Rush Limbaugh, who has been a consistent and enthusiastic defender of Donald Trump (if not someone who has endorsed him), has weighed in on Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants coming to America.
We need to be having a discussion, and yet everybody in the establishment — everybody, Democrats, Republicans — are not interested in having the discussion. They’re just immediately acting as though Trump, “Oh, my God! Get him outta here! He can destroy us!
Rush went on to say this:
“Oh, we’re panicking. What are they gonna think of us?” Do you know, folks, even Hamas…? Hamas is a terrorist group. Do you know that Hamas came out in opposition to Trump’s statement? That puts the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, and everybody else in the establishment and Obama on the same side Hamas is on. And over here all by himself is Donald Trump speaking out against it all.
I want to respond by making two points, the first of which is that most conservatives I know who are critical of Trump are happy to have a discussion about issues, but with him isn’t not always easy. For example, Trump and his spokesman indicated one day that the ban applied to Muslims who are American citizens; the next day, he said it did not. You might have assumed Team Trump had thought this through before announcing the plan, but you would be wrong.
The problem with Mr. Trump is that so much of what he says is made up on the fly – and when he’s pressed on specifics, like how his deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants will work, he reverts to banalities like “great management” and assurances that he’ll be “humane” in executing the plan. (Mr. Trump insists that after deporting them he will allow the “good ones” to re-enter the country through an “expedited” process, raising the question: Why not vet them here rather than deporting them and then inviting many of them back in?)
And then there’s the problem of Trump’s vast, seemingly boundless ignorance – for example, confusing the Iranian Quds Forces with the Kurds and insisting he supports a plan to register all American Muslims in a database (“absolutely”) while repeatedly turning to Syrian refugees each time he has been asked about Muslims in general. There is, of course, a very big difference between having a database for Syrian refugees and having a database for all Muslims in America. But Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to know that, as he doesn’t know so many things.
Let me now turn to Limbaugh’s other point: That Republicans who are critical of his plan to ban immigration of all Muslims to America are on the “side” of Hamas. But so, I would point out, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since Netanyahu said Wednesday that he rejects Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Yet who on the planet has done more to fight and dismantle Hamas than the Israeli prime minister? (Others “siding” with Hamas include such conservative stalwarts as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and former Vice President Dick Cheney.)
The rhetorical wordplay by Limbaugh is an effort to delegitimize those of us who are critics of what Trump wants to do. There is Donald Trump — and there are those of us who side with Hamas. Yet we are on the “side” of Hamas in exactly the same way as Limbaugh is on the “side” of the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the murderous and anti-Semitic Iranian regime, which is also an enemy of the Islamic State.
Let’s examine Limbaugh’s logic for a moment, to see where it leads.
Does the fact that a malevolent regime like Iran wants to destroy ISIS mean that ISIS should not be destroyed, based on the argument that what Iran favors has to be opposed or what Iran opposes has to be supported? Should the United States refuse to be part of a coalition to defeat ISIS if Iran is part of that coalition? You can see where this gets us, and it’s not to an intelligent and rigorous examination of the issues.
It does show you how bizarre the world has become that Rush Limbaugh — who Ronald Reagan once called “the number one voice for conservatism in our country” and who oversees what he likes to call The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies — has shown such enthusiastic support for the man, Trump, my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Yuval Levin rightly refers to as “the least conservative Republican presidential aspirant in living memory.”
I didn’t think I’d see the day where Rush Limbaugh was a leading defender of a RINO. But here we are. This is just one of the unfortunate side effects – call it the collateral intellectual damage – of the candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
