Saturday Open Thread [11.28.15]
A new Economist/YouGov Poll finds Donald Trump leading the GOP presidential field among likely primary voters with 36%, followed by Marco Rubio at 14%, Ted Cruz at 12%, Ben Carson at 10% and Jeb Bush at 6%.
The Economist on Cruz’s Myth of Republican Presidential Politics: “The presidential candidate who has most harmed American politics this year is Donald Trump, a bully who has prospered by inciting rage. Yet from the narrower perspective of the Republican Party, the most dangerous candidate of the 2016 pack may just be Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is rising in the polls by telling conservative activists a seductive but misleading story about how their party wins elections.”
“Since launching his presidential run, the 44-year-old Texan has built his campaign around a simple pitch: assuring the most conservative third of the Republican electorate, from born-again Christian voters to hardline members of the Tea Party, that they form a natural majority of the conservative movement, and indeed would decide general elections if they would only turn out and vote.”
Matt Taibbi: “Politicians are quickly learning that they can say just about anything and get away with it. Along with vindication, apology and suffering, there now exists a fourth way forward for the politician spewing whoppers: Blame the backlash on media bias and walk away a hero.”
“Trump, meanwhile, has been through more of these beefs than one can count, even twice blabbing obvious whoppers in live televised debates… In all of these cases, the candidates doubled or tripled down when pestered by reporters and fact-checkers and insisted they’d been victimized by biased media.”
Washington Post: “Most of the party’s financiers and top strategists are sitting on the sidelines. Many are reluctant to spend money against Trump after watching others fumble as they tried to handle his counterpunches. Others, citing past elections, remain confident that the race will eventually pivot away from him early next year.”
“The political network backed by the billionaire Koch brothers has no plans to take Trump on. American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by strategist Karl Rove, is steering clear and focusing on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton instead. Right to Rise, the super PAC backing Jeb Bush, is not gearing up to attack Trump either. And major Republican donors such as hedge-fund manager Paul Singer and the Ricketts family have shown no interest in supporting the few organizations trying to undercut him.”
David Frum on the only way to stop Trump in the GOP primary: “Until he read Ann Coulter’s book this spring, Trump seemed to have been a perfectly conventional business Republican on immigration. In a 2012 interview, in fact, he blamed Romney’s loss on taking a too-tough line on the issue”
“Attacking Donald Trump as untrustworthy on stopping illegal immigration—or having super PACs do it —will stick in the craw of elected Republicans. They are, for the most part, in full agreement with the 2012-vintage Trump on the issue. But it’s their only hope. Of course, it raises the awkward but all-important question: What would they do instead to address a voter concern that until now they have ignored or disdained?”
McKay Coppins: “Trump’s dominance in this year’s presidential primary race has often been described as a mysterious natural phenomenon: the Donald riding a wild, unpredictable tsunami of conservative populist anger that just now happens to be crashing down on the Republican establishment. But in fact, Trump spent years methodically building and buying support for himself in a vast, right-wing counter-establishment — one that exists entirely outside the old party infrastructure and is quickly becoming just as powerful.”
“These forces have asserted themselves repeatedly in the fight over the future of the Republican Party. But Trump came to understand their power earlier than most. When no one was watching, he was assuming command of this Fringe Establishment, building an army of activists and avatars that he would eventually deploy in his scorched-earth assault on the GOP’s old guard, on his rivals in the primary field — and, as an early test case in the winter of 2014, on me.”
Donald Trump’s offensive comments and flat-out falsehoods just keep coming.
Yet the celebrity billionaire continues his unlikely reign as the front-runner of the 2016 GOP presidential field. Which raises the question: Will Trump eventually cross the line — or is he proof that lines no longer exist?
The political world is beginning to conclude that no one will know the answer to that question until Republicans actually start voting in February.
It increasingly appears that the GOP electorate may be the party’s only remaining means of stopping him, as voters begin to imagine what it would be like to have Trump as their standard-bearer, or maybe even in the White House.
To date, however, his flamethrower rhetoric has seemed to make his supporters love him all the more.
Jeet Heer of the New Republic asks a real Nazi about the Nazi Donald Trump.
Let's ask a Nazi what he thinks about Trump. pic.twitter.com/pSfbd4G2R4
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 25, 2015
So the real Nazi thinks Trump is a genuine Nazi, but thinks that our system of government may not allow him to work the Nazi magic in killing all the Jews, Blacks, Browns and Muslims.
Let’s not find out.
Brian Beutler says the GOP is emerging from its Trump Denialism:
With the denial fading, [Michael] Gerson asks, “Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?”
The answer appears to be “yes.” As much as they want Trump vanquished, the problem for the other Republicans in the field is that they’ve all pledged to back the GOP nominee, no matter who wins. John McCain, a man of the party who nevertheless agreed to place Sarah Palin in line for the presidency, says he will support Trump if faced with a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
That’s not the Breitbart crew talking. It’s the RNC, the entire primary field, and one of the party’s most recent presidential nominees. Which is why when writers likeNational Review’s Kevin Williamson lay the blame for Trump’s ascent at the feet of conservative movement jesters Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and shrug that nothing can be done—“as a matter of culture, Trump is—unhappily—right where a great many conservatives are: angry, sputtering, lashing out. Trump may not last; Trumpism will.”—it rings hollow.
As much as they’ve awakened to the threat that Trumpism poses to their party, Republicans and the conservative intelligentsia lack the self-awareness—or perhaps the temerity—to acknowledge that though they now resent it, they’ve been courting it all along.
Michael Tomasky says I have been right all along in my pronoucements that Ted Cruz will be the 2016 GOP Nominee.
Cue the scary-minor-key power chord: Ted Cruz is within the margin of error of Donald Trump in Iowa. It’s Trump 25, and Cruz 23, but as we will see further down, other numbers from the poll suggest that Cruz is well positioned to win what might now be a two-man race in the Hawkeye State.
This is just awesome news. One can now begin to see how this may all be shaping up. I tweeted it last Friday. Trump becomes the crazy, not-really-electable, neo-fascist candidate—the choice of a good chunk of the base, but one the establishment can’t live with. Marco Rubio, the guy the establishment is most comfortable with, becomes the establishment candidate—but by definition that will make him unacceptable to a sizable chunk of the base. And so emerges Cruz—the “compromise” candidate! (That the scenario of Cruz as compromise candidate is not at all implausible is one stark measure of what Trump’s presence has done to the GOP.)
Cruz is now running—and smartly, it must be said—what you might call the “Donnie Jr.” strategy. Be like Donald, but not as… Not as out there. Not as openly racist. Not as extreme. Differentiate where principle absolutely demands, as Cruz did on the question of religious ID cards for Muslim Americans, which Cruz ruled out as Trump did not. But basically, be the acceptable Trump.
Trump hardly comes out of nowhere. There’s really little about his ascent that is surprising at all if you’ve been paying attention to the direction of our politics in the last decade. I don’t mean that I would have predicted he’d do this well. I didn’t. What I mean is that the nature of his success, the effectiveness of his strategy and message, is entirely predictable. What Trump has done is taken the half-subterranean Republican script of the Obama years, turbocharge it and add a level of media savvy that Trump gained not only from The Apprentice but more from decades navigating and exploiting New York City’s rich tabloid news culture. He’s just taken the existing script, wrung out the wrinkles and internal contradictions and given it its full voice. There’s very, very little that is new or unfamiliar in Trump’s campaign beside taking the world of talk radio, conservative media and base Republican hijinx and pushing them to the center of the national political conversation. If you’re surprised, it’s because you haven’t been paying attention.
