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VOX
Thursday night's Republican debate clarified that despite all the talk, no genuine coherent party-wide effort to stop Trump is going to happen.
The debate ended with everyone on stage — people who'd called Trump a con man and a fake, a liar unfit to serve, ignorant, etc. — agreeing that of course they would support him if he wins. But even before that, in their squabbling and inconsistent messages the non-Trump candidates showed that #NeverTrump isn't really a thing for the people actually in the race.
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| John Parra/WireImage/Getty |
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To secure a majority of delegates, Rubio would need to win two-thirds of the remaining delegates left, which is totally unrealistic. Kasich is even further behind. Cruz is a bit closer, but he's already won his best state (Texas) and doesn't have a lot of growth opportunity. The only hope the establishment has now is for anti-Trump voters to follow Mitt Romney's suggestion and vote tactically in hopes of denying Trump the nomination.
The last best hope, in short, is that the candidates will stop running for president and start running to stop Trump from becoming president. It didn't happen, and even if it does the GOP has set itself up to enter the general election season hopelessly divided.
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| George Frey/Getty |
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The bottom line is that the Republican Party is now on track for a major disaster. One possibility is that Trump will eek out a narrow victory against a divided field in the face of dogged opposition from his own party's elite. Far too many anti-Trump things have been said at this point to take them all back, and the divisions inside the party will hurt Trump badly in the general election.
Democrats, though they should avoid complacency about Trump, can also confidently view him as a weaker-than-average nominee. Presidential candidates who run at the head of a united party have no guarantee of victory, but candidates who run without the wholehearted support of their party's prominent leaders and mid-ranking professional staffers tend to lose.
But the alternative is also disastrous.
If the Republicans running against Trump actually did cooperate with some explicit or implicit alternative in mind, then they could assemble an anti-Trump majority and hand the nomination to their champion. But instead they are all running independent, entirely uncoordinated campaigns and simply hoping to work out the nomination via a chaotic convention floor fight of the sort we haven't seen for two generations.
Nobody knows who or what would emerge from that, but one guarantee is that it would leave Trump and his supporters enraged and demoralized at what they will see as an underhanded theft of a nomination they earned.
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| Better days, in 2012. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images |
After an extended series of debates in which nobody (except, on occasion, for poor Jeb Bush) really attacked Trump we have entered a phase in which nobody does anything except attack Trump.
But for all their attacks, they are not really joining the argument that Trump started over the proposition that the GOP should ditch elements of free market ideology and embrace populist nationalism instead.
Trump's rivals don't want to engage in this argument for the same reason that Trump has rocketed to the polls — most rank-and-file Republicans agree with Trump. So instead, they bite at him over secondary issues — old campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton, Trump University — or try to point out problems with Trump that also apply to the other candidates. It was shocking, for example, to see Fox News anchors pointing out that Trump's tax plan isn't remotely paid for. This is entirely true, but it's equally true of every other GOP tax plan of the past 15 years and it never seemed to bother Fox before....Whether the establishment candidates want to talk about it or not, the delegate math has now reached a point where a major intra-party blowup is essentially inevitable.
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| Mark Peterson/Redux |
JOHN CASSIDY, NEW YORKER
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For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on.....[Trump,] in promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.
For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on. Trump,...In promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.
Would his strategy work? Probably not. But in talking about safeguarding Social Security, forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices, preventing people who don’t have health insurance from dying in the streets, and eliminating tax breaks that favor hedge-fund and private-equity managers (such as Romney), Trump is using the language of economic populism in a manner that none of his Republican rivals can match. Beholden to their campaigns backers, they are forced to confine themselves to the standard guff about cutting taxes, loosening regulations, and encouraging enterprise.
In the past, Republicans cleverly obfuscated the regressive nature of their economic platform by appealing to social issues, and quietly playing the racism/xenophobia card. Trump, however, is beating his rivals at this game, too. On social issues, he has demonstrated that you don’t have to be a Bible-thumping pro-lifer to attract the vote of evangelicals. On immigration, by promising to round up and send home eleven million undocumented workers, he has trumped even the Cruz wing of the G.O.P. And in playing to white hate groups and other racists he is doing what other Republicans, particularly in the Deep South, have been doing for generations. But, while many of these Party regulars used a dog whistle, Trump is using a foghorn.
