Rare News Desk
As Kevin Boyd reported yesterday, several Republican heavyweights have announced that they’d rather see Donald Trump win the Republican nomination than Senator Ted Cruz. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah says he believes Republicans can win with Trump but will be electorally wiped out if they opt for Cruz. Former Senate majority leader Bob Dole echoed Hatch. Consultant John Feehery fired off this pinball earlier this month when he tweeted “Listen, if Trump gets the nomination, I will support him. Cruz? Not so much.”
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The notion, peddled by both Hatch and Dole, that Trump is more electorally viable than Cruz is one of the least opaque fig leafs we’ve seen in a while. Trump’s popularity spread among independents is -27 and with Democrats it’s -70, according to Gallup. Piquing the interest of some disenchanted, blue-collar hardhats won’t be anywhere near enough to close that gap. Meanwhile, Cruz, the supposedly unelectable zealot, is only -3 among independents and -37 among Democrats. Not stellar, but surely a better bet than Trump.
So why is the Republican establishment springing for the manifestly repulsive Trump? Are they looking to engineer a loss so they can be rid of Trump and start rebuilding? That’s unlikely. With Trump at the helm, Republicans wouldn’t just risk losing the White House; they could suffer devastating damage down-ticket as well. Nobody inside the party wants an electoral meltdown.
The real reason for the GOP’s embrace of Trump was identified by the Washington Post yesterday:
Some in the GOP establishment now spin Mr. Trump’s policy emptiness as a feature, not a bug. When they describe him as someone who will “cut deals,” or turn to D.C. elder statesmen for advice, they sound like people who imagine themselves filling the void in Mr. Trump’s head with the agendas of their own lobbying clients.
In other words, the insiders’ upbeat new take on Mr. Trump is a bet on his corruptibility — and a confession of their own.
Exactly. The Republican establishment sees Trump as a more palatable figure than Cruz because they believe the author of The Art of the Deal—the second-best book after the Bible, or so I’ve been told—will be more willing to play ball than the intransigent Cruz. This should finally lay to rest any debate over where the official GOP’s priorities lie: process over policy, stability over substance, a door open to their interests rather than a door closed to bad ideas. So desperate are they to maintain their influence that they’re willing to cast their lots with a man who mocks the disabled, makes putrid jokes about women, and blasts Senator John McCain for having the temerity to be captured during the Vietnam War.
At least he’s not a jerk like that damned Cruz.
The problem is that the peek of pragmatism the establishment thinks it detects in Trump is nothing of the sort. Mark Bowden profiled Trump for Playboy magazine back in 1996, and recently wrote the following for Vanity Fair:
His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.
Trump doesn’t have a guiding set of principles, nor even a consistent preference for dealmaking and pragmatism. The only constant variable is that his actions nourish his fulgurating red giant of an ego, which makes him perhaps the least predictable candidate to ever seek the Republican nomination. This is how he can assail Mitt Romney for being “mean-spirited” towards illegal immigrants in 2012, then call for those same immigrants to be rounded up and deported in 2015. And the GOP thinks this is someone with whom they can find consensus?
Senator Ted Cruz is a flawed candidate and not my first choice for president. He sticks relentlessly to his script and gives off a whiff of opportunism wherever he goes. He’s had his fair share of flip-flops and his ability to win a general election is certainly in doubt. Apparently he’s also offended some people in Washington, considered a gobsmacking capital offense by exactly no one except retired former lobbyists with Hardball gigs who live in Glover Park. And yet, that last infraction has been enough to drive many Republican Washingtonians into the arms of a former reality TV show star and casino bankruptcy tycoon.
The establishment isn’t worried that Cruz will be a failed president. They’re worried he’ll revert to the libertarian-ish-esque-ish Cruz of of 2011 and fight to the mat for change within the GOP—on spending, ethanol, Ex-Im, torture, Assad—rather than succumbing to existing interests. So off with his head. Better to back a raving lunatic than risk that.
