American voters TWICE elected the Legend-In-His-Own-Mind. They can more easily elect Donald. J. Trump, a much lesser evil. Other candidates lack spines to stand up to personal attacks for protected speech. Mr. Magnet appears to be unaware of the dumbed down nation we live in. Just because he pays attention does not mean more than a few do.
[From article]
As a New Yorker, I know that Trump Tower has become one of our city’s top tourist attractions, and I’ve seen confused out-of-towners mistakenly show up at the even more garish Trump International Hotel to bask in the great man’s aura, only to be directed across town to the “real” Trump Tower. So there is unmistakably a mystique surrounding the man with the golden mane.
[. . .]
What he can’t wave away is that, as a big New York real-estate developer, he isn’t a master builder but a political fixer, skilled in navigating the New York game of getting the zoning waivers, tax abatements, and regulatory expediting that is the means by which Gotham’s developers and politicians have turned real-estate development here into a protected cartel, which only those with inside knowledge and connections—especially the knowledge of what campaign contributions to make—can enter.
[. . .]
among other distasteful truths, that centenarian real-estate magnate Leonard Litwin’s Glenwood Management seems to have turned some tens of millions of campaign-contribution dollars into hundreds of millions of real estate tax abatements, according to the New York Times. Buy one, get nine free! Honest graft, George Plunkett of Tammany Hall called it; but how honest is a government-granted license to steal?
[. . .]
Meanwhile, New York’s homeowners or renters lacking political connections end up paying the property taxes that the big-time developers and landlords avoid.
How will Trump’s supporters like this reality? They are justifiably angry over a manipulated economy that has left them behind, especially since part of what caused their plight is government itself. With legal and illegal immigrants, 13 percent of the population but 17 percent of the workforce, now taking their jobs;
[. . .]
with a tax-supported, welfare-dependent, non-working underclass committing more than its share of crime while the Justice Department blames police for trying to keep lawbreaking under control and scorning law-abiding, cop-supporting citizens as politically incorrect; with the First Family spending $70 million on taxpayer funded let-them-eat-cake vacations—what’s not to feel angry about?
[. . .]
the president knows how they feel about all this but condemns their anger as racism
[. . .]
Trump, by contrast, has masterfully mobilized the widespread anger, and he has done the nation a service by showing how out of touch politicians and pundits are with the feelings of ordinary Americans about how the elites are running their country, while abdicating the nation’s world leadership and refusing so much as to name the radical Muslim threat that hangs over the West.
[. . .]
those candidates ignore at their peril justified voter anger over uncontrolled immigration, elite squeamishness at acknowledging Islamist terrorism as what it is, and the lies of political correctness. A Republican who can feel the voters’ pain—truly feel it—and outline a more plausible cure for it than Trump offers stands the best chance of winning the nomination and the election.
http://www.city-journal.org/2016/eon0111mm.html
MYRON MAGNET
An Insider in an Outsider’s Election
Like Mitt Romney in 2012, Donald Trump will have to answer charges about his brand of capitalism.
January 11, 2016
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