“Donald Is Trumping The #NeverTrumps”: Can Ted Cruz Or John Kasich Stop The Trump Train?
Terrible tag-team, murder-suicide or surrender? Those are the options available for the ill-named, ill-executed and probably ill-fated #NeverTrump movement.
The Ides of March were unkind to retiring Sen. Marco Rubio, whose hope-not-fear, praise the lord farewell speech could just as easily have been a brief Et tu, Florida? Then fall Marco! Rubio had played Brutus to Jeb Bush, his former governor and mentor, and then it was retired reality TV star Donald Trump, who doth bestride the party like a colossus, who administered the coup de grace against Rubio in the Sunshine State.
That reduced the GOP field to three finalists, only one of whom – Trump – has a clear and realistic path to an acceptance speech on the final night of the GOP convention in Cleveland. In addition to Florida, he picked up wins in Illinois and North Carolina and was in a tight battle for Missouri.
The one place he fell clearly short was in Ohio, where the popular, two-term governor – John Kasich – held serve and survived the kind of existential test that took Rubio down. But, as I argued last week would be the case, dopey Don won for losing: Kasich’s victory “guarantees at least two not-Trumps remain in the field … with Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz splitting the non-Trump portion of the pie.”
Do you want more happy news, Trump-ists? Savor this: Per The Washington Post’s Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy, the two states that have gotten seen the biggest anti-Trump independent expenditure efforts thus far (or at least through March 13, when the latest Federal Election Commission records were available to them) were Florida, where at least $15.7 million was spent, and Illinois, where another $5.3 million was poured in. Guess in which two states Trump ran up the biggest margins Tuesday night? That’s right – the Sunshine State and the Land of Lincoln, both places where Trump scored double-digit wins.
So where does that leave team #NeverTrump? With a series of unappealing options. In spite of Kasich’s win, this is arguably a two-man race now between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is the only other candidate anywhere near the real estate tycoon in terms of delegates. But Cruz faces a number of problems, starting with his own alienating personality and approach to politics. The non-Trump GOP may yet coalesce around him, but it’ll do so holding its collective nose. Anyone who hadn’t made a virtue of accumulating enemies in Washington would already have the not-Trump field to himself by now.
And the time it took to winnow the field can be marked off in the Southern states and more heavily religious electorates that have cast their ballots already. Here’s where the campaign trail leads for Republicans: the Arizona primary and Utah caucus next week; Wisconsin two weeks later and New York two weeks after that; and then a week later most of the remaining Northeastern states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Where does Cruz notch his next victory? Trump’s going to be strong in Arizona, with former Gov. Jan Brewer and immigration nut Sheriff Joe Arpaio in his corner. Maybe the freshman Texas senator can score a victory in Utah but the map looks bleak after that. Can he go oh-for-April and survive until Indiana on May 3?
As FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik observed Tuesday night, polls show that Trump is stronger vis a vis Cruz in states that haven’t voted yet:
Trump led Cruz by 17 points in places with votes on or before March 15, according to data provided by the online-polling company SurveyMonkey, based on its interviews of 8,624 Republican registered voters from Feb. 29 to March 6. But Trump’s lead expanded to 24 points in places that vote later.
In a hypothetical head-to-head against Cruz, Trump led by 1 point in places that had voted by today, but by 8 points everywhere else. As our delegate tracker indicates, Cruz needed a lead over Trump by now to be on track for a majority of delegates, because the voting gets tougher for him from here.
And that brings us back to Kasich. Appearing on CNN after winning the Buckeye State, the governor was spouting some fairly high octane spin: “I may go to the convention before this is over with more delegates than anybody else,” he said. “There’s 1,000 yet to pick.” Here’s the thing: Even if Kasich – who has less delegates than the dear-departed Rubio – wins those 1,000 or so delegates, he won’t get to the 1,237 needed for the nomination. And the guy whose first win in 31 tries just came in his home state isn’t poised to win the next 1,000 delegates anyway.