In the conservative intellectual world, there are people with a clear view of what is happening. “More than anything else, Trump has demonstrated that white working-class voters have minds of their own,” Reihan Salam, the executive editor of National Review, wrote in Slate earlier this week. “Why wouldn’t they be furious? The Republican failure to defend the interests of working-class voters, and to speak to their hopes and fears, has made Trump’s authoritarianism dangerously alluring.” Salam went on, “There is only one way forward in the post-Trump era. The GOP can no longer survive as the party of tax cuts for the rich. It must reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families.”
Good luck with that one, Reihan. To follow the program he and other reformicons have laid out, the Republican Party would have to accept that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay; extend tax credits for low-income households; offer workers “wage insurance” against the possibility of losing their jobs; invest more in public infrastructure; and vow not to introduce any further tax cuts for households earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more. In short, the G.O.P. would have to move beyond Reaganomics, ditching the pretense that tax cuts and an untethered free market will produce enduring prosperity for ordinary Americans.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see anything along these lines at the Our Principles PAC’s Web site, or in Romney’s speech (which my colleague Amy Davidson wrote about), or in anything anybody associated with the stop-Trump movement has said over the past few days. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait commented on Twitter on Thursday, “#NeverTrump, at its core, is people satisfied that the Republican Party is fundamentally sound.” And that, in the final analysis, is why they are unlikely to be able to see off Trump’s insurgency.
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For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on.....[Trump,] in promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.
For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on. Trump,...In promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.
Would his strategy work? Probably not. But in talking about safeguarding Social Security, forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices, preventing people who don’t have health insurance from dying in the streets, and eliminating tax breaks that favor hedge-fund and private-equity managers (such as Romney), Trump is using the language of economic populism in a manner that none of his Republican rivals can match. Beholden to their campaigns backers, they are forced to confine themselves to the standard guff about cutting taxes, loosening regulations, and encouraging enterprise.
In the past, Republicans cleverly obfuscated the regressive nature of their economic platform by appealing to social issues, and quietly playing the racism/xenophobia card. Trump, however, is beating his rivals at this game, too. On social issues, he has demonstrated that you don’t have to be a Bible-thumping pro-lifer to attract the vote of evangelicals. On immigration, by promising to round up and send home eleven million undocumented workers, he has trumped even the Cruz wing of the G.O.P. And in playing to white hate groups and other racists he is doing what other Republicans, particularly in the Deep South, have been doing for generations. But, while many of these Party regulars used a dog whistle, Trump is using a foghorn.
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| Mark Peterson/Redux |
In the conservative intellectual world, there are people with a clear view of what is happening. “More than anything else, Trump has demonstrated that white working-class voters have minds of their own,” Reihan Salam, the executive editor of National Review, wrote in Slate earlier this week. “Why wouldn’t they be furious? The Republican failure to defend the interests of working-class voters, and to speak to their hopes and fears, has made Trump’s authoritarianism dangerously alluring.” Salam went on, “There is only one way forward in the post-Trump era. The GOP can no longer survive as the party of tax cuts for the rich. It must reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families.”
Good luck with that one, Reihan. To follow the program he and other reformicons have laid out, the Republican Party would have to accept that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay; extend tax credits for low-income households; offer workers “wage insurance” against the possibility of losing their jobs; invest more in public infrastructure; and vow not to introduce any further tax cuts for households earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more. In short, the G.O.P. would have to move beyond Reaganomics, ditching the pretense that tax cuts and an untethered free market will produce enduring prosperity for ordinary Americans.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see anything along these lines at the Our Principles PAC’s Web site, or in Romney’s speech (which my colleague Amy Davidson wrote about), or in anything anybody associated with the stop-Trump movement has said over the past few days. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait commented on Twitter on Thursday, “#NeverTrump, at its core, is people satisfied that the Republican Party is fundamentally sound.” And that, in the final analysis, is why they are unlikely to be able to see off Trump’s insurgency.