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GOP Should Use Trump, Not Abuse Trump
Maybe it's because I'm a latecomer to Republicanism, having first pulled the R lever in 2003 for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California recall election, but I'm confused. I thought one of the first duties, if not the first duty, of a political party was to win. If you don't win, everything else, every policy, every theory, every idea, is air.That was until I joined the GOP. I had read about the Spanish Inquisition and the Black Death, but now I know what real bloodletting is about. The attacks on Donald Trump by his fellow Republicans have been, to put it bluntly, waaaay out of proportion. If -- as Trump himself said in his press conference Tuesday after winning handily in Mississippi and Michigan -- Mitt Romney had attacked Obama with half the vitriol he has attacked Donald Trump with, Romney would be president today. And then there's the conservative punditocracy, so many of whom seem to be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome -- or perhaps it's Trump Envy (for which I wouldn't blame them). But I ask -- as someone who would gladly vote for any Republican candidate still running and probably any of the thirteen who dropped out -- what exactly do they find so terrible about Donald Trump? Yes, Lord knows, he can be embarrassing I remember when the whole world was making fun of Americans for electing a movie actor as their president (though I suspect we will be seeing less of that) and maybe he isn't the most conservative of conservatives (wasn't John Roberts supposed to be that?), but he is clearly one of the more politically shrewd candidates to come along in a while -- and not just for a non-politician. Just the way he is turning post-primary victory speeches into quasi-press conferences, monopolizing the media, reinvents the game. And he is expanding the Republican vote. GOP been chasing "Black" and "Hispanic" vote for decades---I doubt, they even remember that there are white bluecollars What most surprises me, however, is the approach taken to Trump by his enemies, those known under the rubric #NeverTrump and those better heeled who have blown millions on nauseating and evidently useless attack ads painting Donald as Mussolini with a bad haircut. People who had it their own way for very long, are often surprised when balked. It's not Trump, it's everybody whom he attracts: people who played by the old rules, instead of exploiting the new rules. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-03-09 |
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