Posted on 03/01/2016 5:05:59 PM PST by Maceman
Former top Ted Cruz adviser Rick Tyler says conservatives won’t stop making their case against the likely nominee.
The big, set-piece battle of the Republican primary is very nearly over – but the guerilla war against Donald Trump may have just begun.
Trump is poised to seize the Republican nomination today if the Super Tuesday polls prove predictive – but the spirits of the candidates he’s brutalized, ridiculed and (nearly) beaten are likely to haunt and harass him for the next eight months.
And Ted Cruz –clinging to hopes that a win in home-state Texas would forestall an Alamo moment – represents the greatest latent threat for Trump, who has seen a steady stream of I’ll-never-vote-for-him pronouncements over the last week. Some of those defections (former RNC Chairman Mel Martinez, to name one) have come from the party’s establishment wing. But Trump faces a far, far bigger threat if the right revolts – and the declaration by conservative Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse last weekend was an ominous one, auguring a possible (but not inevitable) second front against Trump.
Cruz isn’t likely to follow Sasse if he withdraws from the race, but he’s already proven himself to be the Che Guevara of the tea party movement. He turned on the GOP establishment in the Senate, whipped up House Republicans to rebel against former House Speaker John Boehner, and shut down the government over Obamacare. Cruz owes his brand to RINO hunting. He doesn’t like Trump despite their early-campaign flirtation – and will like Trump a lot less if he inches toward the center in a general election.
Enter Rick Tyler, a veteran conservative strategist who was, until recently, Cruz’s communications director. I sat down with Tyler for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast over the weekend and heard a message that should take some of the fizz from The Donald’s bubbly: Hard-core conservative Republicans may not oppose him publicly, but they could silently undermine his candidacy – and many of the party’s big-money donors, especially pro-Israel heavyweights like Sheldon Adelson, could take a far lesser role in Hillary-bashing than they might have otherwise.
“I think that Hillary Clinton… will hammer [Trump] and expose him for what he is… And if I had to bet, I would say that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump,” said Tyler, who was defenestrated by Cruz last month after he retweeted an inaccurate story about Marco Rubio allegedly demeaning the Bible. The parting was amicable. And the dismissal of Tyler, who worked for Newt Gingrich’s super PAC in 2012, was widely viewed a PR move: Rubio, Trump and Ben Carson had been criticizing the Texas senator for what they deemed dirty tricks, and somebody had to be the sacrificial lamb.
Cruz signed a pledge, like every other Republican to support the eventual nominee – but they didn’t say how much, Tyler reminded me.
When I asked Tyler if his ex-boss would back Trump with “force,” he replied, “Not much because… because, you know, Donald Trump runs around and calls Ted Cruz a liar… That’s very personal.”
When I asked him how serious a problem tea party hostility would be for Trump, he said: “Oh, it’s very significant.”
Tyler outlines the case against Trump from the right – a case Cruz and others are likely to pursue even while “supporting” their nominee: “If you care about gun rights, having Donald Trump be aligned with Michael Bloomberg would be an anathema… he has been quoted as saying, ‘I don't like guns.’ He has been quoted as saying, ‘I support the assault weapons ban.’ And that's true on abortion, partial-birth abortion, gays in the military, homosexual marriage. You know, he’s gone — he’s supported TARP. He’s supported – I mean, it’s on and on and on. I mean, this guy has a contradictory statement for everything he now proclaims and professes to be.”
It seems unlikely that Cruz or Rubio or Bush or Carson or John Kasich will actively oppose Trump as nominee – their allegiance to the Republican Party is stronger than Trump’s. But they could sap his strength by sniping at him, issue-by-issue from the wings.
Tyler raised the specter of 2012, when eventual nominee Mitt Romney – whom many on the right viewed as an establishment sell-out – savaged Gingrich after the former speaker took the South Carolina primary.
“I am sorry to say that our party is going to engage in the politics of personal destruction and that we’re going to call each other names and not talk — it’s very Alinskyite to me,” said Tyler, who remains in close touch with Cruz’s team. “You know: Pick a target, freeze it, focus on it, and destroy it. You know, that seems to be how Donald Trump and now, to some extent, Marco Rubio has decided to run their campaigns. I think that’s a bad — I think that’s a bad omen for the future of the party.”
And there’s another factor: It’s not clear how enthusiastically the big GOP super PACs will support Trump; Tyler’s Gingrich-backing PAC was buoyed by cash from pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Tyler thinks Trump’s recent off-the-cuff comment that he was “neutral” in the Israel-Palestinian standoff was a major error. Could Adelson sit 2016 out?
