The battle between Donald Trump and the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be only starting to heat up.
It certainly isn’t cooling down.
Trump was called out by members of his own party after he said July 18 that U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was not a war hero simply because he got captured in Vietnam. In the next breath, Trump quickly corrected himself and said McCain was a war hero, but not simply because he got captured.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush and various media talkers have all said Trump should apologize, just as Hispanic lawmakers and media moguls called on him to apologize last month for comments about Mexicans.
Graham told CBS News Trump could stay in the race “but just stop being a jackass. … You don’t have to be the world’s biggest jackass to run for president. … I don’t need a poll to tell Donald Trump it’s not good to say John McCain’s a loser because he was captured in a time of war; it’s not good to say that 11 million illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers when they’re not.”
Watch video of Graham taking Donald Trump to task for comments:
[jwplayer 2kdjBWQv]
Lost in the head-spinning trade of barbs is the fact that McCain launched the first salvo, saying Trump has “fired up the crazies” within the Republican Party after Trump drew a crowd of 5,000 in McCain’s home state of Arizona.
“We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” McCain told the New Yorker magazine. “Now he galvanized them. He’s really got them activated.”
Graham came to the defense of his longtime friend, McCain. But Trump, rather than apologize or back off of his comments about McCain, shot back at Graham, meeting venom with venom.
“They can talk all they want. I mean, I got a little dose of it. I was coming up, and I see your senator, what a stiff. What a stiff, Lindsey Graham,” Trump said Tuesday at a campaign stop in Bluffton, South Carolina. “By the way, he’s registered zero in the polls, zero. He’s on television all the time. So this morning, you know, they told me, Mr. Trump, because Bush said, my tone is not nice. My tone. I said, ‘No, we need tone. We need enthusiasm. We need tone!’ It’s true.
“But, they said, and actually Hillary Clinton said, ‘I don’t like his tone.’ And I have a lot of respect for Mexico, by the way. I love Mexico. And I love the Mexican people. I’ve had thousands of Mexicans working for me. I sell apartments for millions of dollars to people from Mexico. They love me. I want people to come into the country. But they have to do it through the legal process. And we can open up the legal process and make it go faster and that kind of thing, but it has to be a legal process. You can’t just have people pouring into the country.”
Watch Trump’s blistering response to Lindsey Graham.
[jwplayer MThuBHvc]
Trump also lambasted Rick Perry, who has criticized him, saying he did a poor job of securing the border while he was governor of Texas and that current Gov. Greg Abbot has done a much better job.
“He started wearing glasses to make himself look smarter,” Trump said of Perry. “It’s not working.”
Asked whether he thinks Trump can sustain his place at the top of Republican presidential primary polls, Graham — who is also seeking the nomination — said no.
“I think the beginning of the end has come,” Graham said. “The beginning of the end has arrived because he’s crossed a line with the American people that will not be tolerated.”
Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program Tuesday, said the establishment politicos and establishment media have engaged in a game of public shaming that has worked on every other public figure but may not work on Trump.
“The Washington establishment and media react in outrage. The media then replays whatever the offensive comment was over and over and over, news stories never ending about the outrageous statement that the public figure made. And then the establishment gets together with the media, and they all demand that the public figure immediately apologize, beg forgiveness, and either withdraw from whatever the public figure is seeking to accomplish, or to stay in properly chagrined and rendered irrelevant.
“That conventional wisdom plays out practically every time this circumstance happens. And the reason it does is because people make the mistake of assuming one thing, and that is this. They make the mistake of assuming that the collective outrage of the Washington establishment and the media is reflective of American public opinion. That’s an automatic conclusion that everybody draws. “
But instead of conceding to the Washington establishment and its media allies, Trump just continues to attack.
On Tuesday he gave out Graham’s cell-phone number before a group of several hundred South Carolinians as TV cameras rolled. CNN played a video of Trump doing his bad-boy thing, but bleeped out the last four digits of Graham’s phone number. CNN’s front-page headline blared, “He did what?”
Watch video clip of Trump giving out Graham’s cell-phone number:
[jwplayer Ubl1eNna]
Tapping into anger
Rev. Jesse Peterson, a Los Angeles radio talker, WND columnist and minister who helps mentor young black men, said Trump has risen in the polls for two reasons.
“One is that most Americans are fed up with a weak Congress and an out-of-control socialist president. And they’re just fed up with the way the country is going and they expect it to get worse before it gets better because Congress will not stop Obama because of their fear of being called racist, so they’re not going to stop him; that’s apparent,” Peterson said. “They’re going to let him do whatever he wants. And, most Americans are feeling unsafe. You have borders wide open and U.S. citizens being gunned down by illegal criminal aliens, and instead of this government protecting the people they protect the enemies by creating sanctuary cities.”
The other factor angering many Republican voters is the president’s lackadaisical response to the terrorist attack in Chattanooga, Peterson said.
“We just had another terror attack, this time in Chattanooga, and instead of Obama calling it a terrorist attack, he called it a lone gunman, so since they know he’s not going to protect them, America is fed up with him and with Congress,” Peterson said. “And Trump is bold, aggressive and not cowering before his attackers, and that’s what people are looking for right now in the face of America’s enemies. That’s a sign of courage, and Americans are looking for a man or a woman of courage and love of country, love of America first.”
Antidote to the ‘mealy-mouthed politician’
Robert Spencer, who writes the blog Jihad Watch for the David Horowitz Freedom Center and has authored several books about Islam, said Trump is tapping into a raw nerve and saying things that many Americans want to hear, but he cautions them not to take Trump seriously as a candidate.
“Trump is a blowhard and a boor, and those qualities, paradoxically enough, are what have catapulted him to the top of the polls. Americans are tired of mealy mouthed career politicians talking platitudes. They want a real person as president – someone who is unafraid of the politically correct media establishment, and willing to take on the issues that most politicians don’t dare touch,” Spencer told WND.
Trump has shown himself willing to do that regarding immigration, but Spencer was not impressed by Trump’s response to the Islamist attack on Garland, Texas, in May. Spencer co-sponsored the Muhammad cartoon-drawing contest with Pamela Geller.
Trump said it was “dumb” to hold such an event because it was tantamount to “taunting” Muslims.
“His opposition to the freedom of speech in the wake of our AFDI free-speech event in Garland, Texas, probably motivated, as Pamela Geller showed in a recent article, by his extensive business interests in Dubai, render him unsuitable as a candidate,” Spencer said. “Trump’s candidacy is yet another symptom of the decline of American culture and the degeneration of the public square into a freak show largely featuring sinister authoritarians on the one hand and clowns on the other. Trump, of course, is in the latter camp, but he plays into the hands of the former.”
Related stories:
Meghan McCain slams Trump for saying dad’s no hero
Trump gives out Lindsay Graham’s cell-phone number
Top conservatives sound off on Trump’s cannonball into GOP pool
Trump fires back at Huff Po ‘clown show’
Trump’s big mouth ‘will save thousands of lies’
Donald Trump steamrolls NBC reporter
Professional leftists jump on ‘dump Trump’ bandwagon
Trump supporters shred Macy’s credit cards
Trump pressed hard on Obama birth doubts
Trump erupts as NYT ignores Ted Cruz bestseller
Trump: I’ll ‘make country great again’
Trump dumped over ‘insulting’ illegal-alien remarks
