Andy McCarthy, senior fellow at National Review and former Assistant U.S. Attorney, joined SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to make his case that Donald Trump is playing Republican primary voters for “chumps,” because “he is the Establishment” he claims to be running against.
McCarthy prefaced his remarks by saying, “I don’t think I’ve written a cross word about Donald Trump personally, and because I consider myself to be among the people who are on-fire mad about what’s going on in Washington, particularly over the last seven years, I very much sympathize with the anger of people who support Donald Trump.”
“What I don’t understand about the support for Trump is, he is exactly what it is that we’ve been fighting all this time,” McCarthy said.
“He has given… gobs of money to politicians. I know that when you say that, he says, ‘Well, he’s a businessman, he gave money to everybody.’ No, he didn’t. He gave money very selectively, to the political Left, and to Establishment Republicans who play ball with the political Left,” he continued.
For example, McCarthy noted in a National Review column this weekend that Trump donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and another $100,000 to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, “who in the House handled the surrendering that went on to the Obama agenda — including the appalling budget deal, which has left us basically with two years of not being able to oppose Obama, because we forfeited the power of the purse.”
McCarthy observed that Trump made a donation to Boehner’s Political Action Committee, which was “established mainly to stop challenges to GOP incumbents by the Tea Party, and rebellious types of people that we were supporting to try and change Washington.”
McCarthy also singled out a $65,000 Trump donation to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, “who handled the Senate end of the surrender on the budget deal.”
“So I think when you look at what Trump has done, in the way of support for politicians, he is the Washington establishment. He’s actually backed the people who perpetuated the Washington establishment,” he concluded.
“And he seems to have been able to get over, on people who are on our side, by fiery rhetoric on immigration — where, if you look at it carefully, the pie in the sky that he’s promising is never going to happen. The wall is not going to happen, certainly not the way he’s described it. It’s not gonna be paid for by Mexico. He’s not going to keep every Muslim out of the country, on a temporary basis. But the one thing he says that actually has a chance of happening, the one that never gets examined, is that he’s going to bring everybody back. You know, he’s going to deport them, and then he’s going to bring them back, with amnesty,” McCarthy said.
On the matter of the proposed border wall, McCarthy said Trump was underestimating the physical difficulty and expense of constructing a fence over the more difficult sections of the border, and the political difficulty of completing the project against pressure from mass demonstrations.
Perhaps more importantly, he said Trump was choosing the symbolically powerful wall instead of a better solution that could resolve the immigration problem “in a matter of weeks to months,” by deploying military forces to secure the southern border.
“I don’t mean to over-simplify Trump’s position, because I know he’s talked about other elements of it, but look – if you have an invasion coming across the border, you have to militarize the border,” McCarthy explained, arguing that the situation on the U.S. border is “not quite yet equivalent to what’s happening in Europe, but it’s snowballing in that direction.”
He said he was not prepared to call Trump a mere “con artist,” because he didn’t know “how much of his transformation to the Right is authentic.”
However, McCarthy said, “I don’t trust him to do what he says he’ll do, and I find it very curious that he runs as the outsider, but every time I turn around, he’s running around the country with Chris Christie, or he’s got his old pal Boehner doing his henchman’s work for him over the weekend against Cruz.”
“The last thing I saw this week is he thinks that Corker — who is the one in the Senate that led the surrender, basically, on Obama’s Iran deal – he thinks Corker’s terrific too. Another iron-clad member of the Republican Establishment,” he said. “To me, it seems like he’s a Ruling Class guy. I don’t see him as an outsider. I think it’s preposterous to say that he’s an outsider, just because he’s never held public office.”
“As I pointed out in my column over the weekend, Reince Priebus has never held public office,” McCarthy said, referring to the head of the Republican National Committee. “Trump is a consummate insider, because the people who control Washington could not do what they do, absent the donors who are behind them. And Trump has been paying for these guys for decades.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
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