The New "Untouchables"

When the caste system was entrenched in India, the "untouchables" were the lowest caste and deemed to have the lowest social status and virtually no ability to rise in society. Today, in the United States, Julie Kelly defines an entirely different kind of "untouchable." She suggests that the political elites in both the Democrat and Republican parties are the new untouchables—often above the law, almost always working only to consolidate their own power, rarely recognizing or addressing the needs of the common person, and playing fast and loose with the truth.

The new untouchables hate Donald Trump with a venom that is palpable.

Kelly writes:

A poll taken several months before the election revealed that neglected voters overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump above any other candidate: “Voters who agreed with the statement ‘people like me don’t have any say about what the government does’ were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump. This feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness was a much better predictor of Trump support than age, race, college attainment, [or] income,” wrote Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

This is the Trump appeal that the ruling political class refused—and still refuses—to acknowledge. It is why Republicans were willing to overlook his personal peccadillos, and why voters in 206 counties who twice chose Barack Obama helped elect Donald Trump. It is why rural moms, union toughs, small business owners, and soybean farmers fill steamy Midwestern assembly halls during summer’s peak to rally around a thrice-married, brash, egotistical Manhattan billionaire who is the working class’s most unlikely champion. It is why Republican candidates across the country are bragging about their Trump-BFF status in tight primary races.

Trump violates every sycophantic, mannerly rule that politicians and their handlers are taught to follow. The name-calling, the gloating, the fight-picking are precisely what any political consultant would advise their client not to do. “Act presidential,” the memo would say. Let others do your dirty work. Stay above the fray, don’t get in the mud. Keep on message. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. Yada yada yada. (Let’s add “Political Consulting Experts” to the long list of professional know-it-alls who’ve been wholly discredited in the Trump era.)

But the jig is up. Trump is a one-man battering ram against a powerful political apparatus—The Untouchables—that ruefully stacks the deck against the very people it purports to understand and protect ...

Nearly two years [after the 2016 election], the war between The Untouchables and The Deplorables rages on. Last week featured several more clashes, proving again that the president’s opposition remains stunningly and stubbornly tone-deaf. (As Peggy Noonan wrote last year, Trump has been lucky in his enemies.) The Untouchables brandished their revoked security clearances and their opinion pages and their GoFundMe campaigns as the latest weapons against a president they intend to destroy.

But instead of taking it on the chin, these martyrs of #TheResistance embrace their victimhood. They caterwaul about imaginary constitutional rights violations not because it’s legitimate but because their self-enacted 28th Amendment right—the Right to Infinite and Unchecked Power—is being trampled.

And at the end of the day, that's really what this is all about. Power lost and/or the threat of power lost, along with the intense need to regain it and/or eliminate the threat.

The new untouchables are a potent force. They will do everything necessary to bring down Trump, and their efforts will not cease until he's out of office. Manufactured outrage, evidence free "scandals," selective prosecution of Trump associates with the intent of entrapping Trump himself, dishonest predictions of catastrophe—all of that and more. If their agent, Robert Mueller, doesn't succeed, they'll try and try again. The big question is whether a man who "violates every sycophantic, mannerly rule that politicians are taught to follow" can vanquish an entrenched group of powerful elites or whether they will vanquish him. Time will tell.