The Case for Trump

Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary to his present deprecation of them. Is it all that surprising that some in his party and some independents, who felt offended, swear that they will not stoop to vote for him when in extremis he now needs them? Or that party stalwarts protest that they no longer wish to be associated with a malodorous albatross hung around their neck?

That question of payback gains importance if the race in the last weeks once again narrows. Trump had by mid September recaptured many of the constituencies that once put John McCain and Mitt Romney within striking distance of Barack Obama. And because Trump has apparently brought back to the Republican cause millions of the old Reagan Democrats, various tea-partiers, and the working classes, and since Hillary Clinton is a far weaker candidate than was Barack Obama, in theory he should have had a better shot to win the popular vote than has any Republican candidate since incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004.

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Why Hillary and Her Wall Street Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall

When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump first talked about building a “big, beautiful wall” at the southern border of the U.S. he was met with fierce resistance. Given the facts that the southern border is the main route used by drug smugglers and criminal illegal immigrants (all persons who cross the border illegal commit a Federal misdemeanor the first time, a felony the second time) there would not seem to be a good reason to resist lawful regulation of border entry. As usual, the answer may be in who gains from the absence of a Wall, and what they gain. The best way to get the answer is to follow the money.

Right now the transfer of money from persons working in the U.S. to Mexico, called “personal remittances” are a major source of Mexican revenue. The growth of remittance revenue is a recent development. Mexico seized the assets of nearly all foreign oil companies operating in Mexico in 1938. But as American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late 1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues, second only to oil revenues.

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