But as details about the meetings leaked out, it became clear that the gatherings did little but paper over deep internal GOP divisions that show no signs of abating.
.. House members already wary of Trump were even more skeptical after seeing him in person, their concerns about his standing among Latinos and praise for Saddam Hussein undiminished. It was even worse with senators, as Trump seemed more intent at times on settling scores than mending fences, calling out his critics in front of the bulk of the Senate GOP Conference.
.. He called Trump’s attacks on fellow Republicans an example of “the bully side of him. Unnecessary red-on-red violence there.”
.. That “wasn’t what I saw. I didn’t hear the word ‘loser’ used,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) of a Washington Post account of Trump’s disses of Flake and Kirk.
.. Despite the insistence that everything was fine, all anyone was talking about on Capitol Hill after the meeting was Trump’s attempts to put his critics in their place, after being granted a golden opportunity to show the likes of Flake and Sasse an olive branch.
.. Trump’s praise for Saddam as an expert killer of terrorists, though, was hard for many Republicans to swallow, particularly veterans.
“Not helping me to get there,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an Air Force veteran. “I have a hard time getting there because I’m an American before I’m a Republican.”
.. When one House Republican asked Trump if he understood that his comments about Hispanics were “not helpful,” he responded that “Hispanics love him,” according to moderate Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.
Why Trump Wins: He knows border wars have replaced culture wars.
Instead, Trump held a large rally in Phoenix, where he was introduced by Arizona’s tough-on-the-border sheriff, Joe Arpaio, drawing a crowd far larger than any other candidate had mustered. Shortly after, in Las Vegas, he brought on stage the father of a young man who had been murdered by an illegal alien. He mocked NBC for dropping him while standing by Brian Williams, who had been caught lying on the air. This was the backdrop to Trump’s surge: a tough immigration and border-control message reinforced by a refusal to bend before what had become a massive barrage of liberal denunciation.
Within weeks, every prestige newspaper in America had published columns written by Republican neoconservative figures anathematizing Trump and warning that his success would “stain” the Republican Party. Republican voters, from that July through the following May, ignored them.
.. Trump’s victory in the primaries has elicited a great deal of establishment hand-wringing and wondering what more could have been done to stop him. Many blamed the press for giving Trump “free media”—which of course he benefited from only because he was unafraid of reporters, and viewers wanted to see and hear him. Some pointed to the unwieldy size of the initial GOP field or the failure of well-funded establishment super PACs to attack Trump early on. In fact, the GOP establishment campaign against Trump was massive: the pages and websites ofNational Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, the New York Times, and the Washington Post overflowed with anti-Trump polemics throughout the campaign season, and Trump was eventually bombarded with more than $70 million of negative TV advertising, three times more than he spent in his own campaign. Yet it seemed to make little difference.
.. But his weaknesses are obvious as well—a shallow grasp of policy, a tendency frequently to say things that are probably not true, an impulse to personalize conflicts and create unnecessary antagonisms. Few would describe his character as “presidential.”
.. For all of Trump’s talents, his victory probably owed as much to underlying political currents as to his brilliance as a leader and political tactician.
.. He won many who consciously or unconsciously identified with the pre-multicultural America that existed for most of the last century. And he won with backing from the growing group of Republicans who understand that the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster.
.. When one examines Trump’s main opponents— Bush and Rubio then, Hillary Clinton now—on the critical issues of immigration (legal and illegal), trade, and Iraq and other military interventions, one finds no substantial differences between them. In foreign policy, the liberal interventionists who would staff a Hillary administration line up seamlessly with neoconservatives in support of continued American “hegemony.” A recently published Center for a New American Security report, produced by charter members of both groups, makes this unambiguously clear. With some tweaking on social issues and the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton could have run interchangeably with Bush and Rubio in the Republican field, and vice versa.
.. the 2016 election ratifies a party realignment that began in 1968, when white working-class voters started moving towards the GOP. The core of Trump’s supporters are the political descendants of what had been the backbone of the Democratic New Deal coalition: working-class whites, politically strongest in the South and flyover states. On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy these voters are nationalist, not globalist
.. On the left, the argument that national boundaries are themselves, like racism or sexism, an arbitrary and unjust form of discrimination is made with growing frequency.
