It’s an interesting dynamic. FoxNews seems to feel entitled to “call” the conservative line, and in Trump they have found someone who does not care…
(As an aside I’m wondering if Trump and his campaign could go for a week denied use of the word “tremendous”.)
Like a lot of troubled couples, they have taken the first step toward patching things up by scheduling some quiet time together.
Couples need to set aside time for a “date night” every once in a while so they both feel wanted.
I got a free news App with a device. I was amused to find Fox listed as a news source. I picked NY Times.
Why is it that everything that Trump says always sounds exactly like an eight-year-old brat mouthing off in a schoolyard?
Even when he tries to be conciliatory after going way overboard, he comes across with all the sincerity and sophistication of said brat having to respond to the teacher going “now say you’re sorry and promise to play nice”. This is national politics reduced to the more juvenile kind of schoolyard taunting. And this is what some alleged plurality of voters want for their President?
Someone early in the Trump candidacy posited that he was a Democratic operative intent on undermining the Republicans, and we all laughed.
But it seems like all Trump has done is attack other Republicans and Fox News! Has he taken any swipes at Hillary or Sanders?
I find this circus to be immensely entertaining, but if Trump gets the nomination I will perish from laughter.
Trump’s ‘base’ consists of the same bunch of yahoos who supported Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. And they aren’t all republicans - there’s a base of disaffected blue collar workers in there who span both parties. They also aren’t particularly conservative on anything other than stopping those dirty foreigners from taking their jobs. Buchanan and Perot were both protectionists and had no problem with big government so long as it behaved the way they wanted it to. Trump is no different, other than he’s not as smart as either of them.
I don’t know a single person on the right who thinks Trump is anything but a buffoon. I don’t know of any serious right-wing politician, journal, or think-tank that has endorsed him or that even has something nice to say about him. And I’m guessing that some of his support in general polling is coming from Democrats who think it’s just awesome that Trump is becoming the face of the Republican party.
My prediction is that at some point as things get more serious Trump’s support will drop and the Republicans will begin to coalesce around one or two other candidates who will then out-poll Trump. At that point, I’m hoping Trump’s giant ego causes him to explode into tiny hairplug-encrusted chunks.
I pretty much agree with that analysis, Sam. For Trump to get the nomination he’d have to get it over the strenuous objections of the entire Republican establishment, including people who collectively have far more money and far more influence than he does, not to mention actual smarts. IOW, it won’t happen. The constant bickering with Fox News is just an example of that.
Though it’s fascinating to imagine a sort of other-worldly scenario where he does get the nomination despite all odds. You can’t run a general election campaign based on juvenile taunts and outrageously stupid pronouncements and he isn’t capable of much else, so I suspect it would result in the most massive Democratic sweep in memory, perhaps in history.
If Trump through some miracle managed to win the first few primaries and went into the Republican convention with a lead in delegates, I suspect you would see a revolt at the convention and Trump would lose the nomination anyway. But that might come at great expense to the Republican Party.
But that’s a real longshot. Once the primary season starts in earnest and people start really paying attention and Trump has to develop a ground operation and convince people to vote for him at the retail politics level, I think he’s done for.
Right now, it’s all about name recognition. Trump is a well-known figure and millions of people have enjoyed his antics on TV and that’s about all they’ve really thought about. As the campaign season wears on, that will change, and Trump will fall. At some point he’ll fall back to second or third place, and then I’m not sure his ego will take it and he’ll probably withdraw under some angry pretext so he doesn’t have to be a ‘loser’.
But he’s causing damage now. He’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room, preventing other candidates from building the kind of momentum they’re going to need to maintain funding through a very long election season.
Those candidates who have spent a lot of money building a large organization are now treading water in single digits while burning through their campaign war chest. This is apparently what happened to Scott Walker - his campaign made the choice to ‘go big’ early and try to establish Walker as the front-runner before the other candidates like Jeb could leapfrog him. Then Trump came along and just sucked the oxygen out of his campaign and left him in debt and without the hoped-for backing from moneyed people he was counting on.
But who are too dependent on the *votes *of the “bunch of yahoos” for an actual election victory to overtly antagonize them.
Were I the institutional GOP I’d be working hard to get Sensible Conservatives into the ballot at the Congressional-District and State levels. Even if Trump eventually fails to get to the top of the ticket, you will end up with a lot of self-proclaimed both Teapartiers and Trumpeteers running in primaries for Representative or for State Assembly/Governor/AG on a platform of tearing up treaties, defund everything but the Army, disobey SCOTUS rulings at will, have Jesus-based education, etc. and in many states those primaries happen *separately *from the presidential race when nobody’s paying much attention. You could end up with a Republican in the WH and T-dominated House Leadership to whom he’s no big improvement over the O-man and will be threatened with shutdowns if he does not do what *they *want.