Thread: As Trump Slides, the Republicans’ Real Problems Start . . .

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/...problems-start

The donald October 2, 2015 5:23 pm

As Trump Slides, the Republicans’ Real Problems Start . . .

Will the G.O.P. Ever Find its Mojo?
by

Jon Kelly

The summer of Trump finally entered a stage of merciful remission last week, on the first official day of autumn, as Frank Rich published a brutally dismissive assessment of the reality candidate’s realistic hopes. Rich finally called bullshit on The Donald’s prospects, comparing him to a “direct descendent of Twain’s 19th-century confidence men: the unhinged charlatan who decides to blow up the system by running for office—often the presidency—on a platform of outrageous pronouncements and boorish behavior.” The argument was confirmed days later through Trump’s own much ballyhooed tax plan, which seemed discomfitingly liberal in temperament, indulgent in its treatment of the wealthy, and wreaking of the unsophistication of Herman Cain’s catchy 9-9-9 policy. Mark Leibovich’s cutting profile of Trump, on the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, subtly presumed the final act, at least politically speaking, which presented itself Thursday in the form of a Suffolk University/USA Today survey. Despite leading in the polls for months, Trump has developed a favorability rating of 27 percent—the lowest among the candidates. As the Republican field narrows, it looks like he may be finally cooked.

Trump’s unexpected seizure of the American mind owes plenty of favor, as Rich noted, to the media. In addition to the outsize debate viewership numbers enjoyed by Fox News and CNN—nearly 50 million combined, far larger than the Oscars—he has appeared on the covers of Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York, and The New York Times Magazine, not to mention in segments on prestige TV news outlets 60 Minutes and Meet the Press, a veritable grand slam of chattering-class media moments. Meanwhile, he has forced countless other responsible journalists to search high and low for reasons to explain his success, undercut it, or attempt to analyze it from every counterintuitive angle. Rich’s and Leibovich’s efforts stood apart, but the truth is that Trump’s genius wasn’t in preying upon a vulnerable electorate, so much as upon defensive newsrooms where reporters watch their traffic as vigilantly as candidates view their poll numbers. Anyway, now it seems like the voters are expressing second thoughts.

But the real problem for the Republicans wasn’t ever going to be what to do with Trump; it was always going to be what to do after him. Now they find themselves in a simulacrum of the 2012 cycle, precisely the position they wanted to avoid, with a bewildering collection of milquetoast establishment candidates and susceptible outsiders. This week, Ben Carson noted that he was cool with fans flying Confederate flags at NASCAR races—a vexing step backward for a party that finally helped lower the crossed stars from outside the South Carolina state house. Carson also sounded decidedly unpresidential when asked about how he would prepare for Hurricane Joaquin—“Uh, I don’t know”—which is preparing to ravage the East Coast.

Carly Fiorina, the third member of the G.O.P.’s outsider triumvirate, is no more formidable. As Amy Davidson recently noted in The New Yorker, not only did she fire thousands of employees during a spotty tenure at Hewlett-Packard, but certain prosaic elements of her background don’t quite check out. Fiorina was technically a secretary—a key element of her oft-told origin story—but her biography is hardly a Horatio Alger tale. Her father was a professor at Stanford, the same place she earned her undergraduate degree; she was accepted to U.C.L.A. School of Law; she eventually earned an M.B.A. at the University or Maryland. An element of exaggeration followed her career to Lucent, too. After announcing a deal worth potentially $2.1 billion with a small company called PathNet, Fortune uncovered that PathNet, with revenues of $1.6 million per year, was loaned much of the money by, you guessed it, Lucent itself.

Presidential primaries often boil down to the tangle between the retail race we see, orchestrated by the campaigns themselves, and the private conversations with donors, which often take place in Park Avenue parlors or New England resort towns. And on some level, this battle parallels the Republican’s own existential crisis. The G.O.P., as has been noted before, is essentially a party in the midst of disruption; it has lost battles on marriage equality and Obamacare, among others, and is flailing about for a clear direction on immigration and entitlements. It may be a fractious party, but it is also, unequivocally, a severely pissed-off one. And the withering of Trump, coupled with the weaknesses of Carson and Fiorina, suggest that the Republicans are likely to end up supporting a candidate of a more Romney-esque vintage. It’s impossible to know whom among Cruz or Kasich or Rubio or Christie or, if he can stop his free fall, Bush will seal the nomination, but it’s going to be hard to sell that candidate to a rank-and-file base that feels increasingly left behind in both their country and their party.

In his essay, Rich argued that Trump’s hidden virtue was an ability to expose a vacuous political culture for what it really is: he was, to put it reductively, a mockery of a mockery. Donald Trump may have scared some party stalwarts within an inch or two of their lives, but hopefully they also realized that Trump himself wasn’t the problem. He simply revealed it.

Well, first of all, Trump isn't "sliding", he's leading every poll in the country.

And, second of all, people wondering or speculating about what the GOP will do "after Trump" is well, really the most hilarious thing I've heard in politics about a clear front-runner that packs voters in by the tens of thousands while his competitors hold little meetings with a few hundred.

At some point, and I hope it's not too soon, because I enjoy reading their attempt-to-kill Trump articles for their literary style and to point out on a blog their inate ignorance of what Americans really want, the media will have to accept the fact that Trump will be on every ballot in every State, and he'll probably win every one of them.

What the media is intentionally over-looking or just flying over their heads because they're stupid, is this simple undisputed, irrefutable fact:

Trump isn't in this race to have a career, to earn a higher salary, to move to a nicer house, or to be important, he already has a fabulous career he enjoys, earns more money than the President's salary which he isn't going to collect, has magnificent homes larger and nicer than the White House, and is already one of the most important, prominent and well-known persons in the world.

Trump is not in this race to improve his life, he's in this race to improve ours.

WTG JUDY
BOY YOUR ONE TOUGH COOKIE &I LIKE THAT TELL IT AS YOU SEE IT