Napoleon and Trump, Advancing on the Capital
It is said, perhaps not reliably, that the following headlines appeared in a Paris newspaper, perhaps Le Moniteur Universel, in 1815 as Napoleon escaped from exile on Elba and advanced through France:
March 9
THE ANTHROPOPHAGUS HAS QUITTED HIS DEN
March 10
THE CORSICAN OGRE HAS LANDED AT CAPE JUAN
March 11
THE TIGER HAS ARRIVED AT CAP
March 12
THE MONSTER SLEPT AT GRENOBLE
March 13
THE TYRANT HAS PASSED THOUGH LYONS
March 14
THE USURPER IS DIRECTING HIS STEPS TOWARDS DIJON
March 18
BONAPARTE IS ONLY SIXTY LEAGUES FROM THE CAPITAL
He has been fortunate enough to escape his pursuers
March 19
BONAPARTE IS ADVANCING WITH RAPID STEPS, BUT HE WILL NEVER ENTER PARIS
March 20
NAPOLEON WILL, TOMORROW, BE UNDER OUR RAMPARTS
March 21
THE EMPEROR IS AT FONTAINEBLEAU
March 22
HIS IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MAJESTY arrived yesterday evening at the Tuileries, amid the joyful acclamation of his devoted and faithful subjects
And I think about that story whenever I see articles like this one in this morning's Washington Post:
GOP elites are now resigned to Donald Trump as their nominee
Philip Rucker writes:
An aura of inevitability is now forming around the controversial mogul. Trump smothered his opponents in six straight primaries in the Northeast and vacuumed up more delegates than even the most generous predictions foresaw. He is gaining high-profile endorsements by the day — a legendary Indiana basketball coach Wednesday, two House committee chairmen Thursday.
Which is not exactly the rush of support that any normal frontrunner would be getting by this point. But the article is full of Republican leaders saying things like “People are realizing that he’s the likely nominee,” and "More and more people hope he wins that nomination on the first ballot because they do not want to see a convention that explodes into total chaos." Not exactly profiles in courage, these leaders. As Dan McLaughlin tweeted last night:
20 years from now - maybe 2 years from now - everyone in the GOP will want to say they were against Trump now.
But the stories are everywhere today: Republicans coming to accept their conquest by Trump. For a brief explanation of why they should not, I recommend Jay Cost's tweets as captured on Storify and my own contribution to a National Review symposium in January:
From a libertarian point of view — and I think serious conservatives and liberals would share this view—Trump’s greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule.
Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign. Trump launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists and has gone on to rant about mass deportation, bans on Muslim immigration, shutting down mosques, and building a wall around America. America is an exceptional nation in large part because we’ve aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone. Equally troubling is his idea of the presidency—his promise that he’s the guy, the man on a white horse, who can ride into Washington, fire the stupid people, hire the best people, and fix everything. He doesn’t talk about policy or working with Congress. He’s effectively vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat. It’s a vision to make the last 16 years of executive abuse of power seem modest.
This is no brief for any other current presidential candidate. The major-party candidates seem as tragically un-libertarian to me as any group of candidates ever. But Trump seems dangerously uninformed, unmoored, erratic, threatening, and megalomaniacal in a way that transcends mere ideology.
Republicans like to praise the "greatest generation." Nobody's ever going to call the Republicans who rolled over for Donald Trump the greatest generation. Nor do they seem to be emulating their hero, Winston Churchill, who famously said:
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.
As Dan McLaughlin suggests, Republicans should be asking themselves, What will I say when my son asks, What did you do when Donald Trump knocked on the Republican party's door, Daddy?
