Mutually Assured Destruction
Trump's takeover has not just altered the Republican establishment's unified field theory of a 2016 success based on emphasizing a more moderate tone; it's also driven the GOP into something of a fratricidal campaign of mutually assured destruction. But if its destruction is indeed all but assured, it would be a mistake for the establishment wing to simply stand by and watch as Trump completes the path of destruction he began when he crashed the Party this past June. Instead, it may be in the best interest of the GOP establishment to blow the Party up on its own terms and rebuild itself in an image of its own choosing.
In other words, to save itself, the GOP must destroy itself by way of a forceful, swift, relentless -- and perhaps essentially suicidal -- execution of gutter politics. In disavowing the clearly irredeemable Trump, the GOP will need to sweep aside all moral and ethical consideration as it fully implements any parliamentary procedures at its disposal, and completely disregard any contravening parliamentary precedents-- in particular, Rule 40B -- that might otherwise prevent his expulsion from happening.
This means that if Trump marches into the GOP convention having earned the necessary 1237 delegates, then the GOP must flat-out deny him the nomination and send him packing. If he has amassed a simple majority that is below that minimum threshold, he should be loudly and openly barred from even attending the convention. Immediately following Trump's expulsion, appropriate follow-up should include a methodical scrubbing of the Party's political interior and exterior of any and all vestiges of Donald Trump's presence, and the preemptive eradication of the potential for any future influence Trump may have on the Republican Party.
Of course, heard amidst all this would be a likely hue and cry: "Isn't this effectively denying the will of the people?" Well, similar to GOP-enacted voter ID laws, it would be effectively denying the will of some of the people. But even so; so be it. It's for the sake of the Party.
In fact, if viewed as a business proposition -- once certain numbers are crunched -- the GOP's jettisoning of Trump looks a bit like the kind of deal that even "The Donald" would co-sign. His plus-60 percent unfavorable rating among all voters for example has remained roughly double that of his favorability rating. Meanwhile proportionally, Trump has garnered roughly 40 percent of the GOP vote thus far, or less than half the Republican base. Considering its now-precarious position, for the GOP, that remaining 60 percent is a fair trade off compared to the alternative -- 100 percent of nothing, or in other words, a GOP that no longer exists.
It's also worth pointing out that despite winning the majority of the primaries, leading in the delegate count, and consistently topping the polls, as of this writing, the combined total of votes cast for the other GOP candidates exceeds by 6 million, the total number of votes Trump himself has received thus far. That's somewhat noteworthy when you consider that Barack Obama's 2012 margin of victory over Romney was 5.9 million.
The "crazies"
It's also worth noting that much of what Trump supporters have shown of themselves at his rallies indicates that very few are of the character desirable to a mainstream political party. Nor -- as the establishment wing has learned -- are they the kind of folks who should be representing the face of the Party during its nomination process. Republicans in particular have paid a steep price for the general tendency of moderate and independent voters to basically ignore day-to-day primary campaign activity until fairly late in the process. That price to the GOP has been a series of presidential primary seasons that had become brand-crushing three-ring circuses completely dominated the more politically-belligerent far-right "crazies."
And just who are the crazies? This time around -- at least in Trump's case -- they are members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. They are also Tea-baggers; angry white men; birthers; Holocaust-deniers; Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers; members of anti-government militias; flat-earthers; hollow-earthers; gay-bashers; religious crack-pots; gun-nuts; anti-abortion terrorists; climate-change deniers; and the "poorly-educated," to name a few.
But regardless of how woefully repugnant some might find their world view, no one is advocating that these American crazies should be disenfranchised of their right to vote. Instead, what's being suggested is that they should not be welcomed to vote as Republicans.
It's difficult to skirt around a conclusion that the GOP's Trump problem is an outgrowth of its willingness to provide a platform to run for President to virtually anyone who calls him or herself a Republican regardless of how unhinged. And so regarding life after Trump, it is important for the GOP to realize that if it can't figure a way of weeding from its nomination process, the most extreme from its lush pasture of bat-sh*t crazy elected and public officials, it may never stop the crazies from dictating the direction of that process.
In both 2008 and 2012, most establishment Republican candidates who understood what it takes to survive early GOP primaries found themselves shamelessly pandering to some incredibly outlandish whims of the crazies -- including pledging to repeal Obamacare even if evidence showed that doing so would lead to the preventable deaths of uninsured Americans. Those who refused to stoop to such levels of pandering eventually paid the price; as did the entire Party when it lost in 2012.
The candidacy of Jon Huntsman -- the Republican whom the Obama campaign feared most prior to the start of the 2012 campaign -- provides an interesting case-in-point. The former Utah governor flatly refused to suck up to the crazies, went absolutely nowhere in the primaries, and wound up endorsing Romney after dropping out in early January, 2012.
Meanwhile, the recipient of Huntsman's endorsement, Romney, basically parodied a minstrel-like caricature of himself by way of bald-face pandering -- at one point describing himself as "severely" conservative-- and won the nomination. Ultimately -- his "47 percent" faux pas notwithstanding -- it was both the ineptness of Romney's pandering and the unique awkwardness of his attempts to "pivot" to the center that contributed to his defeat. Nevertheless, it's easy to speculate about the potential for a more favorable 2012 outcome for Republicans had Romney not apparently caved to the false notion that in a national election it's smart politics to devote time and effort figuring out how to fit fairly moderate policy positions into a Tea Party template.
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