I’ve seen a lot of discussion on how the current GOP guys in charge see Trump, but not as much about Cruz, maybe because their distaste for him is well known. But since the nomination will likely be one of them, and it seems that a brokered convention is at least a little more likely, it got me wondering which the establishment would “prefer” as their candidate, and how enthusiastically they’d promote and fund either.
So which poison would they find preferable?
I suspect it would be Cruz. Trump is a pariah without parallel, and probably viewed as impossible to work with.
I have read about GOP guys saying the opposite too.
This looks more and more like if they have a lot of problems deciding between Attila the Hun and Tamerlane.
Oh that’s easy. I’d take Tamerlane any day of the week.
The thing is that Cruz is a politician, while Trump really isn’t. The GOP core should at least know how to apply pressure to Cruz to fall into line.
Good luck with that.
Mmmmm. Megalomaniac I vs. megalomaniac II. Scrumptious.
Which establishment? GOP Senators hate Cruz more. But there’s no way he will win a majority of delegates. So today he is a useful block against Trump. Trump poses a long term threat to GOP electoral prospects: he could destroy their chances with Latinos for a generation or more. They still hate Cruz more, like others who know Cruz personally.
Movement conservatives hate Trump more. Because he is ideologically unreliable when he is not outright heretical. He is the worst of both worlds - bad ideologically and with poor electoral prospects this Fall.
The donor class appears to be a tail wagged by other dogs. They evidence little independent or strategic thinking. Witness the non-existent then weak ad-bomb campaign against Trump.
I’m not sure how pragmatic conservatives fit in. But they are now a small rump, dividing support between Kasich and Rubio, the latter with some unknown degree of crossover appeal. It’s rough for them: they used to run the show.
That made me chuckle!
The country club set will probably support Hillary.
But if they HAD to pick between Cruz and Trump, they’d pick Trump, because they don’t think he means a word he says, and that he’d be a moderate if he ever actually got elected.
IMO Trump would be “moderate” only in the sense of not advocating for traditional red-meat cultural issues like abortion and traditional red-meat economic issues like “starve the welfare freeloaders”. In those he’d be a lot like a typical movement R politician from the 1970s: “I hear your issues, unlike those evil Ds, but I’ll deal with them later (much later).”
He’d be highly immoderate perhaps irrational on other topics of importance to Rs (and the rest of us). Such as government relations with corporations, military adventurism, having a foreign policy not driven entirely by ego & spleen, planning versus reacting, etc.
The country club set (and the donor set) are real partisan, but the things they want most are stability and predictability. The culture wars are a public distraction they’ve been willing to pay for over the last 30 years precisely because it left the rest of the real important stuff to the adults in the back room.
Whatever you say about Trump, you can’t straight-facedly say he stands for stability and predictability.
The establishment knows damn well Cruz will not “play ball” not matter what, he sure as hell is not going to fall in line and he is going to use them as a scapegoat for every single problem he faces. They clearly would prefer Trump.
I’m having a hard time believing that. Can you give some examples of issues that Cruz won’t fall into lockstep with the Republican establishment for?
Funding the government?
There’s a reason all his Senate colleagues hate him. Why do you think that as a junior Senator they can’t keep him in line but when he’s the damn President they will?
Trump has no principles. That’s obvious.
Today, he’s all about tight borders. But in 2013, he was slamming Mitt Romney for being too hard on the Mexicans, and his own businesses still reject American job applicants in favor of foreigners.
He was pro-abortion and a supporter of gun control until about 10 minutes ago.
He likes the idea of a national, single-payer health insurance plan, and favors higher taxes on the rich.
He simultaneously appeals to isolationists AND promises to smash ISIS.
Does he mean anything he says? PROBABLY not- which is why the Fortune 500 would take him over Cruz (though they’d prefer Hillary to either).
Good example: Trump refuses to allow the transcripts of his meetings with the New York Times editorial board to be made public. Why? PROBABLY because he told them off the record that his anti-immigration rhetoric is just fr show, and that he doesn’t really mean any of it. The Fortune 500 set already suspects he’s a very different, more pragmatic guy in the boardroom, and that he’d put "principle "aside to cut deals. Cruz is a True Believer and probably wouldn’t.
But AFAICT the only deals Trump’s interested in are ones that benefit him personally, even if they’re not beneficial for other Important Rich People. The Important Rich People who constitute the backroom of Republican politics expect a Republican candidate to be loyal to the interests of Important Rich People in general, not just their own self-aggrandizement.
Trump believes he’s so awesome he doesn’t need to take anybody else’s interests into account, and he has no problem walking away from failures that mostly hurt other people. The Republican establishment definitely doesn’t want to let themselves in for that mindset in the Oval Office.
All true, which is why the Fortune 500 will back Hillary over either Trump or Cruz.
But if they HAVE to back Trump or Cruz, they’ll take the guy PRETENDING to be a hard-line conservative over the guy who really is one.
I don’t know. At least with Trump, it may be all an act, we just don’t know. But Cruz is a true believer. More dangerous.
No, that’s really Trump the idiot and reactionary you’re seeing. What he first says before he backtracks is what he believes; he just has the monster-size ego to think that whatever he thinks is right.
How to sink a political campaign: claim to be willing to break international law and commit war crimes, get excoriated by the military in reply, and then qualify it by saying that you’ll just expand legal definitions to allow the former.
Dangerously inexperienced, uncounseled, and flat-out, batshit crazy.
I think they dislike Cruz as a person more, but would probably prefer him as president because he truly believes in conservative principles while Trump doesn’t.