Yet Another Monday Smackdown: Josh Barro on How the Rumpublicans Smashed and Burned Their Own Furniture, and Now Complain That They Have Nowhere to Sit
Live from the Rumpublicans' Self-Made Gehenna: : How the GOP 'Establishment' Created Trump: "Here is my suggestion.... If you want to understand how Trump invaded your party...
...think first about what Ben Carson's campaign, and other campaigns like it, say.... 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 to actual Republican campaigns. This time, it was Ben Carson who ran a 'normal' scam campaign... raised a lot of money... enjoyed a brief honeymoon in the polls... 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....
Often... these candidates. 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 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... [thinking] 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?... It's not normal for a political party to rent frontrunner status to cranks and charlatans for weeks at a time....
Republicans have purposefully torn down... validating institutions... convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted... gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy... abolished standards of discourse.... Republicans waged war on these institutions for a reason.... 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... but that doesn't make him much worse than average in today's Republican party.... In addition... the choice to decouple from reality has made Republican insiders less situationally aware. Who can forget 2012?... In this campaign, Republican insiders... failed to panic... early enough in part because they bought into... Rubio surges... not borne out by the polling or the voting.... In a healthy political party, a savvy campaign would not have been necessary to defeat Trump.... 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.
