May 9, 2016

REPUBLICAN PARTY UNRAVELS OVER TRUMP'S EXPECTED NOMINATION.









NY TIMES

By the end of his first 100 days as the nation’s 45th leader, the wall with Mexico would be designed, the immigration ban on Muslims would be in place, the audit of the Federal Reserve would be underway and plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act would be in motion, Donald Trump pledged in an interview with a New York Times. 

 Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly....leading Republicans, fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.

 The ties between Republican elites — elected officials, donors and Washington insiders — and voters have actually been fraying for years. Traditional power brokers long preached limited-government conservatism and wanted to pursue an immigration overhaul, entitlement cuts, free trade and a hawkish foreign policy, and nominees like John McCain and Mitt Romney largely embraced that agenda. 

Ty Wright for The New York Times

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For 12 consecutive years, polls have indicated that Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, and Republicans have been especially vulnerable to a political campaign like Mr. Trump’s that seeks to channel voter anger. In every state where the question was asked in exit polls during the primary season, 50 percent or more of Republicans said they felt betrayed by their leaders.
The adhesive that once held Republicans together — a shared commitment to a strong national defense and limited government — was weakened by the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But internal divisions were papered over when new, unifying threats emerged after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
It was not until near the end of President George W. Bush’s second term that those fissures broke open again, first with Mr. Bush’s attempt at an immigration overhaul, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and then after the financial rescue of big banks from the 2008 financial collapse.
Alongside the turbulent economy were signs of something more profound plaguing blue-collar white communities, which have increasingly become core Republican constituencies: an increase in children born to single parents, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans.
“The economic deprivation of the last 30 years for working-class whites, combined with growing social isolation, was really dry tinder,” said Robert D. Putnam, the Harvard political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone.” And Mr. Trump, Mr. Putnam contended, “lit a spark.”
“He constructed a series of scapegoats that these folks would find plausible,” said Mr. Putnam, citing Mr. Trump’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants. “He was willing to say things that might have always been popular, but you couldn’t say it.”
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Getty

 WASHINGTON POST

Three streams of Republicans are likely to oppose Trump: those to his right on trade and government spending; neoconservatives who oppose his “America First” noninterventionist foreign policy; and the remaining moderates and others in the party alarmed over his outbursts on, among other things, torture, immigration, race, women, Latinos, Muslims, Vladimir Putin and, lest we forget, Obama’s birthplace, Ted Cruz’s father and John McCain’s military service. These honorable and brave conservatives should not lose their nerve under pressure from conventional politicians or the very lobbyists and big donors Trump likes to denounce.

POLITICO

Donald Trump on Tuesday night assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee and declared: “We want to bring unity to the Republican Party. We have to bring unity.”
Three days later, the GOP is tearing itself apart.

Drew Angerer for The New York Times
Friday brought another day of incredible division and revolt with Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham falling in line not behind Trump, but behind House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said a day earlier that he cannot yet support the brash real estate mogul as his party’s standard-bearer.
Trump, instead of trying to make peace, lashed out.
He fired off a vicious statement, calling Graham an “embarrassment” with “zero credibility.”
Now that Trump’s the presumptive nominee, a full-bore GOP civil war has broken out, dividing the party into factions that are providing fresh headaches for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.


Priebus said the speaker is “being honest, and I know how he feels.”
“And so, I'm comfortable with the idea that [a meeting between Ryan and Trump] is going to take place.
Ryan’s office announced later on Friday that the high-stakes meeting will happen next Thursday with Priebus in tow.