Friday Open Thread [9.11.2015]

Nate Cohn:

It is tempting to look at Mr. Trump’s resilience thus far and conclude that he can defy any effort to bring him down. But the party has not yet played its full hand, or anything like it. So far, Mr. Trump has fended off a few attacks from a disorganized party at a time when voters are paying relatively little attention. That will change.

My colleague Nick Confessore reported that Republican groups are mulling waging a large campaign against Mr. Trump. But that effort has struggled, in part because attacking him brings risks, and every group argues that someone else ought to do the work of taking him down. It’s a textbook collective action problem.

It would be easier if the party had already coalesced around a single candidate. “I think 2016 was already particularly challenging without Trump,” said Hans Noel, another of the book’s authors. The G.O.P. has struggled to coalesce behind anything like a consensus candidate because the party is so fractured and the field is so big.

Seth Masket:

Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has been in the news (and, relatedly, atop the polls) for a while now — a good deal longer than most political observers expected it would be. As such, it’s invited a great deal of analysis about What It Means. Do Trump’s successes so far mean that voters no longer value experience? That they’re pushing back against the GOP’s post-2012 “political correctness”? That the party system is unraveling and Trump has tapped into a post-partisan silent majority? That it’s time to start thinking about his vice presidential candidate? That the parties need to address Trump’s policy stances to survive?

No. On all of the above. Here’s why.

Brian Beutler on the Dr Frankenstein behind the creation of the Trump monster:

Writing for National Review, Jonah Goldberg and Charles C.W. Cooke have each diagnosed Trumpism as a failing of the conservative voters who comprise Trump’s base.

Cooke believes that Trump “has succeeded in convincing conservatives to discard their principles,” begging the question of whether Trump’s supporters ever really shared the principles that animate conservative organizations and National Review writers. Goldberg insisted that “no movement that embraces Trump can call itself conservative,” which helped give rise to #NRORevolt, an online backlash, thick with white nationalists and other conservatives who are fed up with elites who try to write non-conformists—from moderates to protectionists to isolationists to outright racists—out of the movement.

The anti-tax group Club for Growth is a big part of that purification apparatus. It is currently organizing and raising money for an effort to excise Trump before his view that hedge fund managers should pay their fair share in taxes metastasizes through the Republican primary field.

Republican consultant Steve Schmidt, who presumably sympathizes with National Review and Club for Growth, described their frustrations as the result of a fatal disjunction between mass conservatism and the ideology that’s supposed to underlie it. “We’re at this moment in time,” Schmidt told NPR recently, “when there’s a severability between conservatism and issues. Conservatism is now expressed as an emotional sentiment. That sentiment is contempt and anger.”

This explains Trump’s rise and persistence, but fails to account for how “contempt and anger” became such valuable currency in Republican politics today. That omission is predictable, because such an accounting would implicate nearly everyone who now claims to be astonished and dismayed by the Trump phenomenon.

It’s difficult to pinpoint when resentment became a controlling force in Republican politics, but Club for Growth, National Review, and Schmidt all contributed to it.

Republicans in 2008 were contemptuous and angry that their ideology of preemptive war and supply side economics were revealed to be bankrupt and responsible for the horrible mess the country. Not that the horrible events of two failed wars and an economic depression that they were directly responsible for made them angry. No, they were angry that they were found out. They were angry that the were shoved out of power because of it. Power belongs to conservatives. Always. And they were very very very angry that the person doing the shoving was black.

Republicans, all of them, everywhere, began an opposition of total obstruction. And they maintained it through anger and contempt. Every action taken by the black usurper was an action of a genocidal tyrant bent on conservative white people’s immediate, imminent destruction. Everything was an outrage.

Charlie Cook: “It’s hard to look at the opin­ion polling in the GOP pres­id­en­tial nom­in­a­tion con­test and con­clude any­thing else. As un­ex­pec­ted as many of the de­vel­op­ments on the Demo­crat­ic side have been, it doesn’t hold a candle to what is un­fold­ing among the Re­pub­lic­ans.”

“Clearly, something pro­found is hap­pen­ing in the usu­ally staid and or­derly party. Don­ald Trump is in first place not only in both Iowa and New Hamp­shire but in na­tion­al polling as well, av­er­aging more than a quarter of the vote. Ben Car­son, the re­tired neur­o­lo­gist, is now in second place in Iowa and na­tion­wide, and in a stat­ist­ic­al tie in New Hamp­shire with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a more tra­di­tion­al can­did­ate. That Jeb Bush is av­er­aging single-di­git per­form­ances in both cru­cial states and na­tion­ally is just as per­plex­ing.”

