Thoughts from Sea Island
 
We’re just back from lovely Sea Island, Georgia, site of the annual world forum of the fine think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute. I can report that a stimulating, interesting, and fun time was had by all. Since the forum is off-the-record, I can’t report much else. But I will say that spending time with young senators like Tom Cotton (AR), Ben Sasse (NE), Cory Gardner (CO) and Tim Scott (SC) cheered me up about the future of the conservative movement and the Republican party. Indeed, the “early bird breakfast conversation” I moderated on the last day with Gardner and Sasse (see, by the way, Mark Hemingway’s article on Sasse in the current issue) was impressive: Who knew senators could be funny that early in the morning? (Honestly, who knew they could ever be funny?)
 
It’s also fair to say, however, that a specter was haunting the World Forum–the specter of Donald Trump. There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he’s done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated. The attendees at the forum were businessmen and scholars, mostly, so the expressions of hope, and injunctions to do something were directed at those who were thought to have some ability to influence events–such as magazine editors.
 
I of course tried to explain the limits–shocking but true–to the power of magazine editors. But I did come away with this conviction reinforced: There’s obviously lots of analysis of Trump and Trumpism to be done, and in fact we’ve done a fair amount of that in the pages of The Weekly Standard. But the key task now, to once again paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him. In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing, brow-furrowing, and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president.
 
And we can be saved from Trump. He’s getting about 35 percent of the vote so far. As Jay Cost points out today on the blog, there’s a very good chance he’ll fall short–perhaps far short–of a majority of the delegates at the convention. Stopping Trump will be a messy proposition, and there will be disaffected Trump supporters and threats of defections to deal with–but that’s a much better problem to have than trying to deal with Trump as the nominee of the Republican party.
 
So this is a moment, it seems to me, to keep calm and carry on. And to make the case. I’m struck by the huge reaction we’ve gotten to Steve Hayes’s eloquent explanation in the current issue of why he can’t support Trump. So we’ll keep on making arguments, as well as analyzing the situation. And we’ll resist the pseudo-sophisticated fatalism that can lead people to prefer to be clever in foretelling disaster rather than energetic in working to avert it.  

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