At this point Kasich’s sole hope – and arguably sole purpose – is to deny Trump delegates where Cruz is ill-equipped to do so. It’s the carve-up-the-map strategy offered last month by 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove laid it out on Fox Tuesday night: “Look at the contests coming up: We have bunch of Western states where Ted Cruz is probably likely to do well,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of Northeastern states where he hasn’t been doing well where he hasn’t been doing well where John Kasich has done well. So you’ve got Cruz who could cover you know Utah and Arizona and Montana [on June 7] and you could have Kasich who could challenge Trump in places like Connecticut and Delaware. … It gets us to an even more contested convention. In chaos is opportunity for the little guy.”
This is what we’ve come to: Rove is trying to chart a path into chaos for his party in the hopes of benefiting the GOP establishment, or the “little guy” as he puts it. This is, by the way, the third of the five stages of Trump: the first two are the convictions that he could be stopped before or during the primaries and the third is the hope of a convention battle.
So the #NeverTrump-ists and their allies – specifically the Cruz and Kasich campaigns – have to decide quickly whether the last not-Trumps can either tag-team the front-runner before he recedes entirely from their view or at least stay out of each other’s way; the alternative is to continue competing with each other in the grim game of winnowing while more contests slide inexorably past them into Trump’s column.
Because sooner is becoming later and before they know it, the #NeverTrump will be faced with its own existential test: Whether to morph into #NeverTrumpUntilHeFacesHillary.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, March 17, 2016
“Walking In David Duke’s Shadow”: Trump Treads A Well-Worn Path Of Bigotry
It’s happened before. The Republican establishment, recognizing the danger that the bigoted, demagogic candidate posed to the party, roundly opposed his election. On Election Day, however, the candidate captured a majority of the white vote. It was no fluke, as his odious views were well known. He had even once held elected office. A column I wrote almost 25 years ago refreshed my memory.
The candidate was David Duke, an ex-Klansman, neo-Nazi and former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991 and lost by a landslide to Democrat Edwin Edwards, thanks to a phenomenal black turnout.
Then, as now with Donald Trump’s campaign, Duke wooed economically discontented and politically alienated white voters by playing to their fears and resentments. Duke’s supporters believed back then that the quality of their lives — financial situation, job security, personal safety — was no better than when President George H.W. Bush took office in 1989, maybe even worse. As a result, they were frustrated, insecure, angry and ready to blame someone. So they gravitated to Duke, a man they believed would vanquish their foes.
The remarkable thing about the “Dukies,” as some of his supporters described themselves, is that they hardly resembled the caricature that might have been drawn of people who openly sympathized with a racist and anti-Semite.
I was in the midst of a large gathering of Dukies on election eve 1991 in a packed, smoke-filled American Legion Hall in the nearly all-white Metairie, La., House district that Duke had represented. I was also among Duke’s crowd the next day at his election night rally in Baton Rouge.
They resembled the enthusiastic white women and men who attend Trump’s rallies. Duke’s supporters were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, along with many senior citizens, more of them wearing jackets and ties and dresses than cowboy boots and jeans.
As with those in today’s Trump crowds, Dukies’ attention and emotions were riveted on their candidate and against the devils he excoriated: criminals who rape, rob and steal; politicians who only want more government and taxes; the liberal news media that try to tell them what to think.
A few of Duke’s 1991 themes echo today.
Said Duke, “Our environment is being threatened by massive immigration.” Sound familiar?
Duke on his trade policy and what he would say to the Japanese: “If you no buy our rice, we no buy your cars.” Is this where Trump gets it?
Duke on values and religious freedom: “I believe that Christianity is the underpinning of this country. . . . And if we lose its underpinning, I think we’re going to lose the foundations of America.”
A similar message is being delivered by at least one top Trump supporter.
Warming up the crowd this week before Trump’s appearance in Hickory, N.C., Pastor Mark Burns said: “Bernie Sanders . . . doesn’t believe in God. How in the world are we going to let Bernie — I mean, really? Listen, Bernie gotta get saved. He gotta meet Jesus. He gotta have a coming-to-Jesus meeting.”
Donald Trump, the outrageous, is no original. David Duke first trod this path.
But Trump is taking his campaign to places Duke never dreamed of.
Duke thought he knew what was bugging white America. White nationalism was his answer.
Trump knows what the United States needs. His answer: Donald Trump.
