Tea at Trianon: Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump

From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

The kind of institutions that pay top-dollar for Hillary Clinton don’t expect to hear anything different from a speaker like Milley, and he knows it. If veterans are a bedrock of Trump’s support, swamp things like Milley are a core constituency for Harris.

Trump is running against them as much as against her, and veterans are well aware of it—yet they’re with Trump, not the Swamp. The top brass long misled America about the war in Afghanistan, which they insisted we were winning, and it was the troops who paid the price.

The fact that Harris has the backing of Washington’s foreign policy establishment is for many voters a compelling reason to reject her. Voters across the swing states trust Trump over Harris in matters of war and peace.

Fully 50 percent of those voters say Trump is better suited to handle the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with only 39 percent expressing more confidence in Harris, according to polling by The Wall Street Journal. Trump holds an even bigger lead when it comes to which candidate battleground voters trust to handle the Israel-Hamas war: 48 percent say Trump, just 33 percent say Harris.

Every year, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered a foreign policy disaster—the lethally botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Hamas massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and the extension of the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East throughout 2024. No wonder voters in the states most likely to decide the election want Trump’s foreign policy, not more of what President Joe Biden and Harris have given us these last four years. (Read more.)