Trump seems increasingly angry, frustrated and unstable of late. What if things get increasingly worse and he quits the race for POTUS and walks away. What happens next? Pence gets the automatic nod or something else?
We get to see a Republican happy dance.
I would lose a LOT of entertainment in the next couple of months.
Katy Tur of NBC on Twitter: [INDENT]Top republican: @Reince is ‘apoplectic’ over Trump’s refusal to back Ryan. He called several Trump staffers to express his displeasure. [/INDENT] and [INDENT] More from same source: The next 24 to 72 hours are crucial. There is serious talk about key Republicans coming out hard against Trump. [/INDENT] I take that with a grain of salt, btw, since I am not familiar with her reporting.
Josh Marshall: [INDENT][INDENT] Chatter that Trump might bail seem exceedingly unlikely to me.
1: Plus, if Trump bailed, who do u think replaces him? It wld open up all the divisions from primary process only now to be settled …
2: behind closed doors by party insiders. That will go great.
1: Who lines up to replace Trump? The uncompromising but odious Cruz? The unpopular, far right nonentity Pence? Kasich who only won a …
2: single state? Ryan? George P. Good luck sorting that out.
What abt this unbridled egomaniac makes u think he wakes up tomorrow & says,“Okay GOP electeds, if u dont like me don’t worry I’ll go home.” [/INDENT][/INDENT] The GOP seems to be in major damage control mode. I would have never predicted this sort of institutional dysfunctionality 2 years ago. Combined with Trump at around 42% in the polls which strikes me as high given the way he’s taking a wrecking ball to certain traditional GOP positions, NATO among them.
(Then click the left arrow for more by Josh.)
They won’t be the only ones dancing. 
Well, the New York Times is saying pretty much the same thing:
So that’s two separate pieces of reporting suggesting the stream of defections is just beginning.
There has already been a sitting GOP Congressman come out and endorse Hillary and now this evening comes word Meg Whitman is saying she will vote for and donate to the Clinton campaign. Whitman is hardly a household name but she is pretty much the most prominent Republican to jump ship so far.
It is totally unheard of for a Presidential candidate to come out in support of the primary opponent of the Speaker of the House when they are in the same party. As unlikely as it is that Ryan loses the primary, is there anything preventing him from withdrawing his endorsement of Trump after he wins his primary?
Trump is increasingly behaving in a manner that can only be described as unhinged. I’ve heard multiple conversations from pundits discussing his mental stability. President Obama basically questioned his mental state today and Jennifer Granholm said he was unraveling in an interview this morning.
All the defections and doubts about his mental fitness are likely to enrage him further. While I don’t find it likely he will drop out I do wonder what options exist for the GOP to remove him as their nominee. Is that even a possibility? And how would they go about it?
The GOP will have to pick somebody, who would be well advised to conduct his campaign from inside an armored Popemobile once il Doofus’ supporters start exploding in rage at the backstab (even if Trump somehow left voluntarily rather than being shoved aside, nobody would believe that it was actually the former).
I think we’re a long way from the GOP formally divorcing from Trump. Trump may be a doofus, but these people are seasoned professionals and they own calendars. They can look at their iPhones and realize it says “August 3.” This total school bus crash of a week can be smoothed out with a few relatively non-controversial weeks. He’s done it before. Let’s all remember the election was a toss up two weeks ago.
The Republicans are better off making an effort to get Trump to run a campaign with just a modicum of decency and humanity, even if it means losing, rather than splitting the party in two in an effort to fire him. They lost the Presidential election in 2012, but the party survived. They lost in 2008 and 1996 and 1992 and there they are. Would they have been better off in 2008 suddenly going berserk and firing McCain and Palin mid-campaign? Hell no. They’d look like maniacs.
They’re in a horrible position, but it’s equivalent to being the guy jockeying the horse that’s thirty lengths behind Secretariat. You’re going to lose big, but leaping off your horse will turn out a lot worse.
The Republicans can’t un-nominate Trump. The coverage is about what would happen if he quits.
But they can stop endorsing him. And he seems to be practically begging Ryan to withdraw his endorsement. And if Ryan does it, many will follow.
Perhaps Obama suggested they withdraw their endorsements to keep them from doing so.
The question is whether a Republican candidate who is not Trump would do better than one who is Trump - since Trump will say the Republicans made him do it, and his lackeys will eat it up.
The GOP probably could take Trump down by making it so absolutely clear that they’re never, ever going to support him from this point forward. But they’d have to have almost every single prominent republican come out and speak from the same script. They’d have to all agree that the RNC is absolutely not going to lift a finger to support Trump with anything. They’d pressure state GOP organizations to do the same. They’d have to completely and utterly repudiate Trump in the hopes that he gets mad and quits.
But there are several problems with that strategy.
For one thing, there’s the fact that this would be effectively handing Hillary Clinton the election. However much they might be displeased, frustrated, and worried about Trump, they have to come back to their district and explain to voters why they helped Hillary get elected. And regardless of what polls say about independents or swing voters, diehard Trump and Tea Party types worship at Trump’s altar and would batshit insane if they tried something like this without evidence that voters are in agreement.
A related problem is, there’s no telling what kind of effects this would have on the entire party. Something like that could absolutely crush the entire party, causing it to splinter into factions with third or even fourth parties. So the only way to completely gut Trump is to unite against him, but I just don’t believe that’s possible.
Really? All political bias aside, as best as I can, I’d say the GOP has been willfully on the highway to hell for a decade, and they knew it. They’ve burned out their dilithium crystals in a bid to keep winning marginal elections on an extremist platform. What’s happening now is both 100% of their own making and inevitable as they allowed the extremists and Soviet-level ideologues drag them further and further from both reality and a meaningful political position.
We have three months of terror with Trump one bad election from the White House, but I think the prize is going to be the total self-destruction of the GOP and ideological conservatism. Way overdue. I only hope a meaningful opposition party arises by 2020.
So if there are three possible outcomes they can consider,
- they withdraw support from Trump, and Clinton wins;
- they continue support for Trump, and Clinton wins; or,
- they continue support for Trump, and Trump wins–
I think a reasonable argument can be made that #1 is the best outcome for the Republican Party overall, looking to 2018 and beyond.
Rule 9
*Filling Vacancies in Nominations:
(a) The Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States or the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, as nominated by the national convention, or the Republican National Committee may reconvene the national convention for the purpose of filling any such vacancies.
(b) In voting under this rule, the Republican National Committee members representing any state shall be entitled to cast the same number of votes as said state was entitled to cast at the national convention.
(c) In the event that the members of the Republican National Committee from any state shall not be in agreement in the casting of votes hereunder, the votes of such state shall be divided equally, including fractional votes, among the members of the Republican National Committee present or voting by proxy.
(d) No candidate shall be chosen to fill any such vacancy except upon receiving a majority of the votes entitled to be cast in the election.*
Well, that’s if he doesn’t quit. Trump quitting might well work out better than Trump staying in, regardless of November outcomes.
Death & declination seem obvious, but “otherwise” mean? That would seem to suggest they could, at least in theory, remove him from the ticket against his will, not that I see that happening unless he does into a coma.
Longer than that. All the way back to the Ken Starr investigations, where the Republicans decided to destroy the Democractic president, truth be damned.
The problem is Trump voters aren’t an insurgent group that hijacked the nomination. They ARE Republican voters. While I agree it’s better for the party in the long term, how in the hell do they keep Trump voters in the fold right after kneecapping their own nominee, and the first candidate in YEARS they’re genuinely excited about?
Another question: what happens to all his campaign donations? Does he get to keep the money? Has this all been a ploy to bolster a flagging bank account?
The other question I just thought off: what is going to happen to his assets after losing? We’ve got Trump towers, hotels and Mar-a-lago (what’s with the naming convention?), if he loses, no city wants to have a building named after a candidate that lost, especially after everything this year and last year.