Exactly how I feel. I’m as giddy as a school girl.
Will Crassus run ? Will Barackus Pompey fearing the defeat of Hillarius Cicero sideline Donaldus Crassus by manoeuvring him into fatally attacking the Iranians with his legions to die on a foreign field ? Can Crassus Save the Republic ? The Capitol is in an uproar, the senators fearing his rule, his mordant wit, and the lash of his whip…
Trump — Romney 2016 ! ( I give up on Mrs. Palin; Romney would be funnier. )
And even less likely.
What do you mean.
Trumps seems to be the Republican front runner. If he actually remains near the top of by some miracle wins the nomination, that will mean that whatever rational Republican are still in the party will vote Democratic or stay home. The party will be even loonier – it’s difficult to conceive that, but I think it’s possible.
OTOH, if the party does anything to shut down or stifle Trump, or keeps him off ballots, it will exacerbate the civil war between the rationalists and Tea Partiers. If he runs as an indepandent, he might bring a lot of the Tea Partiers with him into some 3rd party. Perhaps in the long run losing the conservative base might be of benefit to the party, but it will make for Democratic landslides for several elections to come.
Mayhap; but after he lost I derived pleasure from imagining the little brute driving on to his $55k car lift at his bat cave and morosely going up and down non-stop purposefully for days on end whilst brooding.
Imagine the frozen rictus of delight as he walks ten steps behind President Trump.
Boyo Jim: I mean that Trump, regardless of what he does, is forcing a conflict between the Tea Party/Populist wing of the GOP and the other wings of the GOP: Before, ever since Nixon, the brains of the GOP has been able to use the Populist wing as its electoral muscle through a combination of the Southern Strategy and occasionally throwing them a bone, but only when those bones don’t hurt the wings of the GOP which were actually in control.
Now, with Trump becoming as big and as loud as he is, the wheels are beginning to fall off that train earlier than, I think, pure demographics would have predicted: Before Trump, it was still possible for the traditional dog whistles to work such that the smarter candidates could signal the racist idiots and still give an acceptable message to the low-information undecideds who aren’t racist but don’t know enough to decode the dog-whistling stuff.
Trump is saying publicly, right out in the open, what the dog whistles are meant to half-conceal, and now the other candidates can’t drop him and they can’t hold on to him: That is, they can’t disavow his messages or else they’ll lose the people the dog whistles were meant for, and they can’t be seen as not distancing themselves from him, or they’ll lose everyone else who votes in this country, especially the increasingly-important Hispanic vote.
So Trump is forcing a choice: Keep to the traditional white male Christian xenophobes, and lose to an inexorable demographic shift, or dump the Tea Party and try to craft a party which is minimally acceptable to people whose last names end in vowels and who (shock horror) might even speak languages other than English in their homes. Either way, it’s a victory for the country as a whole.
Derleth, not a bad analysis, but the problem for them is that they cannot win without those for whom the dog-whistle blows (both identified as GOP and those who identify as “independent” because the GOP is too centrist for them). Long term the demographic shifts are enfeebling, but short term their hope is to get that element turning out while elements that lean Democratic don’t.
The best medicine for the GOP might be to run a Trump (or a Cruz) … someone who passes the muster of that element of the GOP and the independents who always vote GOP. Allow them their swing at bat. Until that swing and complete miss they will believe that a “true conservative” could win at that level.
That won’t happen. More Republicans have an unfavorable view than a favorable view of Trump. You can overcome that if you have low name recognition, but that obviously doesn’t apply to Trump. Plus TPTB who matter a great deal don’t like the guy.
Walker could conceivably run under the arch-conservative banner. But so far he isn’t running a very strong campaign.
Trump’s position that he will run as a third party candidate has the whiff of extortion. The Economist wonders what his demands are. An Ambassadorship to Monoco would be fine; a cabinet position not so much. Though perhaps a well crafted tax break would solve the problem.
People like finding examples of social degradation, how about super rich guys running for president?
Rockefeller --> Perot --> Trump
This would be the most cleansing; also, the least likely.
The most likely, given how primaries work and how much the media is willing to cover Trump, is a primary season full of Trump being increasingly uncomfortable, speaking more and more unspeakable things which were previously hinted at in dog whistles, until he unceremoniously drops out because not even Ailes can convince the GOP to move him any closer to being nominated than they are legally obligated to.
