There are Republican traditionalists rooting for Trump over Cruz, and the thinking of some goes like this:
.. He’ll embarrass the party and roil the country but maybe not cost Republicans key congressional races. Besides which, he scrambles all rules and all precedents so thoroughly that you never know. Victory isn’tunthinkable, and better a Republican who’s allergic to caution, oblivious to actual information and altogether dangerous than a Democrat who’ll dole out all the plum administration jobs to her own party.
.. “Cruz is a disaster for the party,” one of them told me. “Trump is a disaster for the country.”
.. “If Cruz is the nominee, we get wiped out,” he added, with a resigned voice. “And we rebuild.” The party needs that anyway.
.. In fact, a few Republican traditionalists have insisted to me that a Cruz nomination and subsequent defeat would have a long-term upside. It would put to rest the stubborn argument, promoted by Cruz and others on the party’s far right, that the G.O.P. has lost presidential elections over recent decades because nominees like Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t conservative enough.
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present
The default presumption about populism holds that its appeal peaks in times of economic crisis, and this is partly true, as suggested by the populist upsurge of the eighteen-nineties, when disgruntled farmers transformed their anger at banks seizing their land into the populist People’s Party, and the insurgent campaign of Ross Perot, a century later. But, in America, populism is driven not solely by distress at economic malaise but also by fears inspired by racial progress—and the belief that these two things are synonymous.
.. When the Democratic Party—motivated in part by Wallace’s left-flank candidacy and partly by the Great Migration, which had delivered millions of Republican-leaning African-Americans to Democratic strongholds in the North—adopted a strong civil-rights plank at its convention, Southern segregationists bolted and formed the States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) Party.
.. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frequent conflicts with the Southern wing of his party hinged not on the creation of a welfare state but on segregationist demands that only one race be the beneficiary of it.
.. Last summer, large numbers of Sanders supporters took offense at the serial disruption of his campaign events by Black Lives Matter protesters. In retrospect, they appear to have done Sanders a favor. To the extent that his brand of populism is viable, it is dependent on the kind of cross-racial appeal to common economic despair that Henry Wallace understood nearly seventy years ago. In forcing his campaign to court African-Americans earlier and more aggressively than it otherwise would have, Black Lives Matter facilitated Sanders’s upset of Clinton in Michigan—a state where he garnered nearly a third of black votes. The civil-rights movement in which Sanders was a proud participant was itself a response to the identity populism of Southern whites.
.. George Wallace .. blamed his own (relative) racial leniency for his loss in Alabama’s 1958 Democratic gubernatorial primary and reportedly told an aide that he would “never be outniggered again.”
.. Trump’s brand of populism is cemented in the ideal that he will not be out-Muslimed, out-Latinoed, or out-baited regarding any other signpost of American change. And it’s selling. They are all Dixiecrats now.
Trump Clarifies, and It’s Worse
Still, it was interesting to learn that Marco Rubio doesn’t care about climate change, considering he lives in a city that seems to be submerging rather rapidly.
.. But the one thing he didn’t backtrack on was his recent statement to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us.” There were lots of openings. Trump was practically invited to say he meant only radical Islam. Or even to repeat one of his traditional softeners, like claiming he has Muslim friends. (“They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”)
A King in His Castle: How Donald Trump Lives, From His Longtime Butler
If the cap was white, the staff noticed, the boss was in a good mood. If it was red, it was best to stay away.
.. Mr. Senecal, with horn-rimmed glasses, a walrus mustache and a white pocket kerchief in his black jacket, seems to reflect his boss’s worldview: He worries about attacks by Islamic terrorists and is critical of Mr. Trump’s ex-wives.
.. Mr. Senecal encounters Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey lounging on a couch under the living room’s 21-foot gold-leafed ceiling, or chatting with Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as he exits the luxurious Spanish Room.
.. In the early years, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka slept in the same children’s suite that Dina Merrill, an actress and a daughter of Mrs. Post, occupied in the 1930s. Mr. Trump liked to tell guests that the nursery rhyme-themed tiles in the room were made by a young Walt Disney.
“You don’t like that, do you?” Mr. Trump would say when he caught Mr. Senecal rolling his eyes. The house historian would protest that it was not true.
“Who cares?” Mr. Trump would respond with a laugh.
.. When she died in 1973, Mrs. Post left the house to the United States government with the intent that it would become a presidential retreat. But the upkeep proved too expensive, and ownership was transferred back to Mrs. Post’s daughters, who unloaded it to Mr. Trump for less than $10 million in 1985.
.. These days, what really seems to bug Mr. Trump is the sound of planes over the property. Whereas Mrs. Post ensured that the nearby airport would divert flights away from the estate during her stays, the same courtesy has not been extended to Mr. Trump, and the constant roar of engines “drives him nuts,” Mr. Senecal said.
.. But he also added of the foreigners: “They’re so good. They are so professional. These local people,” he trailed off, making a disapproving face.
.. The ballroom later hosted an 80th birthday party for Maya Angelou, thrown by Oprah Winfrey, during which part of the hall was set aside for a “religious ceremony with the hooting and the hollering,” Mr. Senecal recalled.