yet a certain faction of the political right continue to ignore these obvious ideological inconsistencies believing instead in Trump's version of Hope and Change. I've had enough Hope and Change. I want someone less attuned to the entertainment and showmanship of a political campaign and more attuned to the quiet strength of adhering to conservative principles and working to further these principles into a successful campaign for the Republican nomination and later to defeating the Democrat candidate.
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