“Donald Trump destroyed Republicanism through vilification”
Can someone explain this? I understand Trump basically targeted the most vulnerable cultures in attempts of feeble policies which subvert constitutional rights, but he’s basically going against all diplomatic compromises through the USA and middle eastern countries like Iran. To put it straight forward, he’s going against the system(s) of “radical muslims”. Can someone please explain to me how ethos appeals ratify political policies?
You put the statement in inverted commas as though you’re quoting someone, but you don’t say who you’re quoting and you don’t give any context for the quote. Plus, in your title you have Trump killing “the Republican Party”; in your quote he’s destroying “republicanism”. These are two very different things.
If this is a quote from someone, I’d assume that they are making the point that Trump is driving a coach-and-four through the Republican party’s strategy for winning the White House. Thinking Republicans have spotted that it will be next to impossible to win the White House as long as the Republican brand fails to attract women, ethnic and racial minorities and other communities who haven’t traditionally been strong Republican sources, and who are growing demographics in the US. Trump, who is neither thinking nor a Republican, is following the completely opposite strategy; disparage and alienate minorities in the hope of galvanising the traditional core who feel they are losing their dominance in American society and culture. He has succeeded in galvanising that group sufficiently to now look like a racing certainty to take the Republican nomination, but that group is simply not big enough to carry him to victory in the general election, so his tactics for winning the nomination tend to mean that he can’t win the election. Hence, he’s trashing the Republican brand, associating it with positions and stances which are not only unelectable, but offensively unelectable.
You may agree with that view or you may not. But I think that’s the view which your quote may be trying to encapsulate.
To elaborate a bit more on this point for the OP’s sake, the follow-on conclusion is this - that Trump’s nomination doesn’t just torpedo the Republicans’ shot at the White House. It could also torpedo Republican chances in other races as well - for the House, the Senate, and various governor’s elections. If Trump does as badly in the election as many Republicans fear, and the election is an absolute dirigible crash that makes Reagan-Mondale look like a squeaker, he could cost many reliable Republicans their jobs in other elections.
That’s what GOP insiders are panicked about when they talk about the damage Trump does to the PARTY. Just losing the White House in 2016 would be a blow but it’s not something that would cause actual damage to the party; sometimes you win the White House and sometimes you don’t. Poisoning every race and forcing Republicans in many states/districts to distance themselves from their own Presidential candidate, now, that hurts the party.
And it’s more than that. If the Republican Party has Trump as their nominee, many people would no longer self-identify as Republican, and the effects of that will last long beyond the 2016 elections.
Until last year, many many people would tell you that they’re Republicans if you asked their political stance. I think that number is already much smaller, and if he’s the nominee, it will be smaller still.
I could see this leading to the creation of a viable third party, which could lead to the Republican Party going away (the way our elections work, two parties are stable, three are not).
The Republican establishment doesn’t like him. It’s that simple. If Bernie, an outsider who has never been a Democrat before now, were tearing up the polls like Trump, people would be saying the same things about the Democratic party. The whole point of these parties is to consolidate around a candidate that upholds their ideals and plays ball, usually by bringing lots of money into the party. Trump and Sanders don’t do any of that. They’re outsiders.
So the Republican party is torn between nominating someone they actually want (the whole point of political parties in the first place) or nominating someone who got more people into the voting booth. They’re going to look really bad either way.
Imagine if Obama had run as a Republican in ‘08, his platform unchanged, and somehow won the nomination. It’s kind of what Trump is doing. He’s baffling the party by running as a Republican, with very few actual Republican policies or ideas. He’s attacking loyal Republicans, he’s stealing their voters, and he’s threatening the RNC with violence if he doesn’t get his way. And nevertheless, he’s getting Republican voters’ votes. No matter what happens in June, this party will lose a lot of the respect it had, and that doesn’t bode well for November, or for the foreseeable future.
While Sanders might be disruptive to his party from a platform standpoint, he’s mostly just taking things a little farther to the left than the party wants to make a standard part of the platform. Democrats might not be ready to embrace single-payer healthcare as a platform, but they’re not exactly opposed to it. I’m not sure if Trump can be said to have any consistent position, but when he does, he’s all over the place and frequently in direct opposition to the party.
