Could the GOP have prevented Trump in the early days?
IAN American so my understanding of your politics is gleaned from a US history in university 40 yrs ago, watching the news, and reading the Dope.
From my recollection, once Trump announced his intention to run for office, ISTM that he just belligerently competed against a large field of obviously much more competent and qualified people, without relying on reason or knowledge or expertise.
I also recall Paul Ryan, at some point explaining to Trump about how things were supposed to run; this may have been an early hope of a “pivot”.
Yet somehow, without any qualification whatsoever, he barrelled through and became GOP candidate. ISTM that in any normal, conventional world this shouldn’t have happened.
So how did it happen and could it have been prevented without the GOP enacting any new party policies etc?
Since around 1976, selection of the nominee has been almost totally in the hands of primary and caucus voters. Party officials have too few votes, at the convention, to decide any but the closest race.
The only way to stop Trump from being nominated is to change the party rules so that the decision is made by party bosses rather than a broad electorate, I favor this, but it goes so much against the spirit of our age as to be almost inconceivable,
Anybody with enough resources/money can launch a political campaign. If he or she garners enough support within the party they can participate in the debates. Trump did both of these and won the nomination easily. I don’t think the GOP party could have done anything about it even if they wanted to. The GOP Primary voters spoke.
Was this partly the result of non-Trump votes being split amongst his opponents?
I believe that would have been the case here.
The Democratic Party has a group of people called “superdelegates” that can help tip the scales if someone they deem to be dangerous is gaining steam. These are people who get disproportionate voting powers.
They’ve been accused of being undemocratic, and indeed in 2018 they put some restrictions on how and when the superdelegates get to vote. But it’s possible they might have put the brakes on a Trump sort of candidate.
The Republicans don’t have any sort of system like that, they nominate based on popular vote. So if an extremist gets a cult following and catches on, their own rules make them play along and support that person.
I don’t think they could have done anything to stop him, nor can they stop the next Trump wannabe. Not unless they change how their primaries work.
I think the MAGA crowd despise government and Trump was the dark horse candidate they always wanted who wasn’t an “insider”. Trumpers do not want a well functioning government. They wanted to throw a grenade into the inner workings and that’s what they did with Trump.
Sure they could have stopped him, had the sane candidates decided to rally around one of their own and the rest drop out. Sort of like what Democrats did in 2020 to stop Bernie Sanders. When the sane vote is split about 6 different ways but there’s only one guy in the crazy lane, then the crazy guy gets nominated. The sane candidates could have and should have stopped him, but their egos wouldn’t allow it.
I think this is underappreciated. I have a very close relative who is a rabid Trumper. As in, someone I speak to nearly daily. Back in the 2016 primaries, he was Trump OR Sanders, because (his words) “I just want someone to blow the whole thing up.”
Never mind the damage it would do to his, my, everyone’s lives. He’s so miserable, angry, and disillusioned he genuinely wants to start fresh. And all my exhortations as to the foolishness of that go nowhere.
I honestly don’t think it would have mattered if there had been only one or two opponents (unlikely as that was). He went straight to the voters, he broke all the “rules” of civility and congeniality among different candidates in the same party, with name-calling and insults, and somehow he knew that there was a huge constituency for that kind of behavior. I think a lot of his supporters, in addition to blowing up the system, wanted to blow up what they perceived as the hypocrisy and false faces of most politicians, the greasy same-speak that means nothing.
Maybe I am missing some nuance here. Trump is the absolute worst of the worst of greasy same-speak that means nothing.
I agree with this. A step further - if the party was concerned about Trump, they should have sent in some candidates with a spine to stand up to him and call him out on his lies and lack of conservative cred. They were still playing by the rules, and he had no rules. Just a bully in a China shop. While I agree he appealed to the deplorables, someone mocking and humiliating him daily and verbally smacking him across the mouth may have made him tire of politics and go back to being a second-rate TV personality. No one from the party was brave or strong enough to do it. They got what they deserve.
I was shocked that, even after he insulted Ted’s wife and Jeb’s family, the other candidates didn’t step up. In hindsight, I think they didn’t take him seriously and thought he’d drop out to host another reality show or run casinos…
eta: That was my hope as well…
I actually think they could have. In fact, what disturbed me the most as the 2016 campaign season unfolded was the complete lack of scruples or leadership demonstrated by Republicans to stop it. It was clear that they would not oppose Russian interference, not offer leadership or criticism against an individual who was already a well-known corrupt grifter and scumbag.
