Republicans like Jeb Bush look at America’s demographics and Trump’s numbers and conclude that in order for the GOP to succeed, it has to persuade Hispanics that it isn’t a party that is hateful toward them.
And Limbaugh and his ilk regard that very project as a heresy.
.. Could the Republicans lose Hispanics big and still win the election? In 2016, maybe. Beyond that, the trick will get harder to pull off with every election. And if Trump improbably wins the presidency, he’ll either abandon his immigration promises (my bet) or try mass deportation and thereby guarantee that the GOP will lose Hispanics for a generation or more.
How Trump Makes Jeb Bush Seem Like a Wimp
Trump must expect Jeb to find his dehumanization of illegal immigrants repulsive. But like any good bully, he can smell fear. He knows that Jeb, like most of the other Republican presidential candidates, fears the animal spirits he has awoken inside the GOP base
.. The problem with Trump’s ideas about Mexican American illegal immigrants isn’t that they’re “unrealistic” or “expensive” or “not conservative,” whatever that means. It’s that they’re despicable.
.. Calling Trump a bigot misses the point. It implies that he has genuine convictions. He’s an opportunist using bigotry to feed his megalomania.
Should Jeb Bush Go After Trump?
Right now, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush seems to be getting advised that he should take the gloves off with Donald Trump. (If “be yourself” is the advice a candidate hears most often when the news is good, “take the gloves off” is the most frequent counterpoint when news turns bad.)
.. Every campaign runs on money, but Jeb Bush’s more than most. He’s hoping through sheer staying power to impose his nomination on a recalcitrant party. The money buys the staying power. If the money dwindles, his fortunes fall hostage to the Republicans of the early states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, none of them a promising Jeb Bush firewall.
.. Bush’s most immediate problem is not that the base doesn’t trust him—it didn’t trust John McCain either, yet he nevertheless won the nomination—but that his donors enjoy too many plausible alternative choices. Bush needs to hustle the donor-acceptable alternatives out of the race as fast as possible, as Mitt Romney was able to do in 2012, leaving donors with a stark alternative: me or some sure-loser madman.
.. But if Bush can’t drive out the donor-acceptable alternatives, Trump can. Trump is doing just that to Scott Walker right now.
.. Jeb Bush is a candidate with many points of vulnerability: personal, familial, financial. Most of Jeb Bush’s Republican rivals will be reluctant to broach these issues in any but the most elliptical way.
Jeb Bush: Exclamation Point!
They not only got their wish, they got it with punctuation: Jeb! That’s Jeb Bush’s logo, and the exclamation point is the tell. None of the other Republican presidential candidates has anything like it. None of the Democrats either. It’s a declaration of passion that only someone worried about a deficit of it would issue. Methinks thou doth exclaim too much.