A Vintage Postcard From Cleveland Graphic to Headline the Catalogue*
A periodic offering of Love Notes and Dear John epistles from loyal Republican partisans, tearfully sent to Big John with the stubby little fingers (the modern day Valentino Love Legend in His Own Mind).**
All senders are recognized bona fide Republican or conservative voters, writers, political activists, or elected officials. There are no secret trolls in the group below, seeking to divide the party faithful, or dilute the movement’s core messages.
This is part of a growing Republican Wall of Tears for 2016.
These love notes are from Trump’s fellow Republicans. Just imagine what the Democrats will have to say in the next six months. Over and Over again.
To: Donald J. Trump, Republican P.N.
Sender: P.J. O’Rourke, Conservative Author
Location: NPR Radio
Date: May 9, 2016
Message:
“I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises,” O’Rourke continued. “It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
“This man just can’t be president,” O’Rourke said, alluding to the nuclear codes the commander-in-chief takes control of upon assuming office. “They’ve got this button — this briefcase. He’s going to find it.”
Sender: George F. Will, Conservative Opinion Columnist
Location: Washington Post
Date: April 29, 2016
Message:
His running mate will be unqualified for high office because he or she will think Trump is qualified.
Trump would be the most unpopular nominee ever, unable to even come close to Mitt Romney’s insufficient support among women, minorities and young people. In losing disastrously, Trump probably would create down-ballot carnage sufficient to end even Republican control of the House.
Were he to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.
If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.
Sender: Michael Gerson, Conservative Opinion Columnist
Location: Washington Post
Date: May 9, 2016
Message::
They are opposing a candidate who mocks disabled people, demeans women, engages in ethnic stereotyping and encourages religious bigotry.
Those who regard this tawdry mix of vulgarity and cruelty as typical of any social class are engaged in a particularly offensive form of condescension. Hating losers and the weak is fundamentally inconsistent with Christian ethics, and other sources of moral judgment, in every income quintile.
Make no mistake. Those who support Trump, no matter how reluctantly, have crossed a moral boundary. They are standing with a leader who encourages prejudice and despises the weak. They are aiding the transformation of a party formed by Lincoln’s blazing vision of equality into a party of white resentment. Those who find this one of the normal, everyday compromises of politics have truly lost their way.
This is not even to mention Trump’s pledge to limit press freedom, or his malicious birtherism, or his dangerous vaccine skepticism, or his economic plans that would bring global recession, or his lack of relevant qualifications, or his temperament of brooding and bragging, egotism and self-pity, or his promise to emancipate the world from American leadership, or his accusation that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved with Lee Harvey Freaking Oswald.
Some are trying their best to act as though all this were normal. But we are seeing, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “lunacy dancing in high places.” None of this requires a vote for Hillary Clinton. But it forbids a vote for Donald Trump.
Sender: David French, Staff Writer
Location: National Review
Date: May 24, 2016
Message:
Let’s be clear about our nation’s plight: At this moment, American voters face a choice between two historically corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent politicians.
[Trump} would respond to that crisis with a collection of announced policies that range from the insane (intentionally killing women and children to punish terrorists, sending Exxon to pacify the Middle East, blocking even our Kurdish allies from entering the United States) to the reckless (ending the NATO alliance that has been the foundation of Western security for nearly 70 years). [Trump] casually proposes economic changes that could plunge the nation into yet another deep recession, threatening destructive trade wars, questioning the full faith and credit of the United States, and outlining a tax plan that could add as much as $10 trillion to the national debt.Both are walking impeachment risks who would bring horror shows of unending scandal and shame to the Oval Office.
The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option. If either Trump or Clinton win, America loses.
Sender: David Brooks, Conservative opinion Columnist
Location: New York Times
Date: March 18, 2016
Message:
And yet reality is reality.
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.
History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”
Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.
