The Spectator

It’s Trump vs Hillary: a race that should terrify all conservatives

This morning, Ted Cruz bowed out of the race. Now, John Kasich has given up. As a result Donald J. Trump, the most grotesque candidate ever to have run for the Oval Office, is now the only candidate still running for the Republican Party’s  nomination. And so the most powerful country on earth, a nation teeming with talent, will this November be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton or the egregious Trump.

It cannot be assumed that Trump will be defeated in the presidential election itself. This week, for the first time, a poll put him ahead of her. The bookmakers give him a 30 per cent chance: this time last year, he had a 2 per cent chance of winning the nomination.

The world is sooner or later going to have to face up to the possibility that a man whom our own Parliament recently debated banning from the UK, and whom the German ­magazine Der Spiegel recently called ‘the most dangerous man in the world’, might soon be leader of the world’s most powerful nation and commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military.

Is Donald Trump really such a danger to the world? Yes, but not in the way most of his critics usually assert. As the National Review has pointed out, Trump’s ascendancy means that Reagan-style conservatism is now in exile from the Republican party. He will attack Hillary Clinton from the left on every­thing from her Iraq vote to social security. But it is not his incoherent and contradictory foreign policy which we have to fear. It is his much more consistent — but seriously wrong — economic ideas that would inflict the most damage.

His victory speech in Indiana started attacking Mrs Clinton’s economics, saying that she ‘doesn’t understand trade’, apparently because Bill Clinton agreed to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

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