Former Ted Cruz campaign official Rick Tyler says Donald Trump's bruising tactics may earn him the GOP nomination but could haunt him with Republicans for the rest of election season.
“I think it’s certainly possible,” he said. “I mean, because, on the one hand, you have Donald Trump who just doesn’t even — doesn't seem to understand the Middle East and its problems and how to move forward with it…”
Tyler, who signed up with MSNBC a couple of days after he was dismissed, looks pretty good for a guy who has just seen the bottom of his own campaign bus. The crime: Tweeting a false report alleging that Rubio had made a disparaging remark about the Bible – in the presence of Cruz’s evangelist father.
I talked a bit about the kerfuffle with Tyler (he says his boss is squeaky clean) during our 45-minute interview – and he expressed contrition. “I posted it, and it was poor judgment to post it,” he said. “The reason it was is because it was going to be blown up as, you know, I was criticizing Marco for not being a Bible-believing Christian. I never believed that. Of course, I still believe that he is. I took it as more of Marco was being — you know, it was teasing.”
He rejected, out of hand, my suggestion that he was a sacrificial flack – thrown over so Cruz could arrest the Tricky Teddy narrative. Yet he was candid, even a tad gloomy, about Cruz’s path to the nomination with Trump blocking the road.
“Yeah, it’s narrow,” Tyler told me.
“Ted — if Ted wins Texas and wins some substantial portion of the delegates, he will have a mass of delegates,” he explained, laying out a complicated, and in Tyler’s view, somewhat unlikely scenario. “He will have then had two wins. Rubio will — if Rubio doesn't win any on Tuesday and then goes on to lose his home state of Florida, which right now he would, it should be game over for him. Then maybe, then maybe there’s an outside chance we get a consolidation around Ted Cruz, and he could either accumulate enough delegates to get to the convention or at least stop Trump from accumulating enough delegates to get to the convention.”
Tyler, like almost every other operative gunning for Trump, is still scratching his head over the developer’s unprecedented, rapid rise. But he defends the campaign’s decision to play Eddie Haskell nice with Trump early on, telling me that Cruz needed to use those opening months to establish name recognition and create a likeable image in the minds of voters. And that – my point here, not his – hasn’t always been an easy task for Cruz, who has a far greater gift for combat than cuddling.
“First, they have to know your name, right?” Tyler adds. “Second… they have to like you. And then the final is the contrast phase. And if you skip around those steps, it doesn’t really work.”
Hope FReepers don’t start bashing the Tea Party now......
No but there will be some psuedo Tea Party fund raising scams that will.
I can already guess that there will be a hard core of Cruzloyalists who will continue to undermine Trump even after he has the nomination sewn up.
They’ll be working for Hillary even if they don’t admit that to themselves or anyone else.
Rick Tyler ruined Cruzs chances. He was a terrible campaign strategist
He may think he knows the tea party but he does not. Rickie has been an establishment hack for years
Just because someone puts “Tea Party” in their name doesn’t make it so.
Reagan said it best. “A man 80% on my side is a valued friend and ally, not my enemy.”
Trump has (solid) Tea Party support.
Solid.
This is a nonsense article.
Why? If they succede it would be a Pyhrric victory..
ROTFLMAO!
The TEA Party is fueling Donald Trump!
I consider myself a true Tea Party type as it was originally conceived. My guy is Ted Cruz. That said, I will gladly support Trump in order to separate the GOPe from power. That and I think Trump can whip Secretary Cankles in a general election.
Much nonsense.
Taxed Enough Already?
Trump has a solid tax reform plan. And so much more. The whole Tea Party thing is intended to remind people of our revolution against overbearing government. Well ... hellooooooo Mr. Trump!!
The tea party people want the rino, goper vichy uniparty republicans to be expunged from power and the party.
So no.
I was in the District of Corruption on 9/12/2009 along with 2 million fellow patriotic Americans for the biggest demonstration this country has had. It went down the memory hole very quickly but we’re still out here and today I voted Trump.
Trump has more Tea Party support than Cruz. He’d beaten him in every demo.
I’m not going to wage a war against anyone. If my choice is between Hillary and Donald....aka no choice at all....I simply won’t vote.
“Trump has (solid) Tea Party support.”
EXACTLY
The T.E.A. party is still here. The politicians we help elect turned into rancid frauds. They should resign.
Wasn't it more anti-Establishment than textbook ideological conservative?
To the headline: one can hope
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