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What Will Capitulation of the GOP Establishment Look Like?
It looks increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President. He has led in the polls for four months, he has more money than all the other candidates combined in spite of which he is the beneficiary of seemingly limitless free media, and his campaign rallies have the excitement of rock concerts.
As my co-host Todd Feinburg and I discuss in this week’s Harvard Lunch Club Political Podcast, Trump is rolling on. And that no doubt precipitates PVCs from many of the elites on the right (not to mention utter hysteria from everyone on the left).
So my question is this.
Assuming that the Trump trajectory continues on its merry, ballistic way through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and on through “Super Tuesday,” what, exactly, is the capitulation of the GOP establishment going to look like if and when Trump begins rehearsing for his acceptance speech in Cleveland?
How do Karl Rove and George Will and Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson (et tu, Kevin?) and Bret Stephens and Daniel Henninger – oh, why not just throw in the whole Wall Street Journal editorial board? – I could go on, but you get the idea. How do these and so many more venerable conservatives reach that final stage (Kubler Ross is trite, I know) of acceptance of the nomination of Donald Trump?
How does Henninger walk back the remark of saying Trump is “beyond the pale” for politicizing 9/11?
How does Goldberg escape his remark that Trump is like a “cat trained to [urinate] in a human toilet?”
During the general election, how does Will equivocate when asked about his remark that “nothing is now more virtuous than scrubbing, as soon as possible, the Trump stain from public life.”
In short, how do these pundits and many more deal with the extreme vituperation they have spewed toward Trump’s candidacy to date?
Because walk back, escape, equivocate and deal with is what they will inevitably be doing if Trump wins the nomination.
Consider the alternative.
Consider first that Trump has a plan to simplify the tax code and (among many other things) lower the capital gains tax to 15 percent. Trump has a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump has a plan to fix the VA hospital system. Trump describes (I assure you this is coming) how he will appoint constitutional conservatives with a sympathy for unborn life – in the mold of Samuel Alito – to the Supreme Court.
And these guys do what? Endorse Hillary?
I don’t think so.
Of course it is conceivable that Rove and others will embark on a third party candidacy with Jeb (?) carrying the banner. Psychologists say that people who are terrified of heights are not really afraid of falling. They are afraid of jumping. Perhaps the Republican establishment is not so much afraid of Trump launching a third party candidacy as they are of feeling forced into doing so themselves.
A third party candidacy from the former GOP is probably unlikely. And with Trump proposing clearly conservative positions on many central issues (as I mentioned above), abandoning the GOP for Hillary Clinton is not, for any of the aforementioned pundits, going to happen.
No, the conservative elites have made a big mistake. Conservatism in the classical sense is very much about tone. But the invective of these conservatives toward Trump, far from having the measured and sober tone that might have separated supporters from Trump rather than driving them to him, has had the tone – so often ascribed to liberals – of a hissy-fit.
I believe that the flashpoint of this rage has been Trump’s announced intention to send illegal aliens back to their home countries – a prospect that Neocons who are soppy-sentimental about Ellis Island and Chamber of Commerce Republicans who are soppy-sentimental about potentially going to jail utterly loathe.
But whatever the specific underpinnings of the calumny that conservative pundits have shown to Trump – and they are not a phalanx, their reasons vary – they are likely going to have to find a way back into the fold. And it could get ugly.
But perhaps there is a way. Charles Krauthammer (whom I truly respect) recently opined about Trump:
“I think he’s a much better candidate than he was at the beginning, much better on his feet in an interview.”
“When he started out, he wandered into a lot of Twilight Zone places, the deportation of the 12 million, the thing with John McCain. He didn’t do that [in the Baier interview]. He was a lot more disciplined.”
In other words, “I was right. Trump was a buffoon. But isn’t it marvelous the evolution he has gone through?!” In other words: “I didn’t join Trump. Trump joined me!”
It’s a bold plan. But it just might work.
But they are still going to have to get used to one thing. The 12 million have got to go.
Published in General
Thanks Michael. This post has been the most practical and cathartic discussion about Trump on the site.
One final movieland reference.
You posed the question “what will the capitulation look like?”
