Over at NRO, Dan Foster takes a look at Trump’s clip file and concludes, as a number of people already have, that Trump is not a conservative.
Here’s Trump on our last president and our current one:
In a TV interview shortly after the 2008 presidential election, at the height of Obama euphoria, Trump lavished praise on the president-elect and slammed outgoing President Bush as “evil.” “I think he has a chance to go down as a great president,” Trump said of Obama. “I think he’s going to lead through consensus.” Bush, by contrast, he described as “maybe the worst president in the history of this country,” who was “so incompetent, so bad, [and] so evil.”
Trump on paying the government to force people out of their homes at gun-point (AKA eminent domain):
Trump has more than once teamed up with municipalities in an attempt to gut property rights, most egregiously to push an elderly widow off the Atlantic City property she’d owned for 30 years, and which Trump wanted to turn into a limousine parking lot. It should be no surprise, then, that Trump told Neil Cavuto that he agrees with Kelo “100 percent.”
And Trump on Detroit:
In 2008 he told Neil Cavuto that we couldn’t let any of the “Big Three” auto companies fail. “I think the government should stand behind them 100 percent,” he said. “You cannot lose the auto companies.”
The Donald even fails more orthodox litmus tests like abortion and gun control. All of which has me completely befuddled as to why he’s receiving support from Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Allen West, to name just a few orthodox conservatives. Did they meet in a support group for Beltway pariahs and/or birthers?