George Will: If Trump wins the nomination, prepare for the end of the conservative party

Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”1

Well. Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop.

But by his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.

.. One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

Frum: Trump’s Executive Intelligence

The immigration issue cuts deep not because Republicans are so nativist, but because so many Republicans have come to fear that their leaders have turned anti-native.Speaking to the Faith and Freedom conference in Washington in 2013, Jeb Bush seemed to hold Americans up to unfavorable comparison with newcomers:

Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they have more intact families. They bring a younger population. The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system to allow for people to come, to learn English, to play by our rules, to embrace our values, and to pursue their dreams in our country with a vengeance—to create more opportunities for all of us. This is a conservative idea. If we do this, we will rebuild our country in a way that will allow us to grow. If we don’t do it, we will be in decline—because the productivity of this country is dependent on young people that are able to work hard.

That last line of the quote seemed the most insulting of all: Left on their own, the descendants of the people who built the country lack what it takes to keep the country great.

.. Trump voters, by contrast, come from the much more numerous ranks of those who remain worse off today than they were in 1999. They want a strong leader who can and will keep faith with them. Who else in the GOP contest can plausibly make that claim?

Donald Trump Scraps the Usual Campaign Playbook, Including TV Ads

His advisers have not revealed the existence of any pollsters on their staff or any advertising team. He has no real research operation to examine his own vulnerabilities or those of his opponents, and, based on Federal Election Commission filings, little in the way of a voter contact operation to identify and turn out his supporters.

.. If Mr. Trump’s team had researched Mr. Cruz’s weaknesses, for example, then incorporated them in Mr. Trump’s heavily covered speeches and ceaseless television appearances, as well as in paid advertising, he may have been able to pre-empt or at least slow the senator’s rise there.

.. In 2000, when Mr. Trump was toying with a possible third-party presidential candidacy, he had a contract with the motivational speaker Tony Robbins to make $1 million for giving speeches at some of Mr. Robbins’s seminars. Fortune reported that Mr. Trump had engineered his political events so that he would give speeches in the same cities.

“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Mr. Trump told the magazine.

In the most recent period for which there are records, the third quarter of the year, Mr. Trump raised just under $4 million from donors. He contributed only $100,779 of his own money in that quarter, and has lent roughly $2 million since the start of the campaign.

But some of the money Mr. Trump’s campaign spends is on reimbursing him: His largest expense in the last filing period, $723,000, was on a company he owns, Tag Air, which controls the fleet of aircraft he uses to fly to all his events.