The Movement’s Trump dossier
by digby
It isn’t just the National Review. The grassroots movement conservatives are getting an earful too. This is from Richard Viguerie:
This is the fourth in my series of four articles on Donald Trump’s “New York values.”
Senator Ted Cruz took a lot of heat from the establishment media and opponent Donald Trump for his attack on Trump’s “New York values.” Trump’s comeback invoking 9/11 was good politics, but it didn’t really rebut the essential point at the heart of Cruz’s attack. And that is, “Is Donald Trump a conservative and does he share the values of the conservative movement?”
Trump and ClintonsIn this the fourth article in my four-part series on Donald Trump’s New York values the answer is again “NO,” especially if you look at Trump’s long history of supporting far-Left positions, politicians and causes.
Who you walk with tells me an awful lot about who you are. And I would add to that, “where you’ve walked” tells me perhaps even more about what you think, what you will do and how you will govern if elected to public office.
For conservatives opposition to abortion is a given, not only as public policy, but as a foundational principle of personal morality, but for Mr. Trump abortion is and always has been a “choice.”
Back in 1999, during a national television interview, Mr. Trump said, “Well, I’m very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debate the subject. But, you still, I just believe in choice.”
Donald Trump stated in another 1999 interview this time with the Associated Press, “I believe it is a personal decision that should be left to the women and their doctors.”
In his book, “The America We Deserve,” Mr. Trump said, “I support a woman’s right to choose, but I am uncomfortable with the procedures.”
In 2011, Trump said he changed his mind on the issue of abortion but still supports abortion in the case of rape, incest and life of the mother. He also said he supports “the good aspects” of funding Planned Parenthood.
Trump and fellow New Yorker former Governor George Pataki (now out of the race) were alone among Republican candidates for President in defending Planned Parenthood. Indeed, back in August after the gruesome videos of Planned Parenthood executives discussing trading in aborted baby body parts surfaced Trump told Sean Hannity, “They do good things.”
That’s where Mr. Trump has walked on the issue of abortion over the past 16+ years and where he will wander looking for the “good aspects” of funding Planned Parenthood and the “good things” they do no one really knows.
On the issues of special rights for homosexuals and same-sex marriage Trump has a similar history of walking a path that has drawn conservative opposition for many years.
Trump has been an outspoken advocate of special hate-crimes laws covering homosexuality that could be used to stifle free speech and the free exercise of religion, and that form the basis for the outrageous prosecutions of Christians who refuse to participate in homosexual “weddings.”
In 2000 Trump criticized then-Texas Governor George W. Bush for not showing “national leadership by passing a hate-crimes bill but didn’t – presumably from pressure from the Christian right.”
As my friend John Stemberger of the Florida Family Policy Council noted, Trump also favors homosexual “rights” and same-sex marriage laws “that guaranteed same-sex couples equal legal rights as married, heterosexual couples.” Trump also opposed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, the military’s prior ban on openly homosexual service members.
John pointed-out that Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, an advocacy group for gay Republicans, has said of Trump, “He is one of the best, if not the best, pro-gay Republican candidates to ever run for the presidency,” and that Trump would do no harm on same-sex marriage, and has a “stand-out position” on nondiscrimination legislation.
That’s where Donald Trump has walked and who he walks with on Biblical marriage and using the government to force Christians to participate in same-sex “marriages” that directly contradict the tenets of their faith.
And if who you walk with tells me a lot about who you are, then who you give your campaign contributions to tells me who you want to walk with.
A 30-year analysis of Trump’s campaign donation history, reported by Jennifer Kerns of The Blaze, shows that beginning in the 1980s, Trump gave big to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ($22,000), to the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee of New York ($25,000) and to the DCCC’s “Building Fund” in 1993, 1994 and 1997 (at least $10,000). He also contributed to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2002 ($25,000), the New York State Democratic Party ($5,000) and the New York State Democratic Committee also in 2002 ($5,000). Public records show he contributed again to the DCCC in 2006 ($35,000) and with a whopping donation to the Democratic Campaign Committee of New York State in 2008 ($50,000).
In addition to those institutional donations, Trump has also supported longtime Democrat politicians Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, Joseph Kennedy, Eliot Spitzer, Charlie Rangel, the Cuomo family and Daniel Patrick Moynihan with numerous donations and even gave Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel $50,000.
Campaign finance data from CrowdPAC reveals that Donald Trump gave big to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, along with Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Dick Durbin, and California Governor Jerry Brown. He even gave his now-opponent Hillary Clinton several donations, although in smaller amounts of $1,000 each.
Trump has brushed these contributions off and noted that he has given to Republicans as well. But these contributions tell us much about how Donald Trump thinks about politics and the political process, and it isn’t that politics is about principles, but that it is about access, about cronyism, about buying your way to power and special treatment.
Donald Trump has made much of the fact that he’s not taking campaign contributions, and that because he’s rich he can’t be bought – but he’s the poster boy for the New York way of buying access when the merits of your cause wouldn’t get you to first base.
Far from being likely to break the Washington Cartel, as Ted Cruz has promised to do, where Donald Trump has walked and who he walks with tells me Donald Trump is a dues-paying member of the crony government club that has been destroying this country for the past 25 years.
When I look at who Donald Trump has walked with and where he’s walked what I see is not a maturing understanding of the value and validity of conservative thought and ideas about how to govern – what I see is a long record of paying to play with liberal politicians, of adopting liberal positions, and now opportunistically trying to mislead voters into believing he is a populist “conservative.”
When you look at Donald Trump’s record, and you look at where he’s walked and who he’s walked with there’s only one top-tier candidate who has consistently walked with conservatives his entire career, and that candidate is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
See the other articles in the series
1. Trump’s New York Values: Appoint Pro-Partial-Birth Abortion Judges, Like His Sister
2. Trump’s New York Values: The Poster Boy For Debasing American Culture
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Trump voters. They have never cared about any of this crap. They are not ideological at all. They are racists and xenophobes and nationalists, period.
Their “conservatism” has nothing to do with the constitution or “Christian values” or abortion, not really. They sign on to that stuff because it’s part of the deal. They care about suppressing the rights of African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and foreigners. They’re not fond of feminists and real white liberals either, but it’s race and “American Greatness” that animates and motivates them.
Sorry Cruz supporters. You need to find a way to make these people believe that Trump doesn’t really hate people of color and won’t kill any foreigner who looks at an American sideways. That’s all they care about. And Trump seems like the real thing to me.
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