National Review: Trump Uniquely Unqualified For POTUS

…and when the critique comes from a luminary such as Charles Murray, folks should sit up and take notice.  From National Review:

It’s not that Trump makes strategic decisions about what useful untruths he will tell on any given day — it looks as if he just makes up stuff as he goes along. Many of his off-the-cuff fictions are substantively unimportant: He says Rex Ryan won championships when he coached the New York Jets, when he didn’t. No one would care — if it were a one-shot mistake. But it happens repeatedly. Then it gets a little more important, as when he says Paul Ryan called to congratulate him after his victory in the New York primary, announcing a significant political event that in fact did not happen. Then the fictions touch on facts about policy. No, Wisconsin does not have an effective unemployment rate of 20 percent, nor does the federal government impose Common Core standards on the states — to take just two examples plucked at random from among his continual misrepresentations of reality. That he deals so heedlessly in those misrepresentations makes it impossible for an opponent to conduct an authentic policy debate with him.

It’s one thing when a candidate knowingly deceives the public on a few specific topics. Hillary Clinton has knowingly tried to deceive the public about her flip-flop on gay marriage and her misuse of her e-mail server. That’s bad. It should be condemned. This aspect of her character should affect one’s deliberations about whether to vote for her. It’s another thing entirely when a candidate blithely rejects Pat Moynihan’s (attributed) dictum, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”

Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher who taught at Yale University, wrote a small essay entitled On Bullshit back in 1986 that transitioned into book form in 2005.

The problem with the serial bullshitter is that they believe their own lies as truth, and present them as such to others, in an attempt to obscure facts to suit their own personal goals.  Liars — in contrast — know the truth and intentionally deceive folks… bullshitters could care less.  They are the perfect embodiment of a post-modern age where it doesn’t matter what one can or should say, so long as it advances a cause, goal, or personal aim.

Now I don’t know what that says about Donald Trump, but it sure does say a lot about those who consume his trade.

Murray ultimately takes on the disgusting parade of “establishment” Republicans who are now bending the knee to the presumptive Republican nominee:

I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.

There is an element of the uncertainty principle at play here — Schrodinger’s vulgarian, if that captures the imagination.  We know that Hillary Clinton is bad, we suspect that Donald Trump will be equally bad but in different ways.  Therefore the difference between Hillary and Donald is, effectively, better to go where conservatives have a slim chance of affecting policy rather than an environment where we have no option other than resistance.  Murray responds — rightly — with the observation so many others are coming to:

P. J. O’Rourke recently announced that he is voting for Clinton. “She’s wrong about absolutely everything,” O’Rourke said. “But she’s wrong within normal parameters!” Similarly, I am saying that Clinton may be unfit to be president, but she’s unfit within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unfit outside normal parameters.

. . .

And contemplate this fact about history: We have had presidents whose competence once in office was better than we could have anticipated. Truman, for example. We have had presidents whose characters were subsequently revealed to be worse than they had seemed during the campaign. Kennedy, for example. We have never had a president whose character proved to be more admirable once he was in office than it had appeared during the campaign. What you see on your television screen every day from Donald Trump the candidate is the best that you can expect from Donald Trump the president. “Hillary is even worse” doesn’t cut it.

Better the devil we know?

The problem here is that Trump is just as dangerous as Hillary, only in starkly different ways. The latter is a socialist; the former a nationalist.  Individualists forced to choose between the two always have another option… and that is sitting back and waiting for Trump to come to us.

Selling out cheaply — now — means that we won’t get pro-life judges, won’t turn back Obergefell and Windsor, won’t get a free market health care schematic, won’t protect the 2A (or have it bartered away in a “deal” with a Democratic Senate that will surely be elected this year).  Trump has already indicated that everything is on the table, thus lending himself to Frankfurt’s enduring critique.  Tigers don’t change their stripes; bullshitters aren’t going to keep their word.

The NR piece is excellent, and Murray is no slouch — perhaps one of the finest and last public intellectuals we have today that commands such respect in Republican circles.  The objection of “Hillary is worse” simply doesn’t cut the mustard.

Populists are going to have to up their game if they intend to persuade by force of argument.