Trump Brings Back Buchananism
Three-times-failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has a right to feel vindicated by Donald Trump's success.
"We were a little bit ahead of our time," the syndicated columnist and colleague of mine on PBS' "The McLaughlin Group" told NPR a day after Trump's last two primary election rivals for the Republican nomination dropped out.
Buchanan served as an adviser to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and ran twice for president as a Republican and in 2000 on the Reform Party's ticket.
Back then, a lot of critics, including me, thought his platform of an "immigration moratorium," "America First" isolationism and not too thinly veiled white nationalism -- including a "Buchanan fence" on the Mexican border -- was goofy, at best.
Now Donald Trump has ridden these ideas to the door of the GOP nomination.
But while others argue as to whether Trump's campaign pitch promotes European-style white nationalism under another name, there's little doubt in Pat's mind.
In books like his 2006 "State of Emergency," Buchanan even spells out his own vision for what I would call making America hate again.
"If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050, Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built," he wrote.
Asked by NPR's Rachel Martin whether he still stands by that statement, Pat said he only would "amend it" to say 2042 or 2041 instead of 2050, according to more recent projections. "So we're about 25 years away from the fact where Americans of European descent will be a minority in the United States," he said.
Why does he see that as a problem?
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