Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

[Torie]

This is a fascinating read, especially the bit about the McConnell and Senate Pub plans to just dump the Trump if he is nominated, and indeed trash him if need be, to save themselves.

The most curious thing stated in the article is that allegedly LePage, the man who just endorsed Trump and said he'd be just great, two weeks ago tried to get the Pub governors together to blast Trump whom he thought then would be a disaster. What the F happened in two weeks to LePage? Or is there more than one LePage out there? Color me confused.

[Torie]

The party created this mess. By pandering to Tea Partiers and xenophobes more and more in recent years, they've welcomed the crazies into the party. Well, now the crazies dominate the base. What did you expect? I predicted this (albeit not with Trump as the candidate... nobody really predicted that) years ago when GOP officials kept increasingly giving in to and supporting Tea Partiers' unreasonable demands.

Yeah, but much of the Trump base is not tea partiers at all, who tend to be focused on fiscal issues and the like. It's more about the estranged working and lower middle class concerned about their standard of living and buying into Trump's protectionism, both as to trade, and as to immigration, with a loathing of Muslims mixed in.

[Torie]

This is also very enlightening about Republicans' current predicament.

https://storify.com/DemFromCT/david-frum-on-the-state-of-the-republican-party

Ah, your use of the term "predicament" is way too low energy to describe it all. Much more apropos is a considerably higher energy word such as "crisis."

[Torie]

This ... will not work out well. If anything it will cause the Trump phenomena to have more lasting repercussions for the GOP.

So the GOP establishment's plan for dealing with their voters having rejected them and chosen a candidate that basically said they were full of sh**t, is to run attack ads against the candidate their voters chose in an attempt to win them back.

Genius. Pure genius. I can't see how this could possibly not work.

We will deal with that conundrum later. Be patient. Some of it might involve some of the candidates supporting Trump in a pro forma manner, but then taking out ads making clear that on various issues, they take exception to Trump's point of view. Yeah, it does seem rather lame really. So, yeah, let's not discuss this further right now. Later dude. We will think of something.

Of course, if after the nomination, it is demonstrated that Trump committed tax fraud, and the IRS is going to prosecute him, then they can withdraw their endorsement, and hopefully the Trumpeters will be thinned out, and/or suck it up, and still vote for the senate Pubs who bailed, understanding that they had to. So another track to contemplate is the winning the lottery ticket track as it were.

If we keep working on this, maybe we will come up with enough tracks that it will become a veritable railroad yard. Well given it's the Trump, let's think big, really big, and go for it becoming Penn Station and Grand Central Station combined. Ah, that's the ticket!

[Torie]

The party created this mess. By pandering to Tea Partiers and xenophobes more and more in recent years, they've welcomed the crazies into the party. Well, now the crazies dominate the base. What did you expect? I predicted this (albeit not with Trump as the candidate... nobody really predicted that) years ago when GOP officials kept increasingly giving in to and supporting Tea Partiers' unreasonable demands.

Yeah, but much of the Trump base is not tea partiers at all, who tend to be focused on fiscal issues and the like. It's more about the estranged working and lower middle class concerned about their standard of living and buying into Trump's protectionism, both as to trade, and as to immigration, with a loathing of Muslims mixed in.

That's cute that you think the Tea Party was ever motivated by "fiscal issues."

What do you think animated them? Got any polls from back when (i.e., when they were the talk of the town, rather than just so yesterday, as is the case now) as to what they thought?

[Torie]

The party created this mess. By pandering to Tea Partiers and xenophobes more and more in recent years, they've welcomed the crazies into the party. Well, now the crazies dominate the base. What did you expect? I predicted this (albeit not with Trump as the candidate... nobody really predicted that) years ago when GOP officials kept increasingly giving in to and supporting Tea Partiers' unreasonable demands.

Yeah, but much of the Trump base is not tea partiers at all, who tend to be focused on fiscal issues and the like. It's more about the estranged working and lower middle class concerned about their standard of living and buying into Trump's protectionism, both as to trade, and as to immigration, with a loathing of Muslims mixed in.

That's cute that you think the Tea Party was ever motivated by "fiscal issues."

What do you think animated them? Got any polls from back when (i.e., when they were the talk of the town, rather than just so yesterday, as is the case now) as to what they thought?

They were just people who watched a lot of Fox News and listened to a lot of Talk Radio and got worked up into a hysteria about how Obama wanted to destroy America.  There wasn't any particular motivating factor, "financial issues" was just the excuse given but it could have been anything.  It all started with the great Obamacare fabrications tour that the GOP undertook in Summer 09, where they went around the country whipping people up into a frenzy with lies about death panels and rationing and $100,000 deductibles.

Well health care seems like a fiscal issue to me (you seem to be implying it was mostly just a proxy for Obama hate, you know with a racial aspect perhaps), but anyway, here is an article with some numbers about Tea Party people's beliefs, and it seems to mostly involve fiscal issue, combined with an "attitude," as in angry, rather then well, Paul Ryan type cool.

[Torie]

The TP rallies don't sound like my kind of crowd at all. Sounds more like NASCAR. Did you ever go to one?