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How GOP 'establishment' created Trump

http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-establishment-created-trump-2016-3

The Republican 'establishment' made Donald Trump's nomination possible

[image: Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump gives the key note
speech at the Republican Party Lincoln Day event in Birch Run, Michigan,
August 11, 2015. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook]Thomson ReutersGOP frontrunner Donald
Trump.

Members of the Republican "establishment" are finally grappling with the
likelihood that their party is about to nominate Donald Trump. But they
still don't understand how they brought this phenomenon on themselves.

Here is my suggestion to them: If you want to understand how Trump invaded
your party, think first about what Ben Carson's campaign, and other
campaigns like it, say about your party.

It has become routine for people who *obviously* never ought to be
president, like Herman Cain, to enjoy success in the Republican primary
polls for a time and conservative fame — and speaking fees and book sales —
thereafter. Sarah Palin has made a similar career without ever technically
running for president, raising funds instead for a political action
committee that mostly spends money on consultants, giving very little
<http://www.mediaite.com/online/sarah-palin-reportedly-donates-only-5-5-of-pac-money-to-actual-candidates/>
to actual Republican campaigns.

This time, it was Ben Carson who ran a "normal" scam campaign similar to
the one people were expecting Trump to run. He raised a lot of money and
enjoyed a brief honeymoon in the polls before collapsing under scrutiny,
sold books, and made his campaign consultants wealthy, built a brand that
can be monetized on the conservative speaking circuit, and compiled a
fundraising list that can be rented out to other campaigns for years.

[image: ben carson]REUTERS/Mike BlakeBen Carson.

Often, when these candidates aren't running for president, they rent their
mailing lists and their personas to peddlers of doomsday investment
strategies and nonsense natural cures, as when Mike Huckabee endorsed a
cinnamon-based natural diabetes
<http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/may/13/ron-fournier/mike-huckabee-and-diabetes-cure-he-endorsed-no-hea/>
cure. (Note: Cinnamon does not cure diabetes.) Republican insiders have
tended to view these scam candidates with a mix of disdain and amusement,
but not alarm.

These candidates might be taking $50 donations from old ladies on fixed
incomes who really should do something better with their money, but they
are ultimately pretty harmless because they always lose.

But what does it say about the Republican Party that its voters spent even
a week or two seriously contemplating giving the presidency to Herman Cain?
Republican insiders should have realized the appeal of scam campaigns was a
symptom of a problem with the way Republican voters evaluate candidates —
and that eventually, someone smarter than Herman Cain would come along and
figure out how to run the scam long enough to win the nomination.

[image: Herman Cain GOP Trump]Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesHerman Cain.

It's not normal for a political party to rent frontrunner status to cranks
and charlatans for weeks at a time. Disastrous candidates are supposed to
be blocked by validating institutions. Policy experts explain that their
proposals do not add up. The media covers embarrassing incidents from their
past and present. Party leaders warn that they will be embarrassing or
incompetent or unelectable.

The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating
institutions. They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted;
they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and
they have abolished standards of discourse by allowing all complaints about
offensiveness to be lumped into a box called "political correctness" and
ignored.

Republicans waged war on these institutions for a reason. Facts about
policy can be inconvenient — a reality-based approach would find, for
example, that tax cuts increase the deficit and carbon emissions cause
climate change. Acknowledging the validity of complaints about racism could
require some awkward conversations with racist and quasi-racist voters in
the Republican coalition.

Of course, we're now seeing the unintended consequence of the destruction
of those institutions and the boundaries they impose around candidate
acceptability: In doing so, Republicans created a hole that Donald Trump
could fly his 757 through.

Is the press reporting that some of Trump's businesses disserved customers
and lost money? Well, you can't trust liberal media institutions like Fox
News. Is his tax cut irresponsibly large? Don't worry, Trump will make us
so rich it won't matter. Should we be concerned about his rants against
Mexicans, either because they are offensive or because they will turn off
voters? That sounds like something Obama would worry about.

Trump is woefully incoherent and self-contradictory on policy, and often
has terrible ideas when he does get specific, but that doesn't make him
much worse than average in today's Republican party. It's hard for
Republican insiders to call his $10 trillion tax-cut plan absurd when Marco
Rubio wants a $7 trillion one.

In addition to making it hard to attack Trump for policy unseriousness, the
choice to decouple from reality has made Republican insiders less
situationally aware. Who can forget 2012, when Republicans convinced
themselves the polls were skewed and Mitt Romney was really leading all
along? In this campaign, Republican insiders — and not a small number of
reporters
<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/marco-rubio-south-carolina-219310> —
failed to panic about Trump early enough in part because they bought into a
repeated idea about Rubio surges that were not borne out by the polling or
the voting.

[image: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures
between rival candidates Marco Rubio (L) and Ted Cruz (R) at the U.S.
Republican presidential candidates debate in Detroit, Michigan, March 3,
2016. REUTERS/Jim Young]Thomson Reuters

The emerging conventional wisdom is that Rubio and other establishment
candidates screwed up through tactical errors — failing to take Donald
Trump seriously early on, not adjusting their messages to meet the mood for
populism, not putting campaign resources in the right states. There is a
lot of finger pointing about who should have been doing opposition research
on Trump and who should have been running attack ads against him and when.

"Party leaders, donors and other supporters of Rubio portray a political
operation that continues to come up short in its message, in its attention
to the fundamentals of campaigning and in its use of a promising
politician," declares The Washington Post in a Rubio pre-mortem
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bad-strategy-poorly-run-campaign-are-killing-marco-rubios-chances/2016/03/06/d9a77e54-e246-11e5-846c-10191d1fc4ec_story.html?postshare=2461457309688339&tid=ss_tw>
—
amusingly skipping over the possibility that Rubio is losing because people
simply do not want to vote for him.

It may well be true that Rubio's campaign is inept, but in a healthy
political party, a savvy campaign would not have been necessary to defeat
Trump. The whole reason Republican campaigns failed to take Trump seriously
early on was that his unsuitability for the presidency was supposed to be
self-evident: Eventually, one of the many outrageous things he said would
do him in, without his opponents even having to argue against him.

Republicans will not be able to protect their party from future Trumps
without redeveloping institutions that impose accountability — institutions
that make reality matter, and allow the self-evident to be evident.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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