By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment