The only thing that has changed for Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare with respect to the upcoming election is his anxiety level:
What’s more, many of Trump’s voters are going to vote for him because of national security, not despite it. They are going to vote for him believing that Trump is the “tough” candidate. They are going to vote for him believing in his conflation of terrorists and the victims of terrorism. They are going vote for him believing that “a wall” to keep out migrants has something meaningful to do with national security. They are going to vote for him having accepted at some level his apocalyptic account of confrontation with the Islamic world and his insistence that all we need is greater willpower and more firepower for victory to be ours.
The radical disparity between elite policy views of Trump in the national security arena and the apparent resilience of his support certainly has parallels in other areas. But the national security side is different both in the degree of alarm and in the degree of unanimity. This is the area, after all, where the president has the most latitude, and it’s an area where non-partisan expertise is still valued and attitudes tend to be least partisan.
What has happened here? How have we come to a place where at least partly in the name of national security, a huge swath of the electorate is about to vote for a man when a wide community of practitioners and scholars considers it obvious that his views, actions, words, and very psyche threaten national security?
Maybe it’s time to sue Roger Ailes, former CEO of Fox News, for the deliberate deprivation of the American electorate. Doubt that? Here’s Bruce Bartlett, prominent conservative, taking Fox News apart. Not subjectively, but objectively. This should worry every person who thinks they’re a conservative and suckles at the Fox News teat.
