How the Anti-Trump Republicans Set Themselves Up to Fail

There is no scenario in which anti-Trump Republicans can now thwart Trump’s nomination without sabotaging the party ahead of the general election. Dan McCarthy explains what giving the nomination to someone other than Trump and Cruz would mean:

.. There is no scenario in which anti-Trump Republicans can now thwart Trump’s nomination without sabotaging the party ahead of the general election. Dan McCarthy explains what giving the nomination to someone other than Trump and Cruz would mean:

That might console the #neverTrump elites—until they stop to think about just what might be in store at Cleveland, where Trump and Cruz together will command a majority of delegates. Cruz is personally disliked by much of the party elite, which has come to resent his grandstanding ways in the Senate, while Trump is actively hated and feared. Yet if both of them were to be denied the nomination or some significant consolation prize—and what could that be?—by the party’s D.C. leadership class, there would be hell to pay in the long run.

The convention would go down in history as the GOP’s ultimate betrayal of its own voters.

.. Anyone foolish enough to accept the nomination under these circumstances would be seen as illegitimate by at least half of Republican voters whose preferences were ignored, and a nominee foisted upon the part in this way would have enormous difficulty securing the loyalty of his party’s core supporters.

.. If anti-Trump Republicans were capable of thinking through the long-term consequences of what they’re doing (and that is a questionable assumption), they would realize that stopping Trump’s nomination would be a thoroughly discrediting Pyrrhic victory for their faction. It would confirm everything that most Trump and Cruz voters think is wrong with the GOP, and it would vindicate them in their loathing for the party’s elites. Instead of accepting the temporary defeat that a Trump nomination represents for them, his opponents are trying to do something that would all but guarantee more populist insurgencies for years to come.

Will Mitt Romney’s Anti-Trump Pitch Work?

Romney is in just the right position to make the moral case against Trump. He’s well respected, his public image is squeaky clean, and, perhaps most importantly, he operates outside the Washington bubble. But where Romney went wrong Thursday was in presenting his criticism of Trump’s electability as equal to his criticism of Trump’s fitness to lead.

.. In his own way, by straying from his more powerful moral narrative, Romney gave Trump and his supporters an out: They can criticize Romney’s prediction, and ignore his larger, ethical case against Trump.