The fact is, they didn’t care. They were happy with whichever (R) candidate’s butt could occupy the chair in the Oval Office. If it turned out to be Trump, so be it. Any Republican who won, together with control of the Senate, was all they needed to fulfill their 50+ year goal to finally gain control over the Supreme Court and thus impose the “rule of law” as they envision it. Perpetual minority rule.
Trump himself was custom made to tap into the Cult of Perpetual Grievance that has been the underlying strength of Fox in ginning up hatred of democracy cloaked in hatred of liberal policies. And never forget how the Russians helped. It was a lot. As a nation, we were unprepared for the impacts of misinformation in social media in an era when few people read papers or are able to discern reliable, honest news sources. An opinion carries equal weight as a fact.
Trump’s face and venue on Election Night 2016 told me he didn’t actually plan to win. He just wanted the branding opportunity. But Putin wanted him to win, and so did Republicans who were willing to overlook his utter unsuitability for the office Trump talked himself into believing he could do better than anyone else who had ever held it before him. Putin was active in aiding his election. Republicans merely stood by and pretended it was all normal. None of it was normal. No Republican spoke up to point that out. Gaining power was the goal, and they didn’t care how.
There were other factors, including mainstream media that couldn’t take their eyes off the horror show and gave Trump all that free campaign publicity. But mostly, Republicans ignored the cancer in their midst.
We’ll all pay for it for decades.
I think the point made that the crazy wing of the party had only one person running in 2016, while the sane wing had 8 is the most salient. The GOP has many winner-take-all primaries. It took too long for the sane people with no chance but 10% support to drop out, and by then Trump had momentum and a large delegate lead that even if they had all gone to the same candidate, it probably wouldn’t have mattered in terms of delegate count. The fact that there were still a couple non-Trump candidates down to nearly the end (just going by memory, Cruz and Kasich were the main opposition) and they hadn’t made a truce to gather their troops under one banner meant that there was no way to stop Trump, even if half the party thinks he’s the absolute worst thing that the party has ever produced. Around 70% of the party could think that, but if there’s no one else getting above 30%, Trump will win the early contests and will ride the momentum. It’s going to work basically the same this time as in 2016.
In contrast to this, when the Democratic field was wide open in 2020, at some point Biden managed to suddenly get the backing of many that were in that 5-15% range, and shut the door on anyone else not by bullying them all, but by managing to convince them that it was in all their best interests.
I disagree with the idea that “sane” Republicans could have stopped Trump. Ever since Reagan’s “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” blather (at his inauguration, no less!) the Republicans have been on a course to blow things up. That became even worse when the Tea Party movement decided they wanted to blow things up, then burn them down, then pee on the ashes.
In an ideal world, it would have been nice if establishment Republicans had renounced Trump as the nominee, but a) it was too late, b) a lot of them still believed he would be a typical big business Republican who was willing to do whatever the cultural conservatives wanted, and c) they would have found themselves thrown out by angry voters at the next primary.
I think we have to think of it like professional wrestling: everyone knows it’s fake, but they come for the show, and Trump was both face and heel. Those who took it seriously, like other GOP candidates, sounded like they didn’t get understand kayfabe and so were pathetic by comparison. And in politics, like wrestling, anger passes for conviction and sincerity. And lots of people have lots of reasons for being angry. The incoherence of Trump and his ideas, as Eco said about fascism, is part of the reason it works.
When Trump started gaining popularity back in 2015 I could see the appeal. He didn’t sound like any other politician back then. When he spoke, it actually sounded like he meant it rather than the canned, refined, and rehearsed responses we got from the likes of Hillary and others. Despite being a Republican back then, even I could see an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, and decided to vote for Hillary instead.
That is Trump’s candidacy in a nutshell. When Trump mocked John McCain for being a POW, I expected the party who loved the military would turn on him. But instead they laughed along with him and many turned against McCain. I didn’t think a “family values” group like Evangelical Christians would accept a thrice divorced candidate who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, but they did.
In 2016 I was convinced that Trump supporters just wanted to watch the world burn. I’m still of the same opinion.
Was it too late? Did “sane” Republicans really still believe he would be a typical big business Republican who was willing to do whatever the cultural conservatives wanted? Would they really have found themselves thrown out by angry voters if they had spoken up about an issue that so clearly threatened our national security and our election process?
Sorry, but this was not solely an effort by the Tea Party or the Bannonites or MAGAts. “Sane” Republicans have been all in for a long time.
I haven’t posted this link in a while, but here’s one of the best articles ever on how the Republican Party devolved into a grift.
To make it more fun, the article was written in 2014 and “Mitt Romney is the ultimate lying politician” features prominently into the theme. It’s a longish read, but worth it.