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The Pivot
It looks to me that Trump will now turn on the naysayers in the party. It couldn’t be more deserved. He tried to play nice, but they are refusing to support him. After the 50 national security neo-cons penned a letter denouncing him, and other GOP stalwarts are playing games trying to undermine him, Trump will now use them to differentiate himself from failed Republican policies and attract a new coalition of voters.
From yesterday’s speech:
When we talk about the insider, who are we talking about? It’s the comfortable politicians looking out for their own interests. It’s the lobbyists who know how to insert that perfect loophole into every bill. It’s the financial industry that knows how to regulate their competition out of existence. The insiders also include the media executives, anchors and journalists in Washington, Los Angeles, and New York City, who are part of the same failed status quo and want nothing to change.
Every day you pick up a newspaper, or turn on the nightly news, and you hear about some self-interest banker or some discredited Washington insider says they oppose our campaign. Or some encrusted old politician says they oppose our campaign. Or some big time lobbyist says they oppose our campaign.
I wear their opposition as a badge of honor. Because it means I am fighting for REAL change, not just partisan change. I am fighting – all of us across the country are fighting – for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media-donor-political complex that’s bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by and for the people.
The leadership class in Washington D.C., of which Hillary Clinton has been a member for thirty years, has abandoned the people of this country.
I am going to give the people their voice back.
Think about it. The people opposing our campaign are the same people who have left our border open and let innocent people suffer as a result.
The people opposing our campaign are the same people who have led us into one disastrous foreign war after another.
The people opposing our campaign are the same people who lied to us about one trade deal after another.
Aren’t you tired of a system that gets rich at your expense?
Aren’t you tired of big media, big businesses, and big donors rigging the system to keep your voice from being heard?
Are you ready for change?
Are you ready for leadership that puts you, the American people, first? That puts your country first? That puts your family first?
Fasten your seat-belts.
Published in General
As I pointed out in my second comment, some NeverTrumpers don’t try to wriggle out of their responsibility for electing Hilary — they advocate it. While I respect your intellectual honesty, I strongly disagree with your assessment that Trump is worse than Hilary. I will point out that supporting Hilary really does make you a Democrat. You aren’t just electing that monster, you are helping elect her entire machine and her allies throughout government. Even if you yourself make the effort to vote (R) downticket, your family, friends, and acquaintances that are swayed by your public pronouncements will vote (D) all the way. Like most voters, they aren’t going to make the fine distinctions you are.
this is complete nonsense.
I suppose I could say that voting for trump in the primary really does make you a democrat. Would you accept that, or try to “wriggle your way out” of your responsibility for electing Hillary?
I argued, I voted, I lost already. This is now your dog and your fight.
You can strongly disagree with the assessment that Trump is worse than Hillary, but no one is obligated to accept your view. I certainly don’t.
If I think Trump is worse, I won’t vote for him. If I think Hillary is marginally worse, I still won’t vote for Trump because I think his downside risk is greater, as I believe he might be crazy. I would not vote for her in any conceivable circumstance.
So far I haven’t seen enough from Trump to make the risk of voting for him worth taking, so my present position is that I’m not voting for either one. It’s not that she’s not terrible. She is. It’s that he’s not showing me he’s sufficiently better.
However, there are still 81 days left for him to show me something.
Or, like me, you believe that Hillary is a worse person, but that Trump will be worse for the future of conservatism. Phil is ignoring any bigger picture in his quest to personalize and shift the blame for this complete disaster. There is nobody to blame for Trump, but the people who voted for him. I’m certainly not going to own it for them, however loudly they demand that I do so.
Phil and Larry, if you start treating your fellow members with a little good faith you might get a more substantive discussion.
This is where our party has jumped the shark in this election. Hillary is loathsome, but she is not ten feet tall. This whole election has been: “If Hillary gets in, THEN IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!” The Democrat Party has been post-Constitutional for decades and anyone who they nominate is going to be ideologically indistinguishable; perhaps not as corrupt but probably as likely to abuse authority (just like Obama does). We’re going to be listening to this sobbing during every election cycle going forward, and I’m not going to be dragooned into “Binary Choices for Buffoons” because a segment of the GOP electorate can’t focus on winning long enough to nominate a candidate willing to effectively campaign. Return to the Buckley Rule.
The election that really mattered was not this one but the one four years ago, because that’s when “true conservatives” held their noses on points of ideological purity and dumped a good, honorable man (who was damn near prescient on the problems we would be facing today) claiming they could not distinguish him from the Democrat. That’s when we got the ideologue willing to govern by decree. All the long shadows you fear stem from the last four years and you’re going to get that for any Democrat forward.
This is a country with a lot of problems other than a wall (paid for by Mexico), but we have a nominee who is substantially on the same page with Horrible Hillary on everything from trade to foreign policy to entitlements. And he is just as untrustworthy, just as unreliable, just as willing to say what the audience in front of him wants to hear, just as unstable and arbitrary, just as unpleasant a human being, etc. I don’t trust him not to negotiate away the Supreme Court to Chuck Schumer. Just what am I voting for?