.. Lind suggests that “border wars” have replaced “culture wars” as the critical dividing line between the parties.
.. But even if he loses, he will have transformed the Republican Party. Because the Democratic coalition, perhaps now best exemplified by the twin poles of Goldman Sachs and Black Lives Matter, is inherently unstable
.. The concept of “white privilege”—whose emergence has taken the education world by storm—seeks essentially to hold responsible all whites, whatever their own views or personal conduct, for the legacy of racism.
.. the growing use of anti-“white privilege” pedagogical techniques—such as films, teaching exercises, mandatory confession, and other measures—has had the unintended result of making many white students, and their appalled parents, more conscious of having an inescapable and defining white identity. Trump is probably quite sincere in his assertion that he himself is “the least racist person” in politics, but there is little doubt his campaign has benefited from a white reaction to an emerging liberal cultural and educational discourse that depicts whites, and especially white males, as more dangerous and immoral than any other people.
.. the growing use of anti-“white privilege” pedagogical techniques—such as films, teaching exercises, mandatory confession, and other measures—has had the unintended result of making many white students, and their appalled parents, more conscious of having an inescapable and defining white identity. Trump is probably quite sincere in his assertion that he himself is “the least racist person” in politics, but there is little doubt his campaign has benefited from a white reaction to an emerging liberal cultural and educational discourse that depicts whites, and especially white males, as more dangerous and immoral than any other people.
Is Trump Losing the GOP?
Never before have so many leading Republican figures questioned the nominee’s basic fitness for office.
In 1800, the first genuinely competitive election, allies of Vice President Thomas Jefferson said President John Adams possessed a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” For his part, Jefferson was labeled “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father”—not to mention an “atheist” and “whoremaster.”
.. The hard questions about the character and temperament of the presumptive Republican nominee are coming from within his own party, at precisely the time when the most important piece of business for a nominee is consolidation.
.. He’s implying something else: that Trump would not listen to his military, that he’d turn a diplomatic dispute into a casus belli; that he is not to be trusted with the power of the presidency not because of what he thinks, but because of how he behaves.
.. It is rooted in the idea that Trump has the instincts of a narcissistic bully, unable to even imagine that anyone might have a reasonable basis for disagreeing with him
.. What is haunting a significant number of Republicans is that they are on the verge of putting someone in the Oval Office whose character and temperament make him unfit for the job.
.. Unlike so many in the GOP base, who see in Trump’s behavior a fearless willingness to take on a corrupt political system, these Republicans are seeing signs that he is a dangerous figure, not for what he thinks, but for who he is. And no amount of speeches read from a Teleprompter reciting anodyne pieties is likely to change that.
A Party Agrift
So why didn’t any of Mr. Trump’s primary opponents manage to make an issue of his sleazy business career? Were they just incompetent, or is there something structural about the modern Republican Party that makes it unable to confront grifters?
The answer, I’d argue, is the latter.
.. Sometimes it just seems to reflect a judgment on the part of the grifters that people who can be persuaded that President Obama is Muslim can also be persuaded that there are easy money-making opportunities the establishment doesn’t want you to know about.
.. If your fundamental premise is that the profit motive is always good and government is the root of all evil, if you treat any suggestion that, say, some bankers misbehaved in the run-up to the financial crisis as proof that the speaker is anti-business if not a full-blown socialist, how can you condemn anyone’s business practices?
.. Republicans in Congress are going all-out in efforts to repeal the so-called “fiduciary rule” for retirement advisers, a new rule requiring that they serve the interests of their clients, and not receive kickbacks for steering them into bad investments. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has even made repealing that rule part of his “anti-poverty plan.” So the G.O.P. is in effect defending the right of the financial industry to mislead its customers, which makes it hard to attack the likes of Donald Trump.
.. They’ll also claim that Mr. Trump doesn’t reflect their party’s values. But the truth is that in a very deep sense he does. And that’s why they couldn’t stop him.