“Should we see this as a re­bel­lion against ca­reer politi­cians and the GOP es­tab­lish­ment? Or, is roughly 40 per­cent of the GOP elect­or­ate throw­ing a tem­per tan­trum? The an­swer is: both.”

Just published: What Happened to the Republican Party? by John K. White

“The Grand Old Party―once moderate and even magnanimous―has fallen into a prison of its own making when it comes to presidential politics. Republicans may be having a heyday in the Congress but their prospects for the 2016 presidential election aren’t great―and won’t improve unless and until they break out of their intellectual and ideological straightjackets and start speaking to where the American public lives: geographically, culturally, and politically.”

Nate Silver on why Bernie Sanders is not like Donald Trump: “You can call both ‘outsiders.’ But if you’re a Democrat, Sanders is your eccentric uncle: He has his own quirks, but he’s part of the family. If you’re a Republican, Trump is as familial as the vacuum salesman knocking on your door.”

“A Trump nomination would be more of an existential threat to the Republican establishment. He bucks the establishment’s consensus on issues as fundamental to the GOP as taxation and health care, and he’s wobbly on abortion. Splitting with the party on any one of those issues might ordinarily disqualify a candidate. Trump potentially destabilizes the Republicans’ ‘three-legged stool’: The coalition of fiscal, social and national security conservatives have dominated the party since 1980 or so. But on the issue on which Trump is most conservative — immigration — establishment Republicans worry that he might be so reactionary as to cause long-term damage to the party brand.”

“In certain respects, Trump is engaged in an attempted ‘hostile takeover’ of the Republican Party. Because the downside of nominating him might be so enormous — lasting beyond a single election — the GOP establishment may fight to the death to prevent him from being chosen, even at the price of a brokered convention and a fractured party base.”

Jason Zengerle on who is winning the Sheldon Adelson Primary: “Adelson is also said to be conflicted about the various potential Trump-slayers. Scott Walker, despite intensive lobbying efforts, is viewed by many close to Adelson as insufficiently serious about Israel and foreign policy… Rubio is a personal favorite but might lack the necessary ruthlessness to take out The Donald. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, is well positioned to appeal to the same GOP primary voters Trump’s currently energizing, but he is probably too conservative to beat Hillary. Which brings Adelson to Jeb Bush, the candidate who seemingly has the best chance of slaying both Trump and Clinton but whose relationship with the mogul is as vexed as any of the Republican contenders.”

“If Adelson really feels that backing Gingrich over Romney was a mistake in 2012, backing Jeb this time around would be a kind of atonement. But, frustratingly for Adelson, the heir apparent to the Bush dynasty has not always been so eager to play along.”

Esquire’s Charlie Pierce on the nonstory that is the email scandal.

It is at this point in every HRC e-mail bombshell at which we ask ourselves that age-old Whitewater question, “What in the hell is this whole thing about anyway?” Is it about HRC hiding the smoking IM in which she confesses that she and Zombie Vince Foster planned the Benghazi assault in a Moroccan safe house? Is it about the reckless handling of classified material? (If so, then the fact that HRC is not a subject of investigation according to the FBI would seem to be dispositive.) Is it Russettized investigative collating; you said this once, now what about this?….Or is it about the NYT being pissed that, somehow, they never brought down a Clinton. Why do people laugh at their mighty sword?

John Dickerson on the notion that Donald Trump is not the second coming of Ross Perot:

“Perot enjoyed a healthy ego like Trump, but unlike the real estate magnate, he ran on a platform of something more than his skill. As an answer to the public dissatisfaction with Washington politicians, Perot offered a specific reform agenda that included term limits for members of Congress, a balanced budget amendment, and national referenda in which voters would be allowed a direct say in making laws by putting them on a national ballot.”

“Perot was selling a specific set of guardrails that would ensure a stronger relationship between lawmakers and the people. Trump is offering a one-time personality sale. Voters just have to hope that he gets it right and that Congress snaps into shape. Perot was selling a system that was in keeping with the founding principles of the country (and concerns of the founders), and it would guard against the megalomania of politicians. Trump’s candidacy encourages the cult of personality by putting the whole bundle in one candidate.”

“Perot believed in making a painstaking argument to the American people. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t think facts are so important.”