Here is a New York Times article you may have seen. It describes the GOP’s panicked, hyperbolic and yet utterly ineffectual rush to stop the Donald Trump juggernaut. As I’ve said before, the GOP’s Trump problem reminds me of the regional and global powers’ efforts to destroy ISIS. Every party sees the problem, is terrified by the problem. And yet every player has some other angle or priority that’s just a bit more pressing or important. The Saudis, Iran. The Turks, the Kurds. The US, Assad. And on and on. Yet it goes without saying that Trump isn’t the real problem. He didn’t bamboozle the heads of the RNC into signing some one-sided contract they can’t live with. The problem is Republican voters. Look at the polls and you see that in virtually every state in the country between 30% and 50% of GOP voters currently back Trump. And only unicorn thinking supports the idea that the 70% to 50% who do not constitute some sort “anti-Trump” faction. That’s the problem, not Trump himself.
The saving grace for the GOP is that if they’re actually able to destroy Trump with a brutal, scorched earth total war which drives all the way to the convention, he’ll definitely go away quietly.
On the bright side, after Trump is elected President, we’ll be able to look at Turkey and Italy and say, “Bros, we topped you.”
And yes, we’ll need to say ‘bros’.
We can also tell Toronto.
I’ll give Rubio this. This morning’s stump speeches are a different Rubio, a whole new operating system, harsher, funnier, freer. The one we’re listening to now is identical to the stump speech this morning. But okay, that’s a stump speech. The thing is, I don’t think it’s enough. He’s already defined. Trump is too far ahead. Contrary to what almost everyone said last night, Trump did very well. And Tuesday is the big windfall of delegates. The Christie endorsement didn’t change the tide. It just cemented it. Another punch to the face for Rubio when he could least afford it.
Trump announces: “We’re going to open up those libel laws. So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
In amazing moment at Texas rally, coming off the Christie endorsement press conference, pulls out a water bottle and does a bit of impromptu anti-Rubio performance art. Watch.
Trump now proposing 2006/07-style “surge” in on-going War on Christmas.
With the Christie endorsement and Trump’s once-again dominance of the daily news cycle, I think we can say that the MSM’s latest imaginary Rubio comeback last approximately eleven hours.
I’m hearing a cavalcade of Republican operatives and pundits on the cable nets this morning explaining how Trump is basically done, caput, might as well get out of the race now. Hard-charging Rubio flustered him, beat him up, showed that he doesn’t deal in policy details. We all have ways in believing what we want to believe, especially when the alternatives are so bleak. I’m willing to believe that Trump lost some of his support from the part of his coalition which is made of people who thought he was a leading public policy mind. But I’m figuring there weren’t that many of those people. So probably not a problem.
The hits about Trump not being a real conservative were, I think, equally off the mark and actually revealing about how Movement Conservatives and Republican elites don’t fully get what a lot of their voters actually mean by ‘conservative’.