I’m glad Ian shined light on some of the low-lifes cheering Trump’s success over at the home page, but I think he painted with too broad a brush.

Ian mentions good reasons that “level-headed Trump supporters should reconsider their horse.” I thought Bobby Jindal’s comment yesterday in this regard was apt: he “like[s] the idea of Donald Trump” but that the man himself is a “narcissist and an egomaniac” (though I thought “madman” was gilding the lily).

But Ian goes too far when he writes:

It should tell us all we need know of Trump’s candidacy that he does not have the coherent worldview or the rhetorical discipline required to attract genuine conservatives without also attracting their distant, deranged kin.

It’s certainly true that Trump possess neither a coherent worldview nor rhetorical discipline. But President Reagan certainly did, and yet he was endorsed by a Ku Klux Klan group in 1980, whose newspaper applauded his opposition to gun control, the Department of Education, and forced busing. Naturally, when brought to his attention, Reagan denounced them. And it happened again in 1984.

Similarly, the push for full civil rights for black Americans was backed by some very, very bad people. Whittaker Chambers relates in Witness how, when he was a spy for Soviet military intelligence, he moved his family into a middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore. To maintain his cover, it was necessary to hire a black maid, but he insisted she join the family at mealtime as an equal, rather than eat in the kitchen as a subordinate:

[W]hat we had to give her was something that belonged to her by right, but which had been taken from her, and which we were merely giving back. It was her human dignity. Thus, by insisting on acting as Communists must, we found ourselves unwittingly acting as Christians should. I submit that that cuts to the heart of one aspect of the Communist appeal.

The equal dignity of each human being is not a discredited idea simply because Communists also espoused it.

Julius Krein wrote recently in the Weekly Standard that:

What Trump offers is permission to conceive of an American interest as a national interest separate from the ‘international community’ and permission to wish to see that interest triumph. … Trump shows that what is most in demand, however, is not ideological purity but patriotic zeal.

I know from personal experience that there’s no way to deliver such a message without attracting some number of kooks.

I will agree with Ian if and when Trump reaches out to racists haters, or even plays footsie with them, as Ian fears he would do if it served his purposes, But a bunch of nasty tweets from nasty people he has nothing to do with doesn’t fit the bill.

In the meantime, Trump discredits himself pretty effectively in a wide variety of other ways. But the kooks he’s excited discredit neither him nor the cause that many normal Americans see him as giving voice to.