Let’s start out with the obvious: I, like many others, was woefully wrong regarding the Republican electorate and their love affair of Trump. In retrospect, I can see where I went wrong; I knew that the Tea Party crowd was going to hijack the process somewhere in the next few elections, because they’ve been pushing the party ever further right (aided by a gerrymandering process in 2010 that made it impossible to be moderate in the Republican Party without risking usurpation in the primary by someone louder and dumber) and sooner or later they were going to stage a revolution against the money people who kept insisting that they needed a moderate like McCain or Romney to win, but who lost anyway. 2016 seemed like their “If we’re going to go down, we’ll go down with a real Republican” moment.
But where I made my mistake was in thinking that a real Republican was someone like Ted Cruz, who was against taxes, against government regulation, pro-religion, pro-life, and generally embodied the talking points Republicans have been spouting since the 1990s. I didn’t think they would look at a New York businessman with ties to the Clintons and Hollywood and say, “Yeah, that’s one of us alright!” But that’s because I didn’t really understand what the true values of the Tea Party crowd were. It wasn’t about taxes. It wasn’t about small government. It wasn’t about religion. It was about bigotry. Everything that the Republicans have said since Nixon has been a long string of dog-whistles for their xenophobic base, and Trump outflanked people with far stronger political credentials by simply being nakedly, unashamedly racist. Ted Cruz might have years of experience in attempting to destroy the federal government out of thinly-veiled spite at the Democrats for electing a black man, but he wasn’t willing to get down to it and say that the federal government needed to deport all the brown people everywhere. Trump was. That’s why he’s the nominee.
(At least, theoretically the nominee. It is still June, and there’s a non-zero chance that someone could derail the Trump campaign with parliamentary maneuvering at the convention. It’s in the realms of “OMFGReally?”, because if they do it then that’ll pretty much be it for the Presidential election and it’ll also finally cause the slow-simmering feud between the four entirely incompatible factions of the Republican party to boil over, but I feel like it has to be mentioned because if I don’t say it, someone else will.)
(The four factions, by the way, are the ultra-religious theocrats, the libertarian “business is business” deregulators, the “subjugate the lesser countries” neocons, and Trump has revealed that the racists in the party are a faction all their own that can be courted.)
Anyhow, the point is, Trump appealed to the racist wing of the Republican party through a series of Nurembergian rallies, and is now…pending serious bizarreness…the nominee. And he’s down seven points to Clinton. Clinton has, if not actually seen off her one serious challenger in Bernie Sanders, at the very least reduced him to sulking somewhere in Vermont and muttering dire conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, and she has a huge war chest, a battle-tested and savvy group of campaigners on the ground and already moving in the hotly-contested swing states, and several much-loved Democrats up to and including President Obama ready to go out and stump for her. While Trump has…
Okay, look. The thing you need to understand about Trump, in order to make the last few weeks and the next several months make any sense at all, is that he has been surrounded for pretty much his entire adult life by people whose job it is to tell him everything he says, thinks and does is brilliant. If there was ever a point where he had any self-awareness, it withered and died decades ago. This is key, because everyone out there is constantly assuming that at some point, Trump is going to say, “Nah, nah, just kidding! Here’s my real plan,” and we’ll find out that this was all some sort of clever Xanatos gambit to position himself into some sort of superior position to win the election.
But the fact of the matter is, the Trump you see is the Trump you get. He really does believe that he doesn’t need to fundraise personally, because he’s rich. He really does believe that he’s going to be competitive in New York (where he’s currently twenty points down in the polls) because he’s a great guy and everybody in his home state loves him. He really thinks that he can just go around from state to state holding rallies, and appear on TV talk shows, and everyone will listen to his great ideas and vote for him. He really, honest to God, thinks that “the Mexicans” and “the gays” love him. (For that matter, he really thinks that they like being called “the Mexicans” and “the gays”.) Why not? he asks himself. People told him that wouldn’t work to get the Republican nomination, and they were wrong then. Why can’t he win the Presidency this way too?
