The harshest words yet about Trump in the WSJ?

It’s interesting to watch the way The Wall Street Journal has dealt with the phenomenon they struggled so mightily to resist back during the primaries — having Donald Trump as the GOP standard-bearer. And Hillary Clinton, whom they have vilified for so long, as the only sane alternative.

One of their editorialists recently took the plunge, noting that rational people truly have no alternative:

The end of the election is now in sight. Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton. But most Americans will soon make their choice. It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House….

But while he doesn’t quite go to the logical conclusion and say “vote for Hillary,” the WSJ’s Bret Stephens, deputy EPE, has perhaps gone farther than anyone in trashing the alternative.

Today, he likened Trump’s conspiracy-mongering to Joe McCarthy and Charles Lindbergh (the Nazi-loving, anti-Semitic Lindbergh, not the “Lucky Lindy” version). In other words, he invoked some of the darker strains of Western prejudice, specifically with regard to Jews:

Here, then, was the real Donald, fresh off his self-declared unshackling from the rest of the GOP. No longer will the nominee content himself with pursuing petty mysteries such as President Obama’s birth certificate or Alicia Machado’s alleged sex tape.

Bret Stephens

Bret Stephens

Now he’s after the Compleat Conspiracy, the one that explains it all: the rigged election, migrant Mexican rapists, the lying New York Times, thieving hedge funds, Obama-created ISIS, political correctness, women insufficiently attractive to grope, Chinese manufacturers, the Clinton Foundation. If it isn’t voting for Donald Trump and has recently crossed an international border, it’s a problem.

It did not escape notice that Mr. Trump’s remarks smacked of darker antipathies. A reporter for the New York Times suggested that the speech “echoed anti-Semitic themes.” The Daily Stormer, which bills itself as the premier publication of the alt-right, was less delicate, praising the speech for exposing the mass media as “the lying Jewish mouthpiece of international finance and plutocracy.”

But one needn’t accuse Mr. Trump of personal animus toward Jews (there’s no evidence of it) to point out that his candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater. Anti-Semitism isn’t just an ethnic or religious prejudice. It’s a way of thinking. If you incline to believe that the world is controlled by nefarious unseen forces, you might alight on any number of suspects: Freemasons, central bankers, the British foreign office. Somehow, the ultimate culprits usually wind up being Jews….

He adds that “a Trump administration would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics. Pat Buchanan would be its intellectual godfather, Ann Coulter and Ms. Ingraham its high priestesses, Breitbart and the rest of the alt-right web its public trumpets. American Jews shouldn’t have to re-live the 1930s in order to figure out that the “globalist cabal” might mean them.”

As I say, he doesn’t quite get to the point of, “So vote Clinton.” Which would be weird, if we lived in a rational world…

5 thoughts on “The harshest words yet about Trump in the WSJ?

  1. Brad Warthen Post author

    Hang on: It looks like Stephens, personally, has already endorsed Hillary. Somehow I missed this, back in May:

    Hillary: The Conservative Hope
    The right can survive liberal presidents. Trump will kill its best ideas for a generation.
    The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation….

    For conservatives, a Democratic victory in November means the loss of another election, with all the policy reversals that entails. That may be dispiriting, but elections will come again. A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party. Conservatives need to accept that most conservative of wisdoms—sometimes, losing is winning, especially when it offers an education in the importance of political hygiene.

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      The WSJ tends to be the third paper I read in the morning, and sometimes I don’t get to it. That must have been one of those mornings, back in May…

  2. Claus

    Speaking of Hillary, why isn’t she out on the campaign trail? I heard yesterday the had one speaking engagement in the next two weeks. One would think that these next two weeks might be the most two important weeks of her life, yet she decides to stay home and send her husband and daughter out on the trail for her. Makes you wonder if those health issues are true.

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