Trump’s aim seems not to be just the Republican presidential nomination. He clearly wants to be an American ruler, above political party, Washington politics and the demands of democratic compromise. Popularity and admiration will bind him to his followers. He’s so sure of his followers — “many, many millions of people,” as he puts it — that he predicts riots if his path to capturing the nomination is blocked by the GOP establishment.
Trump feeds off a zealotry born out of his promise to reawaken America and restore the country’s greatness. He promises to make his followers strong, instill them with pride, give them hope and make American power dominant in the world.
That kind of thing, too, we have seen before.
From der Spiegel: “There was the impact of the expanded Führer cult on Hitler himself. . . . He became, so it was said, more dismissive than earlier of the slightest criticism, more convinced of his own infallibility. His speeches started to develop a more pronounced messianic tone. He saw himself . . . as chosen by Providence. When, following the successful Rhineland coup, he remarked, in one of his ‘election’ speeches: ‘I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker,’ it was more than a piece of campaign rhetoric. Hitler truly believed it. He increasingly felt infallible.”
It has happened before.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 18, 2016
“The Party May Have No Power At All”: The Republican Convention Is Looking More And More Predictable By The Day
When we first heard talk of a “brokered” or “contested” convention during the 2016 invisible primary, it was just a quadrennial amusement, mostly associated with the sheer size of the early GOP presidential field. Wouldn’t it be cool, pundits thought, if none of these jokers can get a majority and we get to see a real convention instead of an infomercial?
As the GOP field was quickly winnowed, a whole new and more serious rationale for a contested convention came into view: a convention with no “putative nominee” running the show, and moreover, with an opposition still fighting to stop the front-runner. Suddenly, a knowledge of the usually boring and not terribly significant convention rules and procedures became a very valuable commodity in Beltway chatter, and all sorts of lurid scenarios blossomed in the fevered imaginations of would-be “brokers” and their journalistic fans.
Initially, the vision was of a convention with big, brawling, unlimited deliberative powers that could do any damn thing it wanted, particularly after the legal obligation to follow primary and caucus results was impatiently sloughed off at the end of a pro forma first ballot. So party elites didn’t want Donald Trump as the nominee? No problem, so long as he didn’t come to Cleveland with a majority of delegates bound to him. And even then, maybe the elites could manipulate the rules and disappear that majority! Anything seemed possible: A Romney nomination! A Paul Ryan nomination! A heroic effort by the party’s wise leaders to turn a general-election disaster into one long snake dance to the White House!
But as the reality of a contested convention has drawn nearer, in a context where it would likely involve Donald Trump as the favorite of a plurality but not a majority of delegates, the willingness of party elites to pull off some backstage coup in Cleveland has notably abated. Earlier this week, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who would under normal procedures chair the convention, came very close to a Sherman statement (named after William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1884 disclaimer that “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”), ruling out not only himself but any other “dark horse” nominee who did not compete in the primaries:
“I’ve been really clear about this,” he said. “If you want to be president, you should run for president. We should select our nominee from among the people who are running for president. Clear and simple. So no, I am not going to be the president. I am not going to be the nominee.” He added, “I am not going to become the president through Cleveland.”
Now today a new report from NBC based on interviews with members of the RNC Rules Committee showed horror at the idea of a “dark horse” spreading rapidly among these ultra-insiders:
“Ridiculous — not happening,” said one Rules Committee member, asked about the prospect of candidates getting on the ballot who did not run this year.
“There’s no way in hell that any of these candidates — who have worked this hard and spent this much money — are going to say, ‘OK, now, for the good of the party, I’ll sit down and let’s bring back Mitt Romney,'” said the insider. “That’s a fantasy world — there’s zero chance of that happening.”
Another committee member said creating a path for a new candidate would lead to a party meltdown …
Indeed, most of the 19 Rules Committee members reached by MSNBC opposed any rule enabling new candidates to run at the convention. Only three backed a rule allowing new candidates to run.
