Sunday Open Thread [5.8.16]
GEORGIA—WSB-TV/Landmark–Trump 42, Clinton 41
Georgia will be won by Hillary.
New York Times says Trump will never win over Ryan: “Although party leaders furiously brokered a meeting between the two men at the Capitol next Thursday, it is likely that only substantial changes in Mr. Trump’s language and tenor, not just minor calibrations on policy positions, will be needed to bring Mr. Ryan to his camp.”
“Mr. Ryan has become increasingly depressed about the tone of the race within the Republican Party, several people who have talked to him in recent weeks said. He could not bring himself to give even nominal support to Mr. Trump, despite pressure from more conservative House Republicans, after the candidate disparaged various ethnic groups and accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald, among other inflammatory comments. Those remarks determined Mr. Ryan’s course far more than the considerable differences on policy between the men.”
“Mr. Ryan’s stance may lead to the remarkable scenario of a convention chairman presiding over the nomination of a man he does not support, but it basically comes down to three things.”
It may also lead to Ryan’s defeat in his upcoming primary in August. He should go full anti-Trump now, run as a third party candidate and then reclaim the party from the teabaggers and run in 2020 against President Clinton.
On Ryan’s primary in August: Sarah Palin told CNN fthat she will work to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan by backing his primary opponent in Wisconsin. Said Palin: “I think Paul Ryan is soon to be ‘Cantored,’ as in Eric Cantor. His political career is over but for a miracle because he has so disrespected the will of the people, and as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral, and for him to already come out and say who he will not support is not a wise decision of his.”
Max Boot says the GOP is dead: “For the time being, at least, that Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump.”
“Trump is an ignorant demagogue who traffics in racist and misogynistic slurs and crazy conspiracy theories. He champions protectionism and isolationism — the policies that brought us the Great Depression and World War II. He wants to undertake a police-state roundup of undocumented immigrants and to bar Muslims from coming to this country. He encourages his followers to assault protesters and threatens to sue or smear critics.”
“There has never been a major party nominee in U.S. history as unqualified for the presidency. The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.”
The Nazis are happy with Trump.
“White men in America and across the planet are partying like it’s 1999 following Trump’s decisive victory over the evil enemies of our race,” exulted Andrew Anglin at the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
“He is getting white people excited for the first time in my memory,” said a Stormfront participant. “Look at the crowds when he gets the cameras to pan out. They’re huge (or should I say YUGE?) and almost 100% white. It is fantastic to see.”
Conservative Charles C.W. Cooke:
The more I speak to supporters of Donald Trump, the more convinced I become that a significant portion of the man’s apologists are blissfully unaware of what is actually at stake in 2016. Time and time again, I’m told blithely that it doesn’t really matter if Trump loses in 2016, because a loss could not possibly be worse than the status quo. Trump, I am informed, is a “Hail Mary.” And if the Senate and the House go down, too? Well that’s just the price of trying to shake things up. This, I’m afraid, is flat-out wrong. Disastrously wrong. Apocalyptically wrong. The Republican party is an imperfect vehicle and it has, of course, made mistakes. But the idea that it hasn’t effectively and consistently opposed President Obama’s agenda is little more than a dangerous and ignorant fiction.
Conservative Liam Donovan:
Vast swathes of the electorate despise him, so he has no chance of winning As conservatives around the country wake up to the new reality of a Trumpist GOP, shell-shocked Republicans are still coming to grips with the implications.
In one camp you have the eager team players, gamely digging in to do combat with Hillary and support the nominee no matter what. In the other you have the #NeverTrump crowd, steadfastly resisting calls to stand down in the name of party unity. But by far the biggest group doesn’t quite know what to think. They didn’t support Trump, they’re nervous about him as the standard bearer, but he beat the odds, right? If conventional wisdom was wrong then, who is to say it’s right now? To them I say: Stop it. Stop talking yourself into it. Conventional wisdom was wrong precisely because it didn’t heed the polls. It expected voter sentiments to change and Republicans to “get serious” as the election approached. As it turns out, they were serious all along. Trump tapped into something, all right. But the tide of grievance, resentment, and white identity politics he rode to the nomination is a drop in the general-election bucket.
One possibility is that Clinton could pick [Elizabeth] Warren as her running mate as a way to throw a powerful bone to the Bernie Sanders left, putting Warren a mere heartbeat away from the Oval Office. But another, more likely prospect is now floating into view. Between Warren’s powerful fundraising chops and the potential for a Donald Trump candidacy to push Senate seats into Democratic hands, the next Senate could see a whole new power bloc with Warren at the head.
Warren’s influence is twofold. First and foremost, she’s the undisputed queen of the party’s message: Warren-esque liberalism has become the de facto tongue for most of the party’s Senate candidates, regardless of gender—just as her brand of economic populism has dominated the Democratic presidential primaries. Warren’s passions— decreasing college debt, investing in research and regulating financial institutions—have become the party’s passions.
And since winning election to the Senate in 2012, Warren has emerged as her party’s most potent ally at the operational level.