To the rest of us, the reasons why are obvious. There are not enough bigots in this country (thank God!) to make up for the number of women and minorities who will turn out to vote against him. A Presidential candidate receives far more public scrutiny for their statements than a B-list celebrity and reality TV star, and he will have to spend the next several months defending his record of lies, inanity, unworkable plans, and general drunken uncle on Facebook-level blather. The Republicans are not going to throw good money at this moron, and while they may not actively turn on him, they certainly don’t want any part of the Trump brand. Spending time and effort campaigning in states you are going to lose no matter what, or states you are going to win no matter what, is essentially ceding ground to an opponent who targets swing states. You really should settle any pending fraud lawsuits against you before you decide to run for political office, so that you’re not desperately trying to seal evidence while the media is looking for a juicy scandal. Little things like that.
At this point, those little things are adding up to a major defeat. Nobody is willing to call it that, because we all have memories of Trump somehow rolling up victories in the primaries when it was obvious to the majority of Americans that his campaign was an unmitigated shitshow run by a bloviating fascist who raised epistemic closure to an artform, and none of us wants to be wrong again. But of course, Trump wasn’t trying to appeal to a majority of Americans in the Republican primaries, just the bigoted few who agreed with his ugly, racist screeds. The very fact that the majority of Americans have been waiting months to weigh in on the discussion should tell us something about how November will go.
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We almost certainly won’t see Trump get derailed at the convention – it was Cruz attempting to do that sort of thing during the primary that finally pushed Trump over 50%. It’s kind of a political death sentence to do that sort of ting right now, because even Republicans that don’t like Trump dislike that shit. But yeah, Trump is kind of going to get destroyed. The free media coverage he exploited in the primary won’t so much be in his favor this time, because every time he gets it, all Hillary has to do is respond to get time of her own.
I predicted in 2010 that we wouldn’t see a Republican president until after a major reshuffling of the party, and I’m still confident in that prediction.
Oh, I’ll agree that the chances of an anti-Trump coup are incredibly slim. But the very fact that they’re not zero–the fact that the Republican party is literally considering taking the nomination out of the hands of its members for the first time since 1911–is a massive symbolic statement of the unprecedented rift between the party and its candidate, as well as between the party and its most engaged voters. I’d be stunned if we get a contested convention, but the mere possibility is pretty shocking in and of itself.
I really don’t know what to hope for here. Denying Trump the nomination would be all kinds of dramatic, but it also raises the possibility for chaos, violence and everything bad that follows from them. On the other hand, can the GOP not afford not to make some kind of push to get rid of him? The free exposure Trump gets from the Media from now on is (in effect) a whole new series of free advertising for Clinton and all the Dems’ down-ticket candidates.
It’s a pickle.
(And to think, just 12 years ago, people were seriously explaining that the GOP had locked up a permanent majority.)
While I don’t disagree with Trump’s racist dogwhistles that aren’t quite as inaudible as dogwhistles normally are, I think there’s another factor at work here. Trump is years of the Prosperity Gospel come home to roost. The idiots look at him and see a guy who wants everyone to be rich, and is going to take all the rules away to make it happen.
As with many, many people who explained with fine political analysis why Trump could not possibly secure the Republican nomination, you’re now using the same techniques to explain why he cannot possibly secure the Presidency.
Have we learned nothing ?
His fame has distorted the process so badly that these previously effective methods just don’t appear to work. I refer you to the Schwarzenegger governorship as well. But this is largely unknown territory and the old tools of analysis are no longer fit for purpose. What if Michael Jordan runs for office ? Leonardo DiCaprio ? Holy crap… Kanye West ? Where are your (statistical) gods then ?
(and anyway, a large part of the US electorate votes Party, not Candidate. Trump can spew racist and insane gibberish from now until November the 7th (or as he calls it, “campaigning”) and will still hit 45% of the popular vote)
I suspect that many Republicans will take the money they would have put behind a legitimate presidential candidate and use it to take over congress even further, guaranteeing another four years of nothing changing. I suppose that is better than the four-year-long train-wreck that Trump would bring.
Zippy: People getting Trump wrong during the nomination had nothing to do with bad statistics and everything to do with assuming the Republican establishment would unite against him a lot faster than it did. The actual polling was accurate.
Reason for hope: Trump, prior to Cruz et al giving him the nomination by appearing to conspire against him in an “unfair” way, never got more than about 40%, and usually closer to 30% of the GOP primary vote. That means that about a third of a third of Americans “like” Trump. Hooray for us?
However, I look at this campaign, and I hear the words of Terry Pratchett from Going Postal. “Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It’s hope, turned inside out. You know it can’t go wrong, you’re sure it can’t go wrong…But it might.”
The revelation that Trump’s campaign has only $1.2 million cash on hand makes a revolt at the convention much more likely. That’s 40 times less than Clinton, and less than a Senate campaign should have at this point in the cycle. The Republicans are looking at a historic loss and reaping of their downballot candidates if they allow Trump to continue in the top spot. This is an existential crisis for the party. They’re going to try to stop it, and then they’re going to flail dramatically when they find out it can’t be stopped.
Cleveland is going to be *very* interesting.
@Remus Shepherd
If they do try to deny him at the convention it’s going to be a mess in the general. First, he’ll almost certainly run as an independent, claiming, with some justification, that the GOP listened to its own voters pick him, and then ignored their own primary process. At best, the GOP will outright lose the presidency. At worst, it’ll splinter the party. Although it probably will not be into 2 equal halves. It’ll probably be about 1/3 for Trump, and 2/3 remain Republican. Maybe the Trump voters get a chunk of GOP leaning independents. How strange that both Clinton’s might rise to the White House over a splintered 3rd party candidate pulling more GOP votes than Democratic votes.
What I’m getting at is that even if they succeed, this is going to be a messy campaign, I think. I think, at the least, the GOP will have some serious work to do on reforming their primary process so they don’t have this kind of insurgency again. Not to mention all the fun of the protesters (possibly rioters) and that Trump’s ego is currently demanding that he accept the nomination now, not in the Q (the arena where the Cavs play) but instead in FirstEnergy or Progressive field (where the Browns and Indians respectively play) because they seats more and because the image of him in front of a stadium accepting would be comparable to Obama accepting in 2012 in a similar setting. Which would, of course, mean inviting members of the public who would, invariably, protest. How are you going to vet that many people? How creative might they get in their effort to make Trump look bad? Yeah. Cleveland is going to be very interesting.
@Sisyphus: Nah. If Donald does get ousted at the convention, he’ll use that as an excuse to declare victory and walk away: “I would have beaten Hillary, I have a great track record of turning around failing businesses and I would have turned around the Republican campaign, which was failing because Republicans were being very unfair to me, even though they’re close personal friends of mine and they love me, lots of Republicans love me, but when they pulled that underhanded, that deceitful stuff, you know, I decided that my top priority should be my successful businesses and not bailing out a failed political organization.”
That sort of thing.
The big hurdle is that it’s very difficult to make the kind of rules changes that would need to be made to oust Trump (mainly because the Republican party has made it hard on purpose), especially in the kind of timeframe they have to operate in. They’d essentially have to rewrite the entire Republican party bylaws within a couple of weeks, and there just isn’t the kind of intraparty support for that. Especially with Trump overhauling his campaign, which will make many delegates feel like he deserves a chance to right the ship. At this point, it’s not going to happen unless something very unprecedented or very stupid happens (like Trump deciding to prove he’s loved by freeing his delegates to vote their conscience).
@Sisyphus
He can’t run as an independent — it’s become very clear that he hasn’t got the money. Just getting his name on the ballot would require a huge push, and he may be past the deadline in a lot of states by them.
As it is, he’s trying to run for President the same way he does business these days — get somebody else to put up the money and do the work, and slap his name all over it.
Basically, if Obama = Hope, Trump = Fear. Trump is a Yellow Lantern. Sinestro would gladly hand him a power ring and let him go nuts with it. Seriously, has there been a candidate as cartoonish as Trump? Like, the only thing that I know would beat him would be Voltron. Voltron commanded by Jon Stewart, with his satire descendants (John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah) handling the other lions. And they’d have to win, because a Trump victory means that the foursome would be deported to their home countries. Yes, I know Larry was born American. That would not matter to Trump.
I remember last year telling people that Trump was going to win the primary despite all the predictions because experts on the left love to talk about some supposed high-water mark where a Republican candidate – or Republicans as a whole – make a stand that’s too nakedly bigoted and awful even for their party base, who will finally have the scales fall from their eyes and abandon the party.