Sender: Mitt Romney, Republican Businessman, 2012 Presidential Nominee
Location: Hinckley Institute, Salt Lake City
Date: March 3, 2016
Message:
If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession. A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America. His tax plan in combination with his refusal to reform entitlements and honestly address spending would balloon the deficit and the national debt.
But you say, wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t and no he doesn’t. Look, his bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business, he didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.
I’m afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart. Now, I’m far from the first to conclude that Donald Trump lacks the temperament to be president. After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter’s questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.
There is a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War. While at the same time, John McCain, whom he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured. Dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark. He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong. He spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong. He saw no such thing. He imagined it. He’s not of the temperament of the kind of stable, thoughtful person we need as a leader. His imagination must not be married to real power.
All of them bear the responsibility of being an example for our children and our grandchildren. Think of Donald Trump’s personal qualities. The bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics. You know, we have long referred to him as “The Donald.” He’s the only person in the entire country to whom we have added an article before his name, and it was not because he had attributes we admired.
There’s plenty of evidence that Mr. Trump is a con man, a fake. Mr. Trump has changed his positions not just over the years, but over the course of the campaign. And on the Ku Klux Klan, daily for three days in a row. We will only really know if he’s a real deal or a phony if he releases his tax returns. I predict that there are more bombshells in his tax returns. I predict that he doesn’t give much, if anything, to the disabled and to our veterans. And I predict that despite his promise to do so, first made over a year ago, that he will never ever release his tax returns. Never — not the returns under audit; not even the returns that are no longer being audited. He has too much to hide.
Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat. His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president and his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.
Sender: Mona Charen, Senior Fellow
Location: Ethics and Public Policy Center
Date: May 3, 2016
Message:
Donald Trump is a lout — even a chauvinist pig. If ever there were a fitting object for that nasty piece of feminist agitprop from the 1970s, he is the living embodiment. But it would be a mistake to see him only as a throwback. In some ways, he is — the focus on women’s looks, for example. On the other hand, Trump demonstrates none of the virtues the traditional gentleman demonstrated toward women. There is no trace of respect, no protectiveness, no chivalry, no honor. He is a post-feminist, emasculated male searching for masculinity in all the wrong ways — as are his most perfervid followers.
Trump brings his own peculiar baggage to this cultural confusion and appeals to men in the worst ways. He is not manly — he is a caricature of a manly man. He makes physical threats to protesters at his rallies — “I wish someone would punch him in the face” — from behind the cordon of Secret Service officers. He avoided the draft and disparages the heroism of those who served and suffered. Despite his many wives and concubines, he finds femininity itself confusing and threatening. He is made uncomfortable by the idea of menstruation — something most boys get over about the age of 14. He found Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate “disgusting.” He isn’t able to say accurately what Supreme Court justices do (he thinks they “sign bills”), but he is ready and eager to pass judgment on the appearance of women — especially accomplished women such as Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz — who come within his orbit. Like misogynists everywhere, Trump is ready to defame the women he’s mistreated. Hillary Clinton called Monica Lewinsky a liar. Trump did the same to Michelle Fields. Trump is no more a manly man than Clinton is a feminist model. Both use the gender wars to advance their own bottomless personal vanity and ambition. Plague. Houses.
Sender: Jay Caruso, Contributing Editor
Location: Conservative Website RedState
Date: December 1, 2015
Message:
But I will not vote for Donald Trump if he is the GOP nominee. In good conscience I will not do it Trump could swipe the nomination. But there’s no way I vote for that fraud.
He’s a crackpot. He’s a birther. He supports the completely unscientific theory that vaccines cause autism. He flirted with trutherism with respect to what President Bush did or did not know about the 9/11 attacks. He has thrown out the completely unsubstantiated claim he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheering the 9/11 attacks (and no, some woman calling into the Howard Stern show to say she saw it as well is not evidence). We don’t need (another) President spouting that kind of drivel.
