if conservative Establishmentarians fear and loathe the coarseness of Trump’s rhetoric, they need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask why they didn’t object to it when it was helping them raise money and elect Republicans.
.. I think it’s also true that Democrats who don’t object to the foul rhetoric from left-wing activists are going to come to regret it when it gets turned on them one day. On campus today, you can see the old-school liberals shouted down by the young radicals. Sooner or later there is going to be a left-wing candidate who does not have the decency of a Bernie Sanders — and he’s not only going to be taking aim at Republicans.
Trump victory would actually prove worse for the Republican Party in the long run than another Democratic presidency
According to Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, a Trump victory would actually prove worse for the Republican Party in the long run than another Democratic presidency.
.. Trump could run and lose, and the Republican Party could potentially move on from that. If he runs and wins, that’s really the nightmare scenario.”
Can We Please Retire the Notion That Donald Trump Is Hijacking the Republican Party?
Even now, many Republican elites, hedging their bets and putting any principles in escrow, have yet to meaningfully condemn Trump. McCain says he would support him if he gets his party’s nomination. The Establishment campaign guru who figured the Trump problem would solve itself moved on to anti-Trump advocacy and is now seeking to unify the party behind Trump, waving the same white flag of surrender as Chris Christie. Every major party leader — Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, Kevin McCarthy — has followed McCain’s example and vowed to line up behind whoever leads the ticket, Trump included. Even after the recurrent violence at Trump rallies boiled over into chaos in Chicago, none of his surviving presidential rivals would disown their own pledges to support him in November. Trump is not Hitler, but those who think he is, from Glenn Beck to Louis C.K., should note that his Vichy regime is already in place in Washington, D.C.
.. Though the Republican Establishment is routinely referenced as a potential firewall in almost every media consideration of Trump’s unexpected rise, it increasingly looks like a myth, a rhetorical device, or, at best, a Potemkin village. It has little power to do anything beyond tardily raising stop-Trump money that it spends neither wisely nor well and generating an endless torrent of anti-Trump sermons for publications that most Trump voters don’t read. The Establishment’s prize creation, Marco Rubio — a bot candidate programmed with patriotic Reaganisms, unreconstructed Bush-Cheney foreign-policy truculence, a slick television vibe, and a dash of ethnicity — was the biggest product flop to be marketed by America’s Fortune 500 stratum since New Coke.
.. you’ll see that the objections of Trump’s Establishment critics have several common threads. Trump is a vulgarian (true). He has no fixed ideology or coherent policy portfolio (true). He repeatedly and brazenly makes things up (true). He wantonly changes his views (true). He is not recognizable as “a real Republican” (false).
.. Romney is a man who made up so many things in 2012 that his own pollster was moved to declare that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
.. But just over a year ago the Republican congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana conceded that he had committed an even greater infraction than Trump’s by speaking before a Duke-affiliated white-supremacy group in 2002. Scalise had been invited to do so by two longtime Duke aides, at least one of whom was a friend, but he nonetheless maintained, just as Trump did, that he had no idea who these people were or what they stood for. Even hard-line conservatives doubted Scalise’s story — Charles Krauthammer called it “implausible,” and Erick Erickson asked, “How the hell does somebody show up at a David Duke–organized event in 2002 and claim ignorance?” — but the incident was hardly an impediment to Scalise’s advancement in the GOP. He was rewarded with the No. 3 post in the House leadership, majority whip, which he retains today.
.. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan traveled from the 1980 Republican convention to give a speech on states’ rights to a virtually all-white audience just outside the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, best known as the site where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil-rights workers in 1964. Reagan was no Klan sympathizer, but, like Trump, he knew how to pander to voters who might be.
.. Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in his first run for Senate in Texas because he thought it “trampled” the Constitution. When he first ran for president in 1980, he hired Charles Snider, the longtime campaign manager for George Wallace, the populist and racist demagogue who increasingly seems to be Trump’s role model. Eight years after that, Bush hired Thurmond’s protégé Lee Atwater to run his race-infected campaign against Michael Dukakis. (Atwater rhetorically linked Willie Horton, a black murderer and rapist featured in a pro-Bush pac’s ad campaign, to Jesse Jackson.)
.. You could deny Trump the nomination by playing dirty tricks, but he’s definitely going into the convention convinced, along with all of his supporters, that he’s the legitimate nominee. And you have to assume it can’t be taken from him legitimately, because there’s nobody to beat him! So it will have to be stolen. We know Trump can get on TV anytime he wants for as long as he wants. What would he do with his time for the next several months after the convention? Seems to me he’d use it to scorched-earth-destroy the party.
.. George W. Bush journeyed to Bob Jones University to deliver a campaign speech in 2000, when it still banned interracial dating; that same year, he refused to support taking down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia, where it had been raised in 1961 in resistance to desegregation.
.. What separates Trump from such stalwarts of the Republican Establishment as the Bushes is that instead of perfuming his nativist or racial pandering with disingenuous phraseology like compassionate conservatism and kinder, gentler and right to rise, he dispenses with the niceties, or, as he would put it, is brave enough to be politically incorrect.
.. Thomas Frank, writing in The Guardian, has mocked the liberal pundit Nicholas Kristof for devoting a column to a dialogue with an “imaginary” Trump voter rather than speaking to an actual one ..
.. If Trump has one indisputable talent, it’s for spotting the weakness in others (though not himself).
.. In his devastating populist put-down of Romney in 2008, Mike Huckabee described himself as a prospective “president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.”
.. That Trump, who’s literally made a show of firing people on national television, escapes this stain is a testament to the power of his crude everyman shtick.
.. the percentage of Republican voters who call themselves “very conservative” has jumped from 19 percent to 33 percent since 1995.
.. Trump refuses to kowtow to the Establishment—and it is precisely that defiance, as articulated in his ridicule of Romney and Jeb Bush and Megyn Kelly and Little Marco, that endears him to Republican voters and some Democrats as well. The so-called battle for the “soul” of the Republican Party is a battle over power, not ideology
.. It’s the classic populist pitch, and it will not end well for those who invest their faith in Trump. He cares about no one but himself and would reward his own class with extravagant tax cuts like any Republican president.
.. You’ll notice that just about the only Republican politicians or campaign operatives who are vocal in the #NeverTrump claque are either congressmen who are retiring this year, party potentates who have long been out of power (Christine Todd Whitman, Ken Mehlman, J. C. Watts, Mel Martinez), or, as Trump would say, losers (anyone who served in the campaign hierarchies of Romney or Jeb, any neocon who served as a Bush-Cheney architect of the Iraq War). Everyone else will keep on doing what senators and governors like Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions and Paul LePage have steadily been doing: They will appease Trump or surrender to him altogether on the most favorable terms they can, for “the good” of the party and the ticket in November. They will make their peace with the art of the deal.
On Invincible Ignorance
Ever since income inequality began its sharp rise in the 1980s, one favorite conservative excuse has been that it doesn’t mean anything, because economic positions change all the time. People who are rich this year might not be rich next year, so the gap between the rich and the rest doesn’t matter, right?
Well, it’s true that people move up and down the economic ladder, and apologists for inequality love to cite statistics showing that many people who are in the top 1 percent in any given year are out of that category the next year.
.. This is why you shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old defunct orthodoxy.
.. What we’re getting instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to rethink its premises.