I make no public announcements and I make absolutely no effort to convince anyone of anything. If we had fewer posts attacking a rump of disaffected GOP and conservative voters, you might not hear of me at all. As I noted earlier, it seems to me that most of us NeverTrumpers keep it in the family.
Let’s see, nominating someone who:
Had the highest unfavorability rating of any major party nominee, especially among independents (in a year when the Democrats nominated the person with what would have been the highest unfavorability rating of major party nominees);
Primarily appealed to white working class voters (a group that constitutes a plurality in the Republican Party but an overwhelming minority of general electorate) when that candidate had no intention of trying to win over minority groups (and almost always referred to a minority group as “the [minority group]”, eg, the “the Hispanics”, “the second amendment types”;
The media gave nearly $2 billion of free media to and believing that meant he would negate the media in the general;
Had a long track record praising his likely opponent in the most glowing terms (and actually bragged in the debates about getting his likely opponent to attend his wedding);
Routinely (and embarrassingly) traffics in bizarre conspiracy theories that would run afoul of the Ricochet CoC;
Who got incredibly rich gaming the corrupt system in hopes that he will fix the corruption in the system;
Believes taking to people that already support you can act as a campaign;
In short, nominating the only person that could lose to Hillary Clinton.
Except that’s not what happened.
Blame for Romney’s failure should be laid squarely on Romney, and the continuing cries of “betrayal!” are just not true. It is long past the time where people need to own up to this one fact: Romney ran a poor and inept campaign, and he did not fight back where and how he needed.
Just as any failure on Trump’s part will ultimately be laid squarely on Trump.
I still have to push back on this: I do not see how any of the other primary front runners could possibly have defeated Hillary. Those that could have were all knocked out early.
Rubio would be walking away with the election right now. I don’t believe there would be any contest.
Much as I’d like to believe that (and since we’re arguing counterfactuals anyway) unless he enlisted mecha-godzilla I’m pretty sure she’d have squashed him by now.
And that’s a longer term issue about who participates in the GOP primary process both in terms of candidates and people who get to select the nominee. I’m not going to rehash all that (look at posts above), but Trumps’ weaknesses were on full display from the beginning.
Those of us who wanted other candidates (primarily governors who, you know, did stuff that we wanted to see done in DC) clearly underestimated the willingness of fellow GOP primary voters to not just put up with but rally to Trump (I think as much because of – rather than in spite of – his antics). But we did not underestimate the impatience of the general electorate with Trump’s behavior and temperament.
One case in point is that Trump is losing badly in large part because his campaign is largely non-existent and he has yet to spend money on meaningful advertisement. The strategy of his campaign is basically getting voters to rally to him on the force of his personality. It’s not working. As predicted, the media that was happy to give him lots of free time when he was sabotaging the GOP is now uniformly hostile except for Fox (and that is effectively an echo chamber on the right).
I can’t believe for a minute that Ted Cruz would have allowed that to happen.
I simply can’t believe that Rubio would be off message from week-to-week, picking tangential fights.
I don’t have a high opinion of Kasich at all, but he wouldn’t be the captain of this clown circus of a campaign.
One of the lessons from the Romney defeat was the necessity to have a better ground game and widen the base of the party. Every single candidate on the GOP roster but one was supportive of that lesson. Do you want to guess the name of the one?
While I disagree with your subsequent claim as to why it happened, covered by Skipsul, I agree with you about the magnitude of the disaster that befell us in 2012.
So for those of us who meant it — really meant it — when we said that defeat in 2012 meant more than the loss of a single election, you can perhaps understand why we will no longer accept the business as usual GOP cycle of promise, delay, betray, repeat.
The GOP has failed us for the last time. We would rather be beaten for who we are than for the pitifaul creatures we are assumed to be, and you never know — the horse could learn to sing.
Not without those of us who hear his continuing amnesty schtick. And as you can see; that’s a lot.
This is definitely an argument of “counterfactuals anyway”. However, if Marco Rubio couldn’t win his own Party’s nomination, how on earth would he “be walking away with the general”?
The GOP problem in the 2016 POTUS primary was that Walker, Cruz, Rubio and Paul all threw their hats into this three ring circus. If they had put country first and only one of them ran, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
And the GOP RNC was complicit since they didn’t want ANY of these candidates to run against their chosen one Jeb!
Voila! Embrace the Suck. Trump.
They might have run tighter campaigns, but they each had other very serious weaknesses. Rubio didn’t have a coherent message other than “competency”. Kasich was, well, Kasich. And Cruz’s core issues I delineated way back in November ’15 – he was not trusted and too easily caricatured.
Quite frankly we just had too many candidates running, and the big egos (Cruz, Christie, Jeb, and Rubio, and of course Trump) sucked all the air and funding out of the room. That the party allowed so many to run speaks ill of its own organizational woes.
Let me punt this back to you: If the GOP’s approach is the problem and they are a bunch of traitors, why not form a new party – The National Conservatives or something? The simple fact of the matter is that the GOP has thousands of office holds from the local level up. It’s nature and direction is not going to change just because the presidential nominee has a different personality.