So if it’s considered an outrageous offense to primary voters to bypass all of the candidates they’ve voted for, you have to figure at some point it could prove toxic to elevate a candidate who has been regularly defeated as well. And that could become a fatal problem for John Kasich, who is extremely likely to arrive in Cleveland in third place in pledged delegates. Is the convention really going to nominate the left-most (as perceived, anyway) candidate in the whole field after he’s lost 35 or 40 or so primaries and caucuses? It’s hard to imagine any degree of late-primary momentum that’s going to make that look any more acceptable than a Ryan or Romney nomination on a second or third ballot.
So the GOP lurches toward a convention where the only feasible outcomes are probably going to be a Donald Trump or (if he can finish a close second while denying Trump a majority) a Ted Cruz nomination. This will make some Republican Establishment types crazy. But even party elites now seem to understand that this is the wrong year to assert their power to overrule the GOP rank and file. And so, to take in vain the name of the political-science tome that is going to need a revised edition after this cycle ends, “the party” may “decide” it has no power to decide at all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 18, 2016
“Republican Elite’s Reign Of Disdain”: The White Working Class Failed Itself
“Sire, the peasants are revolting!”
“Yes, they are, aren’t they?”
It’s an old joke, but it seems highly relevant to the current situation within the Republican Party. As an angry base rejects establishment candidates in favor of you-know-who, a significant part of the party’s elite blames not itself, but the moral and character failings of the voters.
There has been a lot of buzz over the past few days about an article by Kevin Williamson in National Review, vigorously defended by other members of the magazine’s staff, denying that the white working class — “the heart of Trump’s support” — is in any sense a victim of external forces. A lot has gone wrong in these Americans’ lives — “the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy” — but “nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
O.K., we’re just talking about a couple of writers at a conservative magazine. But it’s obvious, if you look around, that this attitude is widely shared on the right. When Mitt Romney spoke about the 47 percent of voters who would never support him because they “believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of them,” he was channeling an influential strain of conservative thought. So was Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, when he warned of a social safety net that becomes “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
Or consider the attitude toward American workers inadvertently displayed by Eric Cantor, then the House majority leader, when he chose to mark Labor Day with a Twitter post celebrating … business owners.
So what’s going on here?
To be sure, social collapse in the white working class is a deadly serious issue. Literally. Last fall, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attracted widespread attention with a paper showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans, which had been declining for generations, started rising again circa 2000. This rising death rate mainly reflected suicide, alcohol and overdoses of drugs, notably prescription opioids. (Marx declared that religion was the opium of the people. But in 21st-century America, it appears that opioids are the opium of the people.)
And other signs of social unraveling, from deteriorating health to growing isolation, are also on the rise among American whites. Something is going seriously wrong in the heartland.
Furthermore, the writers at National Review are right to link these social ills to the Trump phenomenon. Call it death and The Donald: Analysis of primary election results so far shows that counties with high white mortality rates are also likely to vote Trump.
The question, however, is why this is happening. And the diagnosis preferred by the Republican elite is just wrong — wrong in a way that helps us understand how that elite lost control of the nominating process.
Stripped down to its essence, the G.O.P. elite view is that working-class America faces a crisis, not of opportunity, but of values. That is, for some mysterious reason many of our citizens have, as Mr. Ryan puts it, lost “their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” And this crisis of values, they suggest, has been aided and abetted by social programs that make life too easy on slackers.
The problems with this diagnosis should be obvious. Tens of millions of people don’t suffer a collapse in values for no reason. Remember, several decades ago the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the social ills of America’s black community didn’t come out of thin air, but were the result of disappearing economic opportunity. If he was right, you would have expected declining opportunity to have the same effect on whites, and sure enough, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.
Meanwhile, the argument that the social safety net causes social decay by coddling slackers runs up against the hard truth that every other advanced country has a more generous social safety net than we do, yet the rise in mortality among middle-aged whites in America is unique: Everywhere else, it is continuing its historic decline.
