On Tuesday, April 26, Donald Trump won impressive primary victories in five states, victories that would seem to make it difficult (though not yet impossible) to deny him the Republican nomination. On Wednesday, in Washington, D.C., Trump read from a teleprompter a foreign policy speech designed to make it easy for Republican officeholders and apparatchiks to come around, to pretend to discover that, “Gee, Trump really isn’t that bad!” On Thursday, those Republican elites dutifully (if still somewhat halfheartedly) proclaimed that very discovery and began to slink around to supporting Trump.
Trump’s speech is in fact predictably unimpressive. The parts of it that are true are utterly unoriginal and strikingly superficial regurgitations of conventional conservative criticisms of the Obama administration, presented in a simple-minded way. There are also vague platitudes about America and the world indistinguishable from those that inhabit most such speeches.
