Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan still isn’t a Donald Trump supporter, but she suggests in her latest column that his popularity with Republican voters isn’t as complicated as the news media and political veterans think it is.
“They take his numbers seriously — they can read a poll — but they think, as [his GOP rival Jeb] Bush said, that his support is all about anger, angst and theatrics,” Noonan wrote in the column published Thursday night. “That’s part of the story, but the other, more consequential part has to do with real policy issues. The Establishment refuses to see that, because to admit it is to implicate themselves and their leadership.”
In the past, Noonan has bemoaned the rise of Trump, referring to his candidacy as a “freak show.” She is now calling him the “great disruptor.”
“He brags that he has brought up great questions and forced other candidates to face them and sometimes change their stands — and he has,” she wrote. “He changed the debate on illegal immigration. He said he’d build a wall and close the border and as the months passed and his competitors saw his surge, they too were suddenly, clearly, aggressively for ending illegal immigration… He changed the debate when he asked for a pause in Muslim immigration until America ‘can figure out what’s going on.’ In the age of terror, that looked suspiciously like common sense.”
Trump is currently leading the GOP presidential field in national polls and even early primary state polls, except for Iowa, where Ted Cruz leads by a small margin. Trump is No. 2 on the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings.
