Here is Jeffrey Lord writing at The American Spectator where he covers some very interesting history:
The media assures: Donald Trump can’t possibly win.
The GOP Establishment assures: Donald Trump can’t possibly win.
After assuring everyone that 1) Trump was never going to run in the first place and 2) once he declared that he would run they insisted he would get nowhere, we now find that these whiz-bangs were wrong on both counts. Trump is in the race and he has surged to the top of the polls, drawing huge crowds. By chance, here in my home Central Pennsylvania county, a race to fill a vacancy in the state legislature in an August 4th election has Republican candidate Greg Rothman knocking on doors in this traditionally Republican district. Rothman tells me he has knocked on 3,100 doors thus far — and while he’s there to talk state issues residents in this area are volunteering to him that they support… Donald Trump.
Yet in spite of the reality of Trump’s candidacy and the support surging for his candidacy — and the startling reality that rank-and-file Republicans are spontaneously telling a Pennsylvania legislative candidate that they like Donald Trump — the Trump critics insist he can’t win.
Hmmm. Where have we heard this kind of thing before? To be specific? Right here when Ronald Reagan ran for president. Let’s start with the media first.
• New York Times: Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.”
• New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.”
• New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.”
• New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.”
• Harper’s magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.”
• Chicago Daily News: “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense — irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief… Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.”
Read more: The American Spectator
Image credit: www.spectator.org.
