For a man who has been engulfed this week in the political equivalent of a category five hurricane, Donald Trump is in remarkably good shape. He has been reviled around the globe, labelled a fascist, accused by Hillary Clinton of aiding terrorists and even inspired a British rebellion; yet apart from a hoarse voice he has emerged appearing utterly unscathed.

“We’ve had a pretty interesting couple of days,” he tells a roomful of New England police officers who have come to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to endorse him for US president. He repays the favour by praising their “beauty” – an interesting word to apply to cops – and calls them “some of the greatest people I know”.

He has taken some heat for his remarks on Monday, he tells the crowd, alluding to his call for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to all Muslims seeking entry. “Unbelievable … incredible heat,” he says.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/donald-trump-polling-muslim-ban-republican-support-new-hampshire

I don’t think a lot about Donald Trump, but his enduring popularity is forcing me to look at the Trump phenomenon more broadly and deeply than I have been doing.

I had to laugh sympathetically at Steve Sailer’s notion of Trump’s Luck, which Sailer defines as “the pattern that whenever the national media announces that This Time, Trump Has Gone Too Far, the next day’s headlines will be about some outrage validating Trump’s general point.” Like so many of my fellow pundits, I have rolled my eyes at Trump all year, and figured he would be a footnote to the campaign by now. I watched his rally in Mobile this August, and could not understand why anybody would take this egotistical demagogue seriously. But here we are in December, and the man who was expected to be the GOP front runner, Jeb Bush, is in low single digits in the polls, despite all his money and GOP establishment cred, and Trump is dominating the race on the Right.

I commend to you again Noah Millman’s piece pointing out that Establishment politicians of the Left and Right are in many ways no better than Trump on the whole “fascist” thing. They just have a different way of talking about the things they do, to keep them respectable in polite society. In the end, I don’t believe that Trump is going to be the GOP nominee, and I believe that the American people will be forced to choose between a Democrat and a Republican who are the problem, not the solution. Don’t get me wrong here: Trump’s not a solution either. What his candidacy reveals, at least to me, is how little authority the US political establishment has.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-alienation-the-benedict-option/

As the candidates in Tuesday's Republican debate grappled over how to tackle the growing threat of the Islamic State group (also known as Isis), Donald Trump calmly reassured them "the answer is simple".

Rather than focus on a bombing campaign in Syria, or sending in ground troops, the billionaire offered a more novel, technological strategy: to "close off areas of the internet".

"Isis is using the internet better than we are using the internet, and it was our idea," the 69-year-old entrepreneur told the audience in Las Vegas.

"We should be able to penetrate the internet and find out exactly where Isis is and everything about Isis. "We can do that if we use our good people."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35109492