Also, Sanders isn’t intentionally provoking every minority he can think of with ridiculous and illegal schemes. Mostly he likes to attack Wall Street, but to reach Trump-like levels, he would have to suggest waterboarding Jamie Dimon, killing the families of Goldman-Sachs employees, deporting day traders and blocking travel for foreign bankers.
The Republican Party is killing itself, not Trump. It’s a civil war, and they don’t have a Lincoln.
Yes. I really dont see how Trumps positions (anti-immigration, for example) are much more reactionary that Cruz or Rubio.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/05/how-ted-cruz-differs-from-donald-trump-on-immigration/
*Sen. Ted Cruz said Monday that he’s tougher on immigration than Donald Trump.
Speaking with people after a campaign event in Boone, Iowa, the Texas Republican said in response to a question that he agrees with Trump’s assertion that all undocumented immigrants should be deported.
“Absolutely, yes,” he said. And then he went further.
“And in fact, look, there’s a difference,” he said, according to a video of the exchange first reported by BuzzFeed. “He’s advocated allowing folks to come back in and become citizens. I oppose that.”
Cruz was asked by reporters at a campaign stop in Winterset, Iowa, later Monday if he thought there should be exceptions for deportations.
“I believe we should enforce the law,” he said. “The law requires that anyone here illegally who is apprehended should be deported.”*
*This now has Ted Cruz positioned as the Republican candidate with the most hardline position on immigration.
NumbersUSA, a prominent immigration restriction group, keeps an ongoing scorecard on 2016 presidential candidates and since updated on March 4, Ted Cruz has an “A” and Trump a “B+”.*
I’d welcome someone to show a major issue where Trump is far to the right of the other candidates- or in any case, well off the GOP platform.
The GOP simply failed to have any Moderate Conservatives at all this election. Every candidate pushed as far right as possible.
Trump’s platform is troubling to all decent people, but I doubt that’s the main argument against him from establishment Republicans. A lot of them think he’s too liberal, or a closet Democrat. And either way, he doesn’t play ball like a loyal party man should.
Bernie’s platform isn’t the main argument against him from establishment Dems either. It’s that he’s never been a Democrat, never given them money, never helped their party’s candidates in local elections. He’s an outsider, who doesn’t play ball either. But he’s not winning, so he’s less of a threat to Democrats than Trump is to the GOP.
What do any of the others say about targeting and killing the families of terrorists?
Pretty much the whole carpet bombing them into oblivion thing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/05/ted-cruz-vows-to-utterly-destroy-isis-and-carpet-bomb-terrorists/
If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS," the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate told reporters. "We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion.
And, he has also roused a part of the Pub base which might well refuse to quiet down again after this election. In short, he is spoiling the whole Republican coalition and the whole model that has brought the GOP victory after victory in elections at all levels since 1980.
The GOP Establishment are elitist conservatives. Unlike the Dem Establishment, they side with Wall Street and the 1% without the slightest dissonance between their actions and their principles, sincere or professed. “Changing the brand” might produce a party that is more populist, more in tune with the base, and by now they realize very definitely and undeniably that their base just doesn’t want the same things they do. The base wants what Trump is offering, even if Wall Street doesn’t like it, and is clearly sick and tired of pulling the (R) lever just for the sake of social conservatism, especially when it seems to make no real difference in social politics at the federal level any more. Abortion is still protected, gays can marry each other now, nobody in Congress even talks about school prayer any more, and the Establishment won’t even take the base’s anti-immigration feelings seriously enough to do anything about it that might increase corporations’ labor costs. The GOP that would satisfy them might conceivably win elections, but it would not be a GOP that the Establishment – or the donor class – could stomach.