Well, over the past 30 years the workplace and financial reporting regulations I work within have been adding a Queens phone book every year. Every firm has to live or die by them. Except illegal firms.
Federal regulations have metastacized so that containing all the laws, rules, procedures would require a library out of Borges to contain them.
Except immigration law; I mean those laws actually adhered to. Laws here simply cannot be enforced. It’s the golden rule. Every pizza parlor in flyover country must be subjected to the media’s klieg lights about adherence to the latest court decision about catering Bill and Jerry’s wedding reception.
Illegal immigrants get sanctuary cities, free emergency room care (no questions asked), in-state tuition, and exemption from nearly the entire rule book everyone else has to play by.
Here’s how I see the capitulation:
Anton ChigurhDONALD TRUMP:And you know what’s going to happen now. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.
Carson WellsGOP ESTABLISHMENT:You go to hell.
Anton ChigurhDONALD TRUMP:[Chuckles] Alright. Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I’d love to cast Cruz here, but right now it’s Trump.
I’m the one that is ignoring facts? Look up immigration policy. From the 1920s to the 1965 we had a nationality quota system of immigration. Only a small percentage of a nation’s citizens could immigrate to the United States. For 40 years we had leftist victory after leftist victory from the New Deal with FDR to the Great Society with LBJ because of AMERICANS, NOT IMMIGRANTS. It didn’t take any immigrants to reinforce those laws, the American people did it themselves. Blame your fellow citizens, those illegals didn’t get the chance to do what you think they did and even then that is speculation at best that they would want a welfare state.
That’s not to say there shouldn’t be border control or reform. There should be as it is necessary to the concept of a nation state. I support, as many republican candidates other than tRump support, making legal immigration a merit based system rather than a family based one. A family based system ensures that people of certain mind set enter the nation (as families generally have homogenous views) and that means both left wing and right wing families enter.
However, immigration is about betterment of individuals and thus the whole of society. Having immigration based on skills and education is not something tRump has spoken of however, he only speaks of nativist attacks, for the most part, on immigration.
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Also consider your claims of the left wanting more illegal immigration and them not fearing how it depresses wages. Think about what kind of employment many of those illegals are entering into and what the law prescribes about them.
Those illegals are in many cases moving to work. Not vote for what government they want. The left of course as we know does love cheating in voting but the left also supports illegal immigration for their concept of multiculturalism. They are the ones organizing groups to convince immigrants of the wrongs of northern european culture, not the immigrants. The left paints America has xenophobic.
We are not that. We simply wish to have a unifying culture and that means values. That also means we need a language of communication.
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The language being english. Those values being virtuous ones like honesty and perserverance along with recognizing those objective facts of human life like the rights to belief, self-defense, life, and the pursuit of happiness. We are not against individuals speaking spanish or german or chinese or korean or arab, but we are for understanding the english language that way you can cooperate, if necessary, with American society.
Immigrants and even migrants have historically never had an issue with learning their new nation’s mother tongue and if we looked around the world till the left came to fore never did. Even the Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, and the countless other Germanic tribes that invaded the Romans had to learn Latin and did know Latin (as many of them had long term relations with the Romans). Thats why we have Romance languages. Even in Mexico today there are kiosks that are for english speakers. There is some cultural diffusion occuring so to speak.
We are not against other languages. We are simply for a degree of unity by those common morals and that unifying language (E Plurbus Unum, out of many one). We need to fight the Left in the culture and we will see them routif we do. Those Latinos from the south of the border are no more predisposed to left wing ideology than they are ours. As a matter of fact, I would argue ours is more compatible with human nature as it is.
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Its us conservatives that support the family. We support hard work. We support private property. We support faith (so long as it doesn’t impinge on our human rights). We support limited government to its legitimate purposes (thus lower taxes and less regulations). We support charity (not the welfare state of the left which is not charity in any sense of the word). We are the ones that desire a better life for all men.
We desire that men be free, not slaves to some monolithic state. We desire than men be free that they might be good men of their own free will. We, definitively, offer a better world than what the left does. They offer compulsion and servitude, we offer free will and virtue. When we begin to make that argument and show it and also counter those insipid leftist claims then we will win in the culture and you will silly organizations like La Raza crumble.