Don’t Mess With Trump in Texas
John Allen Gay
Politics, United States
Ignoring the GOP front-runner didn’t work, but attacking him isn’t working either.
A psychologist watching the Republican establishment over the last week might recall Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous Five Stages of Grief. After months of denial that a Donald Trump victory was possible and then, after he began winning, bargaining with reality, embracing every outlier poll that put his rivals in spitting distance and every campaign consultant offering some new labyrinthine path to victory, the elite is now split on which of the three final stages to move to next.
There is the anger crowd, railing at party donors and candidates afraid to take on Trump or evangelical voters who have flocked to the thrice-married casino mogul. There are depressives, too, talking about moving to Australia (Canada having abandoned the resolute rightist Stephen Harper for liberal ninnymuggins Justin Trudeau) or hoping for an asteroid to end civilization (and yes, there’s campaign swag for that). And there are those who accept the real possibility that Trump will win the nomination and who are ready to line up behind him in the general election. (A few in the party’s neoconservative wing are talking of switching to Hillary Clinton, instead, suggesting that Kübler-Ross missed a stage: betrayal.)
The party elites are now bitterly feuding over the right way forward. Should Ted Cruz stay in to draw votes away from Trump, or should he get out to clarify the field? Should Marco Rubio attack the Donald directly, or try to force Cruz out of the race first? Is it “Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project”? The latter faction has been backed in its assault on the frontrunner by the press, which has offered up new investigations into Trump’s business record and media appearances alongside critical editorials and unfriendly op-eds from Republican grandees. (Surely Trump’s voters will have second thoughts when they learn the Wall Street Journal editorial board is against their man.)
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