Trump then becomes a fixture on FOX News, playing up a classic persecution fantasy and maybe even talking about being a write-in candidate, such that his narcissism gets fed regularly and he can pay down some of his debts. Or get enough leverage to amass massive new debts. Probably the second.
Trump keeps saying the things people like Romney only say when the help are secretly recording them, his base gets angrier and angrier than their golden boy is being robbed, and, in the best case, they boycott the election (or write in his name, same difference), and 2016 is a blowout for the Democrats.
November 2016 is beautiful beyond words for all of us bitter schadenfreude addicts who read The Free Republic.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
Yes, Trump and Cruz have a lock on the AWG (angry white guy) demographic. Their combined polling in the GOP primary amounts to 23.9%.
I don’t know what motivates Trump aside from ego. But Kevin Drum provides a hint: Donald Trump Explained in Four Words. The four words are a quote from a recent anti-Walker speech: “Finally, I can attack.” [INDENT][INDENT]This is what he lives for. But only if he can pretend that the other guy started it. John McCain called his supporters crazies. Lindsey Graham called Trump a jackass. And now a Walker fundraiser called him DumbDumb. Finally! It must have been killing Trump to hold back on Walker until he had the appropriate casus belli.
That’s Trump. He lives for the fight. And despite being worth $10 billion (or whatever) he always manages to feel like he’s the aggrieved party. If this reminds you of any particular bloc of voters, now you know why he’s doing so well in the polls.[/INDENT][/INDENT]
Chuck Jones, the national treasure who directed the Looney Tunes series of cartoons, set a number of rules for his creations. One of them was “Bugs Bunny must always be provoked.” Otherwise he would just be a bully.
Well, here’s the answer. The Donald’s still at or near the top of the polls. Amazing: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/26/politics/cnn-poll-presidential-race/index.html
I think it bespeaks more than anything else an expression of disgust in GOP and GOP leaners with the system as it now stands. Even more than angry White male.
Trump is the most known, visible, and dramatic way to say “none of the above/other” - they do not want another Romney style approach, the Tea Party side of things has proven themselves ineffectual … Trump is politically that “outsider” archetype to an extreme. It was part of the Perot appeal in its day as well.
And also apparently the fact that the polls do not yet include the impact of the McCain comments, reflecting data mostly collected before they were made…
Well, the next poll on that site indicates it was taken after the impact had settled:
Most Republican voters want Donald Trump to remain in the race for president, and he’s the candidate GOP voters are most likely to say they want to see on the debate stage, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll.*
…
*Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are registered to vote, 52% say they want Trump to stay in the race for the party’s nomination, while 33% hope that he drops out. Another 15% say they’d like to see him make an independent run for the presidency. *
…
The majority of those Republicans surveyed that wants Trump to remain in the race includes numbers of those seen as the core of the GOP primary electorate: 58% of white evangelicals, 58% of conservatives, and 57% of tea party supporters. *
*
The CNN/ORC Poll is the first publicly-released national telephone poll to be conducted entirely after Trump talked about Senator John McCain’s military record during an Iowa campaign event last weekend, drawing rebukes from Republicans for saying he didn’t think McCain is a war hero.
The religious component of that support indicates a greater spirituality in Donald Trump than I had considered.
Of course if the Democrats are fools enough to run Mrs Clinton, who is also of that tired old cohort of the Beltway regulars the populace are rejecting, then whomever is the Republican nominee will narrowly win: that nominee could — themselves surprised — be the redoubtable Mr. Trump.
Trump — Romney 2016 !
I don’t think Rockefeller can fairly be compared to Perot and Trump. Among other political activities (including government posts under Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower), he was governor of New York for 15 years. While not unopposed, he was seen as a reasonable choice for VP under Ford, which certainly would not be the case with the other two.
I just saw where Trump says he’ll give Palin a cabinet post. I had no idea there was such a thing as Secretary of Willful Ignorance.
It’s be a new post called Secretary of Bering Straight Security. She’s an expert on seeing Russia from her house.
Secretary of Keeping It Real is already taken.