But the Republican elite can’t handle the truth. It’s too committed to an Ayn Rand story line about heroic job creators versus moochers to admit either that trickle-down economics can fail to deliver good jobs, or that sometimes government aid is a crucial lifeline. So it ends up lashing out at its own voters when they refuse to buy into that story line.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump has any better idea about what the country needs; he’s just peddling another fantasy, this one involving the supposed power of belligerence. But at least he’s acknowledging the real problems ordinary Americans face, not lecturing them on their moral failings. And that’s an important reason he’s winning.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, March 18, 2016
“Choosing Their Poison”: Anti-Trump Republicans Now Only Have 3 Options: Terrible, Miserable, And Awful
With his near-sweep of Tuesday’s primaries, Donald Trump is now in firm command of the Republican race for president, and although it’s still possible for Ted Cruz to overtake him, it’s looking increasingly likely that Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. Which leaves most Americans (and most of the world) in a state of abject horror, and presents Republican politicians, strategists, and party activists with a dilemma: What do they do?
The time for figuring out how Trump can be stopped from taking over the party is nearly gone. There are essentially three paths left open, none of which are appetizing. The question is merely which brand of poison the party wants to swallow. But each has its pluses and minuses, so let’s investigate:
1. Rally behind Trump. This is the path of least resistance, and it may be the least bad of the options. Yes, many Republicans have said they’d never support him, or at least condemned him in strong terms; they’ll now be confronted with their hypocrisy. But as I’ve argued repeatedly, Trump is going to become a different candidate once the general election comes. Perhaps in the process of appealing to a broader electorate, he’ll also become less bombastic and more serious, and it won’t seem so awful to stand by his side.
And from an ideological standpoint, there’s a powerful logic to it. If you’re a conservative, even if you think Trump would be a terrible president and an inconsistent ally (almost certainly true on both counts), he’d at least do what you want some of the time, which is better than what you’d get with Hillary Clinton as president.
The trouble is that while Trump has the support of a plurality of Republicans, that isn’t anywhere near a majority of the electorate as a whole. So Republicans may decide that it’s better to do their part and try to convince the public that a Trump presidency really would be great. If they succeed, at least they’d get to fill the executive branch with Republicans.
2. Try to take the nomination from Trump at the convention. Trump may get to the necessary 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination outright, but at the moment it’s anything but a sure thing. If he doesn’t, it would bring Republicans to a contested convention, which is likely to be a nightmare no matter what the final result. If it comes to that, the anti-Trump forces will try to find a leader to unite behind, but it won’t be easy. If it’s Ted Cruz or John Kasich, it would be hard to take the nomination from Trump on the grounds that he didn’t win a majority of the delegates, then give it to someone who won even fewer. But giving it to someone who didn’t run at all could be even worse.
Just imagine how Trump’s supporters will react if the very establishment they’ve rebelled against snatches the nomination from their champion and gives it to some low-energy weakling. All their rage and frustration would come pouring out, perhaps literally on the heads of their tormentors. Trump has already said “I think you’d have riots” if such a thing occurred, and you can bet he’d be encouraging them.
And keep in mind that conservative talk radio hosts will spend the months between now and then getting their audiences riled up about what a despicable crime it would be to take the nomination away from Trump and hand it to some establishment stooge (they’re already getting started). So Trump’s supporters would be ready for a fight as soon as they got to Cleveland.
The whole chaotic mess would be broadcast live on TV, making the party look even less responsible and sane than it does now. Then even if the establishment prevailed, chances are strong that many of Trump’s supporters would simply stay home on Election Day out of frustration, increasing the chances that Hillary Clinton gets elected.
3. Mount a third-party bid. This is the most outlandish of the possibilities, yet some people are actively exploring it. There’s a meeting of prominent conservative activists happening Thursday to discuss whether and how to go about it, and some donors have already hired consultants to assemble a roadmap to a third-party campaign. The biggest practical problem is getting on the ballot in all 50 states, which requires lots of signatures before deadlines that are coming up soon. But more important from Republicans’ standpoint is that such an effort is almost guaranteed to fail.
If you had a conservative third-party candidate, he or she would face Trump, taking some portion of Republican voters, and (probably) Hillary Clinton, holding nearly all Democratic voters. A unified Democratic Party facing a Republican Party split in two means the Democrat would win.
Now it may be that some Republicans are so worried about what a Trump presidency would do to the GOP over the long term that they see Hillary Clinton in the White House as a preferable outcome. But I’m guessing there aren’t too many of them. Which is why the first option — swallow your pride, hold your nose, and get behind Trump — is the one most Republicans are probably going to take.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, March 17, 2016
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