I don’t like sounding like “Mr. I-Told-You-So,” but a Trump candidacy has been building for years. I warned people back in late 2007/early 2008 that Obama was telling the truth about what he was going to do. It wasn’t the kind of rhetoric that people expect that just goes away once you’re elected. In some ways, Trump is the push-back against Obama and his ilk’s progressivism.
The other – and more important – part of it is, as I said years before even Obama, that we (as in “the voters”) will have to take out the Republican party leadership before we can worry about the Democrats. I think that, more than anything, has to do with Trump’s success. After throwing the voters under the bus less than two weeks after the 2014 election, the option of a compromise between the grassroots and the leadership disappeared. Since 2010, every attempt to trust you has been met with contempt. If you want to see the root cause of the Trump candidacy, you need to look in a mirror. In short, the Republican party leadership is a greater threat to the Republic than either Clinton or Sanders.
No, Trump is not a conservative. He is a liberal. I’m using those terms in the Jefferson-Hamilton context. But he is not a progressive which, is what now makes up the Democrat party and the Republican leadership. More important is that he is a tactical nuke that is being targeted on the political class whether politician, academian or press. Nothing less that the destruction of those will satisfy the voters at this point. That applies to both the general Republican voting base as well as the Blue Dog centrist and conservative Democrat voters.
The funny part of this is that of the two alternatives, both Cruz and Rubio are also non-establishment candidates. The one establishment candidate left is actually Kasich. The only reason I think the political class is throwing their support behind Rubio is that they believe they can bully him in at least some respects. We’ve seen that mistake from him already. Rubio is the only way they manage to keep any degree of influence. Unfortunately for them, the more they sign up behind Rubio, the lower his support in the elections will sink. By supporting him they are killing his chance of winning.
More important, Rubio is the only one I think that Hillary might manage to beat. A lot of people will sit out a Rubio general election and there won’t the the disaffected Blue Dogs to make up for it like there would be for Trump. At this point, that is the best case scenario as far as the Republican party leadership is concerned. That is the only way they maintain their current status quo of power. In a way that’s the most ironic part of all this. For the Party establishment to survive, they have to lose.
Actually, in my opinion, Rubio simply cannot win the nomination. If Rubio quits, his votes will most likely go to Cruz. If Cruz quits, his votes will unquestionably go to Trump. If Trump quits, his votes will go to Cruz. I’m talking delegates, here, not popular votes. Truth is Rubio has already lost. One was or another, there will be some sort of deal and peace between Trump and Cruz further down the road. Most Trump supporters see his histrionics for what they are, so they won’t be a problem. The Kool-Aid drinking Trumpettes will either a) do what Trump tells them to do or b) sit out and be irrelevant. This die-hard group is smaller than most think, in my opinion, and the group that sits out is even smaller.
That’s the good thing about Trump/Cruz/Rubio. In essence, the election coming down to these three mean the establishment have already lost and it’s just a matter of how long it takes them to die. They are the walking dead.