He has no class and he is no statesman. I know critics will write this off as him not being “politically correct.” But there is a line between being politically correct and being a boorish ass and Trump can’t navigate it. From making fun of Carly Fiorina’s face to his pathetic schoolyard-like bully mocking of a disabled reporter to his tantrums on Twitter about news stations or reporters “not being fair” to him (remember his hissy fit over Fox News?). It’s completely unbecoming for a man who wants to lead the free world. This is not ‘The Apprentice.’
Sender: Brian Bartlett, Republican Communications Strategist
Location: Rational 360 Public Affairs, Washington D.C.
Date: February 10, 2016
Message:
Trump is a clown. There is only one thing in the world that matters to Trump: himself. Self-obsession, pettiness, insecurity, narcissism and a ‘huuuge’ ego are not qualities we want our president to have.
Most of the policy proposals Trump has put forward have originated from so deep into fantasy land that even attempting to thoughtfully analyze them is a fools errand Whenever he’s confronted with the truth, he launches ad hominem attacks, or with a quick sleight of hand, manages to distract his audience and change the subject by saying something even more outrageous about a completely separate topic.
A Donald Trump presidency is not the manifestation of our wildest dreams—it is our worst nightmare. He does not represent the values of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. I will not support him in either a primary or general election, and neither should any other conservative, Republican, or American.
Sender: Norm Colman, Former U.S. Senator Minnesota (R)
Location: Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul
Date: March 3, 2016
Message:
I won’t vote for Donald Trump. I won’t vote for Donald Trump because of who he isn’t. He isn’t a Republican. He isn’t a conservative. He isn’t a truth teller. He’s not a uniter. Donald Trump isn’t the leader America needs after eight years of a president who deliberately divided us and fanned the flames of racial and socioeconomic strife — and, by doing so, diminished America’s standing in the world.
I also won’t vote for Donald Trump because of who he is. A bigot. A misogynist. A fraud. A bully.
He is accused of stealing $40 million from thousands of fellow Americans through a phony “college” — promising opportunity to achieve the American Dream. He has left in his wake failed enterprises such as Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage and Trump Vodka. His multiple corporate bankruptcies have left scores of “little guys” — suppliers — with unpaid bills. He is not to be trusted with billions of dollars from the hardworking labor of millions of other fellow Americans.
When a man mocks the disabled, dismisses the valor and honor of America’s veterans, such as Sen. John McCain, and defames the last Republican commander-in-chief, he is not to be trusted to lead our nation’s military in times of peace or war.
There is a coarseness to Trump that degrades the political discourse, such as when he calls women “fat pigs” or attacks a female reporter by a not-so-subtle reference to her menstrual cycle.
And any man who declines to renounce the affections of the KKK and David Duke should not be trusted to lead America. Ever.
We have been deceived by a con artist. A fraud wrapped in the veneer of being a businessman, who has slapped a slogan on a baseball cap and is closer to being president of the United States than any bigot, misogynist, fraud and bully in modern American history.
Selected Additional Sources:
Meet the Republicans speaking out against Trump, by MSNBC Staff (March 2, 2016; updated May 26, 2016)
This is an American tragedy: Republicans must step up and defeat Donald Trump, by Sean Patrick Donlan (May 28, 2016)
*The Postcards from Cleveland theme promptly brings to mind the 1987 novel written by Carrie Fisher, Hollywood royalty daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and popular singer Eddie Fisher, and who was briefly married to musician Paul Simon.
**Postcards from the Edge is a semi-autobiographical novel by Carrie Fisher, first published in 1987. It was later adapted, by Fisher herself, into a motion picture by the same name, directed by Mike Nichols which was released by Columbia Pictures in 1990.
From the Wikipedia entry about Postcards from the Edge:
The novel revolves around movie actress Suzanne Vale as she tries to put her life together after a drug overdose. The book is divided into five main sections: The prologue is in epistolary form, with postcards written by Suzanne to her brother, friend, and grandmother. The novel continues the epistolary form, consisting of first-person narrative excerpts from a journal Suzanne kept while coming to terms with her drug addiction and rehab experiences. (“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.”)
