The #NeverTrump crowd appear to be getting serious (and worried). This article claims that the GOP is planning to hand the nomination to Kasich / Rubio after a contested convention:
And we’ve just seen that Colorado simply decided to not hold a primary of any type and just hand it’s delegates to Cruz, provoking outrage from Trump supporters:
And we’ve already got protests by Trump supporters lined up for the GOP convention in Cleveland which very well (almost certainly given Trump supporters history) could turn violent:
If the GOP does award the nomination to someone else in a contested convention, I just can’t see Trump or his supporters going quietly. At the very least Trump will never endorse whoever is picked and tell his supporters to stay home. At worst he runs as an independent, or forms his own party and runs in 2020. Either option is a disaster long term for the GOP.
Personally I think the #NeverTrump crowd are making it worse for themselves. They’d be better off handing the nomination to Trump and letting him get beaten fair and square in the general. He’d have no excuse then and that would probably be the end of him. By “stealing” the nomination from the GOP candidate with the most delegates both him and his supporters have good reasons to stick around not just this elections cycle, but the next one and the next one as well. And as I see it a political block of 20 percent Trump supporters that will never again support the establishment GOP means the GOP is done as a mainstream party.
Of course they will support the Establishment GOP, in any future year when no Trump or Trumpoid is running. What else are they gonna do, vote Democrat?
Colorado has a caucus, not a primary. And Cruz beat Trump like an orange-headed stepchild because Trump’s people didn’t know the rules. No corruption involved, no ‘unfairness,’ except that anything that doesn’t give Trump a win is inherently ‘unfair.’
As long as they give the nomination to Cruz, they can point at historical precedent and probably have plausible deniability. The others, not so much.
You’re missing my point. If the GOP steals the nomination from the candidate with the highest delegates (eg Trump) then either Trump or someone Trump anoints as kingmaker will be around as a spoiler, possibly for the next 3 or 4 election cycles. Whatever happens I really don’t think Trump is going to pack up and go home, he enjoys the attention and power too much.
Trump might be popular, but Trump would destroy the GOP structure, which is why the GOP won’t have it. They hate Ted Cruz – I mean the Senate effing hates him. But he’s at least not saying he wants to redefine the GOP. He plays their game in terms of collecting fundraising and mostly on policies. He just goes off the wall when it comes to tactics. He violates Senate decorum. He stabs other senators in the back, but then again, they all have a propensity to do the same if it means saving their own @sses.
But Donald Trump would be a free agent. He would be free to do and say as he pleases, beholden to absolutely nobody in the party. That’s why they will not care an iota if he leaves. THey’re prepared for it. The GOP can probably take losing the WH again. They cannot take losing control of the party and potentially losing seats in congress because they were dumb enough to listen to the average voter. People shoulda known by now, republicans don’t care about average voters and average votes. That’s why they tried to impeach Clinton. That’s why they tried to suppress the votes in different states.
For one thing, he might somehow win, and that’s nightmarish.
For another, he already has no excuse. What the hell kind of excuse can he offer? That he’s not good enough at politicking? That someone else beat him at dealmaking? You think he can sell that, and you simultaneously think he’s not actually skillful enough to get nominated in the first place?
Trump turns seventy in a couple of months; you think he’ll be up for another go-round when he’s four years older, and knows that he doesn’t have the get-underestimated element of surprise on his side? C’mon.
Trump is 69 and if he’s an independent, he will eventually go away, but not if he’s the GOP nominee. If he’s the GOP nominee, he never goes away. He takes the party down with him. They will write off the election and try to keep the legislative control. Hell, if they can keep a majority of congress and have a Clinton in the White House, it would be just like old times. No problem then.
Hopefully. After decades of moral and spiritual treason, perhaps the GOP will finally transform itself from a tool of the cosmopolitian Capital to a social nationalist formation under the helm of someone even better then TRUMP.
I think you’re right in their thinking, and for one thing let me make clear I am NOT a Trump supporter. The issue is that the GOP is under estimating the vast amount of rage from the lowest common denominator that Fox News has been stirring up for the last 20 years and which Trump has so successfully managed to harness. It may well be a case that cutting out the cancer kills the patient.
Not much to add to this other than that the longer and more divisive the better in my book.
But.
A contested convention going to someone other than the person with the highest delegate count is not the nomination being “stolen” from that person. It is that losing the game because the game winner is the one who crosses the 1237 line, not the plurality getter before the convention.
I don’t know if he will lose or not. But if he does it was not stolen, he was simply the loser.
“stolen” is the wording that Trump and his supporters will be using, and we all know that the adage “if you repeat something often enough (with enough media attention) it becomes true” is more and more relevant in modern politics.
Oh it will be true to his solid base of support, many of whom were are not for the party in any sense but are for the cult of the Trump. Many of them would not be voting for a different GOP candidate in most cases.
We’ve had a thread on this before. The result of this convention could be similar to the meteor strike that took out the major dinosaurs. A disaster to be sure but lots new came out of it, birds and mammals coming out of shadows, more fit for the new world. What will emerge out of the GOP after? Ryan is trying to position himself to lead its future, not this election cycle, but in the future, as is Kasich (which is why he persists more than anything else I think). It will take a cycle or so for them but I think they may create a party that is more politically fit and functional for the future world on the other side. Give it 8 years.
Sounds like just more dinosaurs. Kasich actually looks like one, more importantly he thinks like a dinosaur would think if a dinosaur were Catholic, and Ryan ain’t no mammal, that’s for sure.
Read the article above Trump Ally Roger Stone has already said he is planning to get protesters to go to individual delegates hotel rooms in order to “gently persuade” them to do the right thing.
When Trump supporters burn down the Cleveland convention centre, thats when I’ll start to worry.
Once I skim and see this, I don’t read the rest. Take that for what you will.
I’m torn on the issue of a Trump nomination. On one hand, it would be beneficial for the GOP to get its ass handed to it in November and perhaps rise from the ashes. But I’m afraid what we’ll get is another round of “we didn’t nominate a true conservative”. So maybe what they need to do is nominate Cruz and get somewhat less of a beatdown and no longer have that “true conservative” crap to whine about.
I don’t see the party destroying itself to stop Trump, they’ll bend every effort to stop him and if they can’t, they’ll punt the election. Democrats did just fine after McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. There are worse things than being on the wrong side of a blowout. So they don’t win in 2016. It’s not like they had any intention of actually doing anything with power once they got it.