I am sorry to note that Donald Trump no longer seems to be at war with the pope.
“No, I like him,” Trump said during a town hall on CNN. He added that he had “a lot of respect for the pope. I think he’s got a lot of personality.”
There are several troubling matters here. One is that there is nothing more dangerous than having Donald Trump express a sudden fondness for you.
“I like China.”
“I love Mexican people.”
“I love the Muslims.”
Trump, you’ll remember, got ticked off because Francis said that anybody who obsesses about building walls to keep people out “is not Christian.” Trump retorted that anybody who doubted the moral stupendousness of wall-builders was “disgraceful.”
But on CNN, Trump was reformulating. The pope’s comment was not so disgraceful after all. “I think it was probably a little bit nicer statement than it was reported by you folks in the media,” Trump said.
Now, you could see how he might have jumped to the wrong conclusion if somebody had yelled, “Hey, the pope thinks you’re not acting like a Christian!” while he was walking into McDonald’s for lunch. (He really likes McDonald’s. Thinks they’re clean. I refuse to follow that thought any further.)
But Trump pummeled the papacy with a prepared statement at a rally in a golf course clubhouse. Cynical minds might have thought that the candidate jumped on the pope’s comments because it looked like a good way to remind South Carolina voters about his plan for a border wall. The same minds might also suspect that as criticism mounted, the idea of a war with the Vatican looked less enticing.
Perhaps you didn’t see Trump’s town hall on CNN. It was very interesting, but there’s a limit to how many of these things you need to watch. You could learn a foreign language in the time it takes.
The great theme of the night was things that Donald Trump said that he now doesn’t remember, or didn’t necessarily mean. This happens all the time. Either our great business genius is incapable of mental fact-checking, or he has about as much political courage as a rabbit.
A while ago, Trump joked that his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, would make a great Supreme Court justice. Ted Cruz pretended to take the idea seriously and laced into Judge Trump Barry as a “radical pro-abortion extremist.” (She once wrote the majority opinion in a ruling that found a New Jersey law outlawing partial-birth abortion unconstitutional.)
Trump had three possible responses:
1) Point out that Samuel Alito, who is now one of the Supreme Court’s most right-wing members, heard the case, too, and came to the same decision.
2) Challenge Cruz to a duel for talking trash about his sister.
3) Change the subject entirely by describing Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery.
The answer is: None of the above! Although Trump did veer off into a disquisition on the plastic surgery issue later. Here’s the answer:
“I don’t even know what her views are on abortion. I really don’t. … She may have made a decision one way or the other. I never asked her.”
People, how many of you have siblings? Do you know how they feel about abortion? If your sister was one of the most influential jurists in the nation, would you keep up with her major decisions? At least have a minion leave newspaper clips on your desk?
The biggest part of the cornucopia of retractions, evasions and garbled babbling involved Iraq. Trump constantly brags that he was opposed to the Bush administration’s invasion. From the very, very beginning. But while the town hall was underway, BuzzFeed News posted a radio interview from Sept. 11, 2002, in which Howard Stern asked Trump if he thought American troops should go in, and Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
Didn’t count! “When you’re in the private sector, you know, you get asked things and, you know, you’re not a politician, and probably the first time I was asked,” Trump protested. “By the time the war started I was against it. And shortly thereafter, I was really against it.”
In a dramatic highlight of the last Republican debate, Trump accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public about the invasion. (“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.”) It was a potentially historic moment: a top Republican candidate for president attempts to lead his party into a frank reappraisal of the Bush-Cheney administration’s inherent honesty.
Here we are, one week later: “I’m not talking about lying. ... Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”
Meanwhile, reporters continue to ask Trump supporters what the attraction is. And his fans say that he tells it like it is.
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