Then how did Trump get on the debate stage, as well as the 15 others? No, the RNC was actually playing by the rules on this one – they gave the voters what they asked for. What you are describing is what happened on the other side.
A) I think if the party nominated a cardboard cutout with an R on it, it would be polling better against Hillary than Trump is now.
B) Even if I concede your point that the candidates that could have defeated Hillary were knocked out early, that is because the party chose Trump early on, choosing to lose with Trump rather than win with a GOPer.
The best possible case for Trump is that the party learned the wrong lesson from Romney, ie, assuming that Romney lost solely because he didn’t fight hard enough and nominated someone that was all fight and no substance. But, I don’t think the primary voters put that much thought into it. I think the primary voters wanted to believe that economic central planning works, and the only reason is hasn’t so far is that we haven’t had someone with a great brain like Trump doing the planning.
National GOP politics will benefit from being shown who’s in charge. No, it’s not Trump, and it’s not the chattering class. It’s a nation of fed-up Americans. Choose wisely, GOP. There’s still hope.
There is an old adage in military history: the generals in the next war will try to fight by the rules of the last war. People learn the wrong lessons and double down by then applying those lessons big time.
“We lost because our logistics let us down!” they might say, and then go an organize the next war to death – great logistics, so great they don’t have any will to use them to effect (see: France 1939).
Sure, Romney had a flawed ground game, but that wasn’t his core flaw – his core flaw was He Himself and his inability to punch back. Obama had an excellent ground game twice, but it would have been for naught if he wasn’t also a class 1 charismatic speaker with a personality cult.
Cruz et al spent millions on their ground games (Cruz even had phone apps!) – but neglected their strategy. They learned the wrong lessons of why they lost: organization is useless if you aren’t using it to advance. Cleverness is not its own reward here.
Trump too seems to have learned only half the lesson – zero ground game but with a massive personality push. It worked in the primaries, so he misapplied it in the general.
Democrats?
This is the biggest issue. Our nomination and campaign process for President eliminates any decent human being from running for the office. I am of the opinion that anyone seeking the office of the Presidency should be constitutionally prohibited from holding the office.
We need to find a way to get good leaders to run for the office, because our current system is guaranteeing that only miserable human beings can win. All this focus on the lesser of two evils has only raised the level of evil in both parties nominees, culminating in two of the worst people in this century to be the nominees this year.
If electorate doesn’t care about this country, then I’m not sure why I should. If these two are the best our country has to offer, then our country is already doomed. Trump won’t “save” our country any more than Hillary will ruin it. He will merely have our country go off the cliff of national destruction a couple of degrees to the right of where it will if Hillary is elected. The difference, Trump will tear out the brakes by making the GOP another party of economic central planning.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree. I sat through all of the main event debates, and Rubio could speak convincingly on a wide range of topics from defense to the economy to education, etc. Kasich was annoying but cogent. Cruz had a lingering creepiness and was to tactical for his own good, but he was very solid on the issues.
The problem for Trump right now is not issues but temperament and the fact that more voters detest him than they distrust Hillary. In fact this year has been entirely about personalities and almost nothing about issues. Two things that I can say about Rubio is that he is likeable and came across as level headed, and he was making a concerted effort to have a broad base. Would he be winning? I hope so, but even if not he wouldn’t be taking these shots and endangering down-ballot races as we are facing now.
The problem with nominating Trump was saying that the conventional wisdom of what it takes to win a race doesn’t apply any more. Reality check: people tend to respond to candidates and their messages pretty consistently over time.
Again, interesting question: how do we prevent 17 candidates on the stage without people attacking the process as a coronation? That’s a question we need to get answered.
Skip, where are we going on this? Learn from the past but don’t try to drawn lessons from it?
As an aside, I think the electoral college as originally designed is the best system I can conceive of for accomplishing this. We have perverted that system by making it more democratic in the pejorative sense of that word.
It is odd to me that our founders took great care to protect us from a “democracy”, and over the last 200 years, we have systematically destroyed those protections.
All good points.
Skippy – you’re living in fantasy land. I don’t think there is any candidate but Trump who is capable of losing to the utter disaster that is Hillary.
One of the stronger arguments for voting for Trump is that Republicans, most of them, can tell that there are deep, deep problems with their nominee, while Democrats really seem oblivious to how bad Hillary is. They don’t like her Wall Street connections or that she’s not a completely out of the closet socialist, but her real crimes are just crazy stuff made up by FoxNews. Trump would face real opposition from Congress and definitely from the media, while Hillary would not. That’s basically the argument Mickey Kaus made. I’m not sure if I buy that argument, but there it is.
I desperately want to vote against Hillary, and I am watching closely for the chance to do so. Trump’s speech on crime and race was very good. I’m not yet convinced that Trump would damage progressivism more than he would damage conservatism, but if he takes enough steps in the right direction, I’ll vote for him.
Huh? This is hostility that I do not understand on Ricochet.