There has been almost no end of complaints about how awful a president Donald Trump is. Unqualified. An oaf. Conflicts of interest. Nepotism. Russian influence. He didn’t release his tax returns. At Bloomberg View, in his catalogue of how bad the first 100 days of the Trump presidency has been, Jonathan Bernstein includes an insightful observation:
Republican party actors should have done whatever it took to defeat his nomination when they had the chance. Nominations matter, and none more so than the presidential nomination, and they are worth fighting — hard — over.
I would agree with it except for one thing. Is there actually anything that Republican party leaders could have done to prevent Trump’s securing the nomination?
I think they could have dissuaded any of the members of the very large field of candidates they cared to. That would have required them to unify behind one candidate early on. Who?
More than any president of my memory, Trump has been a self-made candidate. He was largely self-financing. There was no rallying ’round by Republican leaders, many of whom openly disdained him. They didn’t “fall in line” as Bill Clinton put it.
What steps on the part of the RNC could have prevented Donald Trump from securing the nominations? What could have prevented him from being elected president?
Beats me, but those emails must have been much more interesting than the DNC’s.
No one else could have done what Trump did. The coalition that defeated Hillary Clinton simply didn’t represent the party of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz; their bewilderment was obvious and they didn’t know how to ride the wave.
Had they managed to lock Trump out in some procedural move the Republicans almost certainly would have lost the election as their base, which didn’t really share their ideology, left them to blow away with the dust.
Right. They never saw him coming. The GOP spent years ginning up the base, and, mirabile dictu, along come someone who actually appealed to the ginned-up. Live by the politics of anger, die by the politics of anger.
Don’t forget Melania. I think she was a real asset to his image. Men love a “hot” First Lady and women say that finally there will be “grace and dignity” in the White House again, Jackie O. and all.
Is there actually anything that Republican party leaders could have done to prevent Trump’s securing the nomination?
They could have found some candidates that weren’t (a) campaigning to be the President of Greater Mexico, (b) weren’t promising more of the same-old same-old invade-every-country-in-the-world-so-we-can-import-more-people-that-hate-us, and (c) weren’t offering more of the same we-have-to-do-this-to-save-the-billionaires economic policies. Of course, the Dems ran a candidate that promised all those things AND MORE (because who doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia to protect ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria?), so it was an easy vote to make for a lot of us.
I stated at the time that I didn’t trust Trump, and even if he proved trustworthy I doubted he’d be all that good. Looks like I’ve been proven right! Nevertheless, what were my choices? Jeb and most of the other Republicans were openly contemptuous of middle American white culture (see the likes of Keven D. Williamson & Bill Krystol, for example), and HRC has sided with those that think that breast-feeding and genital preference in dating are transphobic.
If the Republicans had wanted someone other than Trump, they should have run someone that didn’t hate the white American working- and middle-classes. I’d ask a rhetorical question of “how fucking hard can that be?”, but based on all the other Presidential candidates of the last 25 years*, it’s clearly next to impossible.
* The only other two I can think of off the top of my head are Ross Perot and Pat Buchanon. What a world, right?
This continues to be the #BestYearEver, however. Even little things like the College Republicans at Yale trolling the non-hunger hunger strike with a BBQ and the Fyre Festival disaster have been great. (The #FyreFestival tweets were fantastic. My favorite was the guy talking about telling us to not send help, because God had forsaken them to Hell.) The big things like the Democratic Party openly coming out as hostile to non-gay non-rich whites to their advocacy of political violence and open hatred of free speech have been spectacular to behold.
Having a reality TV star as president is kind of old hat, however. We’d done that the previous eight years. The current one isn’t even as big a buffoon as Obama, as he didn’t sit in a pew for 20+ years nodding along to sermons of “God DAMN America!” while hanging out with anti-American terrorists who should have been hung for treason decades ago on Saturday nights.
But I’ve never lived through a civilizational collapse before, so this is fun! I suspect there must have been some Hittite dudes sitting around as the Bronze Age was collapsing about them going, “This shit’s fucking hysterical! I mean, sure, we’re gonna die, but can you believe this shit?!!?” Well, I’m with you, Hittite dudes, I’m with you!
” The current one isn’t even as big a buffoon as Obama”
Let me know if you need your meds renewed. I will call in the Rx for you.
Steve
Good to see ellipsis back. I was going to make the point that he made, though he did so much more colorfully. But at the core of it, the GOP couldn’t have knocked Trump with any particular tactic but they could possibly have done so if they’d understood why he was gaining traction and then used that knowledge to ndercut him by co-opting issues like globalization and border security.
That would have required though an understanding of the electorate AND willingness to take stances on policy that opposed the interests of their donors, so it wasn’t going to happen and we’ll never know if it would have worked. I’m a little surprised that no one even tried.
Let me know if you need your meds renewed. I will call in the Rx for you.
Taking up pill milling on the side?
Obama sat in those pews for twenty years, and never heard a thing the reverend said, is that it? Friends with people that express regrert that they didn’t kill enough cops and didn’t bring a totalitarian communist government to the US, but none of it rubbed off?
Trump acts the buffoon. Obama assumes everyone else is, because he never ever gets even a hint of blowback for anything he does from his sycophantic followers. There’s plenty of buffoonery to go around, you just don’t think Obama’s buffoonery matters.
I’m a little surprised that no one even tried.
That part isn’t entirely true. Cruz belatedly tried to play the part of an immigration hawk, but almost no one believed him. It doesn’t take much examination of Cruz & his record for most people to realize which side he’s on. (His own, in case that isn’t clear. As I’ve said before, for a fat guy, he has that hungry look of the ambitiously thin. And he’s literally sleeping with the banking class, so what’s good for Wall Street etc.) I’ve even had a couple of people come apologize to me IRL for having doubted me on Ted! There’s some satisfaction to that!
But I’m going to try and stay gone and only pop in occasionally. This time I wanted to make certain Schuler saw something about carbon-scrubbing the atmosphere. But now I’m gone like a fart in the wind….
Josh Barro tweeted “In a way, Fyre Festival was an amazing success. Instead of entertaining thousands of people, it entertained millions.”