The 1990 Hollywood comedy-drama movie adaptation which loosely follows the book, was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Meryl Streep (the most outstanding actress of her generation, for my money), Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Quaid, among others. The movie grossed $40 million in the U.S., and holds a 90% rating on the movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes.
***In the 1920’s silent film era, Valentino was the epitome of the matinee movie idol male Lover, as judged by women everywhere, and viewed suspiciously by many men, who nonetheless copied his look and style. He died early at age 31.
Rudolph Valentino, from The Son of the Sheik (1926)
From the Wikipedia entry for Rudolph Valentino:
Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella, professionally known as Rudolph Valentino (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926), was an Italian-born American actor who starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik. An early pop icon, a sex symbol of the 1920s, he was known as the “Latin Lover” or simply as “Valentino.” He had applied for American citizenship shortly before his death, which occurred at age 31, causing mass hysteria among his female fans and further propelling him into iconic status.
Dating back to the de Saulles trial in New York, during which his masculinity had been questioned in print, Valentino had been very sensitive about his public perception. Women loved him and thought him the epitome of romance. However, American men were less impressed, walking out of his movies in disgust. With the Fairbanks type being the epitome of manhood, Valentino was seen as a threat to the “All American” man. One man, asked in a street interview in 1922 what he thought of Valentino, replied, “Many men desire to be another Douglas Fairbanks. But Valentino? I wonder…” Women in the same interview found Valentino “triumphantly seductive. Puts the love-making of the average husband or sweetheart into discard as tame, flat, and unimpassioned.” Men may have wanted to act like Fairbanks, but they copied Valentino’s look. A man with perfectly greased-back hair was called a “Vaselino.”
Some journalists were still calling his masculinity into question, going on at length about his pomaded hair, his dandyish clothing, his treatment of women, his views on women, and whether he was effeminate or not. Valentino hated these stories and was known to carry the clippings of the newspaper articles around with him and criticize them.
In July 1926, the Chicago Tribune reported that a vending machine dispensing pink talcum powder had appeared in an upscale hotel washroom. An editorial that followed used the story to protest the feminization of American men, and blamed the talcum powder on Valentino and his films. The piece infuriated Valentino and he challenged the writer to a boxing match since dueling was illegal. Neither challenge was answered. Shortly afterward, Valentino met with journalist H.L. Mencken for advice on how best to deal with the incident. Mencken advised Valentino to “let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion,” but Valentino insisted the editorial was “infamous.” Mencken found Valentino to be likable and gentlemanly and wrote sympathetically of him in an article published in the Baltimore Sun a week after Valentino’s death:
It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast—a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside… The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered him, but in those last days, unless I am a worse psychologist than even the professors of psychology, it was revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid…
Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.
After Valentino challenged the Tribune’s anonymous writer to a boxing match, the New York Evening Journal boxing writer, Frank O’Neill, volunteered to fight in his place. Valentino won the bout, which took place on the roof of New York’s Ambassador Hotel.
Boxing heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who trained Valentino and other Hollywood notables of the era in boxing, said of him: “He was the most virile and masculine of men. The women were like flies to a honeypot. He could never shake them off, anywhere he went. What a lovely, lucky guy.”
Valentino’s sex symbol status and his untimely death was a biographical part in John Dos Passos’s The Big Money in the U.S.A trilogy. His title was the Adagio Dancer.
‘The Son of the Sheik” Move Poster (1926), in Art Nouveau Style
An interesting essay on Valentino can be found in the New Yorker Book Section: “Those Lips, Those Eyes: The lives of Rudolph Valentino”, by Thomas Mallon, May 19, 2003
Since Valentino starred only in silent movies, there is no record of his voice on screen. There is however a rare sound recording of his singing voice from 1923 here: