Or he’s down with OPP.
No, there won’t – a reasonable and mainstream Republican simply can’t win the party’s nomination any more. Trump has given the Teanut Gallery a taste of red meat, the Grand High Panjandrums of the party establishment will never get them back to accepting the pink slime of talking the hard-right talk during the primaries and Etch-a-Sketching back to the center for the general election.
Look at the primary results and reconsider what their mainstream really is now.
Why not? Surely the argument is that they’ll opt for whoever is the most likely to talk the talk without Etch-a-Sketching back to the center. So if, four years from now, it’s a bunch of reasonable and mainstream candidates, said plurality of the Republicans will vote for whichever of them outpaces the others, right?
So all they have to do is keep the next wannabe Trump out. Are they politically savvy enough to do that? Well, they weren’t this year, of course – but four years from now, they may well have a card to play that they couldn’t have played this time.
Imagine that Trump flops. Imagine his brand is tarnished. We’ve seen him get excoriated for racist remarks in the context of a now-publicized fraud lawsuit against him; get mocked for refusing to release his tax returns, while people speculate about how little income and wealth he actually has; get a Republican senator with military experience to declare him unfit to command the nuclear arsenal – so just imagine that all (b) keeps on keeping on, and (b) gets so, so much worse before he loses big.
Say you’re a GOP bigwig who couldn’t come up with anything to tell Trump when he was thinking of running. Can you come up with something interesting to tell the next guy who’s thinking of running against reasonable and mainstream candidates?