But not one that can go backwards in time and change things. Maybe that’s for the best, we are warned about the dangers of killing Hitler and accidentally replacing him with someone worse. I dread to think what worse than Trump would look and sound like.
But maybe Donald Trump happened because of Percival Dunwoody.
A fair bit of the GOPs lock on state level offices and the House is down to a lot of very careful gerrymandering and a concerted effort towards voter suppression. Under the auspices of fighting non-existent voter fraud they’ve done everything they can to eliminate extended and early voting time, absentee ballots, voter registration drives, and institute onerous ID requirements and other restrictions. Most of this is not so quietly designed to prevent the young, the non-white, the urban, and a bunch of other groups from voting. They’ve built a bizarre group of voter/congressional districts that guarantee them a certain percentage of house seats and state legislators in a large number of states. They do this because the simple mechanic these days is the more people who vote the more votes the Democrats get. Increased voter turn out isn’t in the GOP’s interest because increased voter turn out = increased Democratic vote.
That makes Trump particularly dangerous for them. He’s certainly engaging for a certain chunk of the GOP base, and attracts certain demographics from within their own party. But enough of the rest of the party hates to guy to potentially cause a problem. The bigger issue is that he frightens and pisses off a lot of people. Including Blacks, Hispanics and other non-whites, women, the young, moderates. All the groups that the GOP half heartedly courts while actively trying to prevent from voting. The longer Trump keeps it up the more likely it is that he’ll drive voter turn out from those groups up, while potentially reducing voter turn out among more moderate conservatives, and he might even cause some sort of split among conservatives who do vote. Driving some off to the Dems, and some off to weird 3rd party options. If his fetid stink attaches itself to the party as a whole (which it seems to be doing as we speak), it could potentially endanger the carefully constructed, un-democratic safety net they’ve made for themselves. Making it unlikely they can maintain the sort of major presence they have now, without significant ideological changes.
Its probably an unlikely, worst case (for them) scenario. And it would probably require Trump to take the nomination (which would be bad, and I still think unlikely). But a man can dream.
Distraction from various revelations such as that the Conservative woman MP invented the death threats from opponents of bombing Syria, and that the chief reason for the British involvement seems to be that we’re trying to sell the Brimstone missile to more countries. After all the “urgency” of the debate, and the RAF bombing things almost the minute it was over, suddenly things went very quiet. Distraction was needed - and give him his due, Trump is a big distraction.
And shortly afterwards the said world leaders get together with Cheney and ask for tips on arranging hunting accidents.
Do you have a source for that? I believe you, but I cant find anything.
i was curious whether the RNC could kick him out?
surely they must have some control over membership? ( you can’t, for instance, run as both a democrat and a republican. )
I saw it yesterday…let me try to find it.
Edit:
via Jon Snow.
Yeah, I really don’t know how the parties work… But the DNC, at least, seems pretty solidly set on keeping Lessig out… Which would imply that the RNC doesn’t want to kick Trumpy out:
So far Trump is not backing down from his desire to restrict/ban Islam.
And that’s good.
He should say exactly what he wants to do, stick to it, and let the people vote based on that.
I’m hoping at least one newspaper will run a headline that says “Total Loser” when Trump loses some primaries or the Presidential election.
i’m not sure that you can trust the comments on major news sites. more telling are the articles themselves.
commenters troll not just for fun, but for profit.
( here’s at least one story about fox news paying for commenters, but astroturfing is everywhere )
I imagine the test is like this:
The RNC apparently made a deal with Trump that he won’t run as a third party candidate if he loses the primaries. Trump running on his own would mean the Democratic nominee will win, as Trump will split the conservative vote. The RNC can’t kick him out now.
that’s pretty much my take, too.
i’ve been hearing a lot of republicans have been speaking out against all this, but if they really want to lead – they need to start leading sometime soon.
( currently, i imagine all of these party leaders running around in circles saying “but what can we do?” )
True. As long as it actually has the desired effect.
On the flip side, there’s also the whole “everyone hating/ostracising all Muslims is what ISIS wants” thing.
Anyway:
Those who are currently not voting skew very heavily Democratic. Although, disengaged “independent” types, from whom Trump derives part of his support, are in there too.
I don’t know how much he’s actually spent, but the campaign has definitely already cost him a fair bit of money in lost deals and damage to the trump brand. Back in July, The Wrap guestimated that he had lost about 50 million. He was already quite a successful entertainment personality - I don’t see what he has to gain from turning himself into Sarah Palin / Glenn Beck. I totally believe that Trump believes that he can and should be president.
FiveThirtyEight has some encouraging things to say on this topic - mostly that it’s still very early, and that while we might feel like it’s been nothing but Trump coverage for months, the most voters are actually still undecided / uninformed / not paying a ton of attention, and a lot of people who say they’d vote Trump may be doing so on the basis of little more than name recognition
I’m down with Turley, but I’m a little ticked that GWU recently had a student pull down a Palestinian flag the student had taped in their window.
Other than that, Trump is a yuje douchebag.
That may be something worth it’s own BB topic…
You know, if you ask people out in “The World” who is running for president, the odds are that they only know one name.
The Publicity Game…
Trump is perfect for the Democrats. When they win in 2016, their next butcher can keep killing Muslims in the Middle East while urging the rest of us to remain “tolerant.” Just like Obama!