And the fact of the matter is that Trump is proof that the point doesn’t exist. On the one hand you have the culture warriors, who are happy to hear someone say what they’ve been thinking this whole time. On the other hand you have the people who might do a bit of hand-wringing and ‘oh, I think people are overstating it and anyway the Democrats will destroy the economy.’ They’re not moving. There is a congealed lump at the center of the party base that just isn’t going anywhere.
@Jason: I have to disagree. Trump is clearly an Orange Lantern who’s figured out how to make all his constructs look yellow to fool people into thinking he’s a Yellow Lantern. 🙂
“At this point, those little things are adding up to a major defeat. Nobody is willing to call it that, because…”
No major news outlet in America would let a Presidential Election go so predictably one-sided. They will do what they did in 2012 and make the race appear as and contested as possible to get people to pay attention to the news until all the “mistakes” and “victories” will fall away to cold hard electoral math and the 6 months reveal themselves to be the clickbait they always were.
Christian: It was actually very obvious that the talking heads at Fox were actually buying it though. Look up the clip of them going to speak with their statistics guy to ask what happened while he gives them a blank stare. It’s priceless.
Question: assuming The Cheeto Jesus is denied three times at the convention, who then has the money to run a competitive presidential campaign from July until November? I think even a self-funder would be reluctant to flush their fortune down the drain, unless there was a serious chance to run and win. Romney? No. Two strikes and you’re out. Cruz? People were viscerally turned off by Lyin’ Ted. Jeb?
My god. Jeb? Really? That’s the better choice between the specter of the most staggering defeat? Please clap.
@ScienceGiant: I don’t think anyone knows. That’s the biggest hurdle the DumpTrump crowd has; they know that a contested convention is going to result in a giant mess that nobody wants to take ownership of.
Romney might want it, just because he thinks it’ll earn him some grace if he steps in to sail the sinking ship, but the base hates him with a passion and still can’t stand that he got the nomination in 2012.
Walker wants it, and he’s got the Kochs ready to pour cash into his campaign, but he’s already shown that he’s a dud and nobody’s behind him.
Cruz is hated strongly by a lot of people (it’s like God is persecuting him for some unknown reason), but he has support among the delegates. But he knows that 2016 is a poisoned pill right now and he’s already thinking 2020.
Rubio’s already thinking 2020. Accepting the Presidential nod now, after playing Hamlet on his Senate bid, would make him (even more of a) laughingstock.
Christie’s a mess. Just a stone mess.
Honestly, it might go to Trump even at a contested convention just because nobody wants to jump on board the train barreling at 90 into a brick wall.
So Trump won because Republicans are bigots….
Pot calling kettle, pot calling kettle.
Anyway, it’s all moot. Hillary won when the electoral college went blue. The only ways she could lose at this point are if Sanders runs Independent (he won’t), or if the people rise up and insist we run America as if it were a true Democracy (we won’t) and -then- Trump gets the majority vote (he won’t).
@JohnSeavey: I attempted to articulate our posting in conversation with my wife last night. Hearing me are you allowed made me realize the likely choice will be Romney. He is after all and experienced campaigner who can run nationally until November. However, my wife and eyes the entire premise. She emphatically states Trump will never be denied, never drop out, never say die.
I’ve said it many times: this is what has become of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. They would be horrified.
John . . . Trump being an Orange Lantern is believable, especially since Lex Luthor had one of those rings once. Also, Trump has hair issues like Larfleeze. But I can’t think of any candidate that openly uses fears. And there are parallels with Obama, like how 2004 were breakout years for them (The Apprentice for Trump, taking over the DNC for Obama). But when I think about it, the opposite of orange on the color spectrum is indigo, which would mean Hillary belongs with the Indigo Tribe. Shady past and a problem grasping emotions, eventually being able to mimic the powers of all of them?
ETA: Here’s how I originally saw Trump. Discuss.
Is his appeal about racism as such, though? Or about the outsider who will cut the Gordian Knot of politics and save us from politicians? (Note that this is a silly belief, but a common one.)
Trump has done well appealing to deregulators as well as subjugate-the-lesser-nations neocons (wait, isn’t that racist?) and he has a tax plan designed to appeal to the GOP voter: Simple and low.
Maybe the GOP who support him aren’t that positively racist; they just don’t care that much about racism. I wonder if most GOP voters are indifferent to racism! You know, other than anti-racist outliers like Morning Joe, my mom, and the Bush family.