The NY Times has an article today about the Republican establishment full meltdown over the unprecedented candidacy of the orange would-be fright-king: Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump
And it’s awesome. Choice excerpts are below.
First off, the Rovemeister’s seems a bit uptight these days:
The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.
Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.
Yeah, right. Not too late.
Then Gov. LePage of Maine “urged the governors to draft an open letter ‘to the people,’ disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.” Which is really strange because he just endorsed Trump yesterday. But that’s LePage’s peculiar brand of Republican crazy, I guess.
More hand-wringing and finger-pointing follows and this sweet thought:
Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.
That’s where I’m at. I think the Trump candidacy presents the best opportunity for Democrats since 1933 to turn this country to the left for a long, long time. But, heh, I’m a cock-eyed opportunist who wants to use his Trumpness like a cudgel to finally neutralize the Reagan Devolution and Republican obstructionism for good.
More fun here:
Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”
“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Gee, this wouldn’t help the Democratic candidate in the fall, now would it? That top party strategists don’t believe Trump is fit for the presidency. For once, we agree. And can you leak one of the ads for us?
BTW, in their plan, these strategists wrote that a Trump nomination would not only make Republicans lose the presidency, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”
Exactly, boys. Pity that.
Oh, yeah, then the Koch bros chime in and they don’t like him either.
Their only hope is a brokered convention where delegates ignore the voters and vote for a predetermined candidate of the establishment, the article goes on to say. Of course, Trump would then go third party, sue their asses (cuz that’s what he does best) and the Republicans would be in even worse disarray for the general.
Perhaps the best is this:
While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
So the Senate majority leader is so afraid of Trump’s detrimental effect to their chances, he will formally disavow him?
It doesn’t get much better than this, folks. The Republicans are in more disarray than the Dems of 1968. Whoever our candidate is, we can use this dysfunction to rally all stripes of Dems and independents who believe Trump is a danger to America to win seats across the land.
We don’t take anything for granted. But we do take their dysfunction and paint the entire Republican party as purveyors of a despot-admiring, shallow, ill-informed, bigoted blowhard who could very easily start WWIII with his schoolyard insults and demeanor.
They created their own big pile of doo-doo. Now it’s time to fling it back at them.