It is often said the GOP base votes against its own economic interests for the sake of social and cultural issues. There is much truth to that, but that does not mean they are oblivious to their own economic interests. Middle- and working-class white Americans have to live with stagnant incomes, rising costs of education and housing and health care, and declining prospects – and they know it – and even they are now starting to realize, I think, that the neoliberalism and supply-side economics that have been the Pub gospel since 1980 will never solve those problems. The cultural issues still matter to them, but what’s the good of voting social-conservative, if it gets them no appreciable social-conservative results at the federal level and Main Street continues to economically die anyway? So they turn to Trump’s protectionism and immigrant-busting. That probably won’t solve their economic problems either, but it is easier to believe it will, and if Wall Street don’t like it that’s just one more reason why they do like it.
Sanders has been working inside the Democratic structure in Congress for years. If he was leading, do you think party leaders would be meeting to form a third party? I don’t. If he got nominated do you think he would rip apart the power structure? I don’t.
You should watch TDS from last night. Trump is full of standard Republican ideas. What the leadership doesn’t like is that he has removed the stone under which these ideas have been scuttling. Establishment Republican: We need to stop illegal immigration to reduce crime. Trump: Mexicans are rapists. Different? Not really. Do you think traditionally Republican Trump voters have changed their views to vote for him, or do you think that he reflects their views?
I gotta say, this does not sound half-bad! At least it would be targeting individuals who have done things that have hurt other Americans. 
Except, no killing of GS employees’ families. They should be made dirt poor and refused any social services. Let the punishment match the crime.
Jamie Dimon’s (and his wall street bank peers) waterboarding should be a daily televised event.
I don’t think anyone is saying they are changing their views. The difference is that Trump is appealing to more of them.
There is some truth to the idea that Trump is taking off the plausible deniability to certain Republican ideas. But you can also say that Establishment Republicans are less extreme in those ideas. There is a difference between your examples, in degree if not in kind.
You can easily say that reducing illegal immigration would reduce crime without in any way thinking that the majority of illegal immigrants are criminals. And that’s not even the core plank on this issue: the core is just to appeal to “law and order” and the fact that these immigrants broke the law in coming here.
So you do have a more nuanced position on the Establishment Republican side. Trump blows off the nuance to say what a certain group of people really want to hear.
And that’s Trumps appeal, and why it scares me. He gives voice to the darkness of what people really want. And that darkness being a core part of the Republican base does hurt the reputation of the party. And reputation is everything when you’re trying to convince people to vote for you.
[QUOTE=BigT;19206567
You can easily say that reducing illegal immigration would reduce crime without in any way thinking that the majority of illegal immigrants are criminals. And that’s not even the core plank on this issue: the core is just to appeal to “law and order” and the fact that these immigrants broke the law in coming here…[/QUOTE]
Well, in the sense that yes, they broke the law in coming. But in general “Illegals” are hard working and law abiding.
Still, no one has yet shown Trumps positions are much more reactionary that Cruz’s.
Nope. In fact, in my opinion, Cruz is worse, because he actually believes all the shit he says. Trump is gambling on whipping up the base as much as he can to win the nomination before softening his image to court moderates in the general election. I don’t think it will work. But I do think Trump is playing a game, and Ted “Zodiac” Cruz is deadly serious.
Trump is the dogwhistle of the Republican Party that’s turned into a bullhorn. The GOP used to have plausible deniability for some of their more odious ideas. “Mexicans are bad” becomes “We’re concerned about illegal immigration”. “Blacks are criminals” becomes “Inner city crime rate is high”. “Women need to stay home and be barefoot and pregnant” becomes “God made men and women different and perform a different set of roles”.
Trump is saying all of those things, but without using the dogwhistle. The way he’s said it, and the amount of unfiltered people repeating his stance, causes the moderates and independents to move away from the Republican party. It also forces the remaining Republicans to confront how blatant those beliefs are, and some of them are finding out that they can’t deny the vile hatreds of the GOP anymore and are becoming disillusioned.
More or less, except in a very few cases, I think the whole “dogwhistle” thing is balderdash.
No doubt, Trumps team reads the polls and he panders to the results. What does he personally believe is a interesting question.
Cruz is a nutjob, Trump is a demagogue.