Posted on 03/23/2016 7:17:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better.
Denial has been Trump's greatest ally. Republicans and commentators didn't believe he would run. They didn't believe he could be an attractive candidate to rational people, no matter how angry with "the establishment" voters said they were. They -- which includes me -- were wrong.
The denial lasted longer for some than others. Long after many observers had come to the realization that Trump was the front-runner, Jeb Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, believed Bush's real rival was Marco Rubio. It spent $35 million trying to destroy Rubio before it dropped its first $25,000 attacking Trump.
Over the weekend, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus showed the first public signs of acceptance about what's in store for the party. He finally acknowledged that the Republican nominee was probably going to be determined on the convention floor in Cleveland.
Priebus explained, rightly, that the rules are the rules, and that if Trump can't secure the required 1,237 delegates before Cleveland, it's anyone's game. "This is a delegate-driven process," he told CNN's Dana Bash. "The minority of delegates doesn't rule for the majority."
Trump's response to this floor-fight talk was to vomit up the usual word salad.
"All I can say is this, I don't know what's going to happen," Trump told ABC's "This Week." "But I will say this, you're going to have a lot of very unhappy people [if I'm denied the nomination]. And I think, frankly, for the Republicans to disenfranchise all those people because if that happens, they're not voting and the Republicans lose."
Even through the syntactical fog, Trump's point is clear: If he can't reach 1,237, he should get the nomination anyway. Because he is Trump. If that doesn't happen, his supporters will stay home, defect from the party, riot or all three.
And he's right. Not about deserving the nomination even if he doesn't have the delegates. That's typical Trumpian whining. But he's right that if he's denied the nomination, many -- not all, but many -- of his supporters will bolt from the convention and the party.
Left out of Trump's unsubtle threat: Many anti-Trump Republicans will desert the convention and the party if he's not denied the nomination.
There are only three possible ways to avoid a calamitous walkout. Ted Cruz can win the nomination outright before the convention. That's very unlikely given that he'd need to win roughly 80 percent of all the remaining delegates.
Second, Trump could reveal he has a hidden reservoir of magnanimity and patriotism, and rally his faithful to the consensus nominee. Stop laughing.
Third, the delegates could pick someone sufficiently attractive that Trump followers get over their understandable bitterness and support that candidate despite Trump's objections. Who would that be? Certainly not Mitt Romney. Maybe a reanimated Ronald Reagan. Or Batman? I have no idea.
All of these scenarios are so unlikely in part because the split in the GOP isn't merely about a single personality. Trump represents just the most pronounced of a spiderweb of ideological and demographic fault lines that are increasingly difficult to paper over. As Joel Kotkin put it in a column for the Orange County Register, the Republican Party now "consists of interest groups that so broadly dislike each other that they share little common ground."
Put simply, and with the incessant and obtuse comparisons of Trump to Reagan notwithstanding, you cannot have a party that's both Reaganite and Trumpish.
Trump's cheerleaders insist that he's a symptom of long-simmering maladies on the right. I'm persuaded (even though I think Dr. Trump's remedies are nothing but snake oil). Even now, too many GOP leaders think Trump's success is purely a result of his brash personality, and nothing more. But only when we accept that a terrible diagnosis is real is it possible to think intelligently about our options.
To wit: This ends in tears no matter what. Get over it and pick a side.
You do know you pinged me to a thread that was posted on March 23? A walk down memory lane. It's kind of fun to see what people were posting a couple of months ago.
Jonah G. Not a bad writer, but watching as the party gets behind Trump, his prognostication was wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
With the current beating down he is doing to Hillary, every single one of these smart folks who told us that he would lose in a landslide is looking like a moron.
Over to the corner with your dunce cap Jonah!
Are lbbyblue and Cincinnatus wiff still posting? Someone needes to tell CW that Perry was one of the first GOPers who endorsed Trump after the Indiana primary. Don't let her near any sharp objects though.......
:-)
Cincinatus’ Wife hasn’t posted since March 26. Wonder what happened?
Wow indeed. I got pinged to the thread, and when I saw the moniker ‘libbyboohoo’ I instinctively called in the parrot, lol
However I note that lil libby’s FR status appears to be NOT ‘banned or suspended’ (cue spooky music, kids running through the streets in horror, animals hiding in the crawl space)
C’mon Kent, cut me some slack, I’m still on my first cup o’ coffee here, lol
Fair enough. ;)
Wow, read the thread, a bit o history here.
“Are lbbyblue and Cincinnatus wiff “
LOL
Thanks. I like a morning chuckle with my coffee......
“...he will never consolidate the base but he will unite the dems and independents.” ****
Name a soul who cares about what you lob, Lu, in regard to your tin pot psycho-analysis of FReeper politics, election outcomes, and particularly your obsessive ragging on Free Republic supporters of the Republican nominee, TRUMP.
You lost. Your candidate lost.
Your outcome forecasting and predictions are all an object of ridicule, all together in a hat, that continues to be handed to you.
So, what’s your game here? Sewing disinformation and fomenting for the globalists is a really bad fit for Free Republic.
...and I feel fine.
Haha so right you are Rita from OK.
libbylu keeps losing....
Pretty soon I might actually feel sympathy for libbylu..
losing and having so much disdain for Trump has to be destroying libbylu’s innards.
The checks bounced.
Donald Trump carried the South. Rudy Giuliani couldn't win one county in the South.
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