George Will Too Politically Correct to Tolerate Donald Trump

Last year, political commentator George F. Will won recognition for standing up to political correctness. This year, he is enforcing it.

Will told the lawyers of the conservative Federalist Society at a Friday luncheon that he had de-registered from the Republican Party over the impending nomination of Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. He is only the latest Republican establishment figure to declare that if the conventional candidates lose — even just this once — he will simply quit.

Will said he became an “unaffiliated” voter despite the risk of Hillary Clinton appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In April, he blasted Trump as “the most anti-conservative presidential aspirant in [the Republican Party’s] history,” and called Trump’s supporters “quislings” and “collaborationists,” terms that originated to describe those who helped the Nazis.

Because Trump won’t toe the party line, Will wants even those who support him to be “ineligible to participate in the party’s reconstruction.”

Last year, Will sang a different tune. In delivering the inaugural keynote address to the Disinvitation Dinner of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale, Will — who was “disinvited” from Scripps College in California for questioning the left’s sexual assault statistics — declared that “free speech has never been, in the history of our republic, more comprehensively, aggressively, and dangerously threatened than it is now.” He also warned that Hillary Clinton had said “one of the four most important things she wants to do in the world is … end the First Amendment as we have known it.”

Trump is the first presidential candidate to challenge political correctness head-on. The would-be censors who attack Will and so many others have made Trump the target of their obsessions.

And yet instead of defending Trump — even while, perhaps, retaining his criticisms — Will has demonized him, and explicitly advises Republicans: “Make sure he loses.”

Indeed — and let the disinviters run the country, as long as there are still after-dinner speeches to give.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.