Remember the debate in South Carolina twelve days ago? Where Trump completely blew his cool in what was a "road game" for him, facing a "hostile" crowd that was really only heavily pro-Rubio, and revealed his true, liberal left commie bastard self? Remember his supreme sense of self-entitlement that does not brook any opposition, to the point of all but demanding that the RNC rig the primaries for him to guarantee his victory - or as he phrased it, "treating me fairly"? And viciously ripping anybody and anything who/that doesn't comply?
That's idiotically playing well with far too many "Republican" voters who have lost their minds by conflating "political incorrectness" and "strength" with being a jerk and alchemizing "anger" into an ideology and political philosophy. But it is not going to work - indeed, will have the exact opposite effect - in the general campaign beyond (as all the hypothetical general election polls involving Trump continue to indicate), the Obamedia know it, and today the New York Times delivers a taste of the utter, Trump-vaporizing media bleepstorm to come:
Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” and it is not just the very-well-to-do who want to get in.
Since 2010, nearly three hundred United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only seventeen have been hired.
In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.
In his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump has stoked his crowds by promising to bring back jobs that have been snatched by illegal [alien]s or outsourced by corporations, and voters worried about immigration have been his strongest backers.
But he has also pursued more than five hundred visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, according to the United States [Commissariat] of Labor, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs. [emphases added]
When the Times asked Trump to explain this - there's no other word for it - betrayal of the very raison d'etere of his candidacy, he spouted the same excuses (Americans didn't want the jobs, they weren't qualified, we had to get the help from wherever we could, etc.) that pro-amnesty pols and their Big Business/"Corporate America" patrons - the people that Trumplicans (and their enablers) claim to detest with a fiery, sulfuric passion - invariably offer up. Which, in a rational campaign, would have sent The Donald back to Celebrity Apprentice months ago, but in this Bizarro world wasteland, makes him a coiffed, well-dressed god. He is, in other words, the epitome of his supporters' deepest loathings. But because he's their cult leader, he can do no wrong, including the very sort of thing that drove them to him in the first place. It's like if Hitler had come out at a Nuremberg rally and declared that he was Jewish, and that was the most important reason to pursue the "Final Solution," and the assembled Nazi throngs had deluged him in deafening "sieg heils!"
Actions, in other words, used to speak louder than words. And in anything resembling a conservative context, Donald Trump is all empty, hollow words.
But the assembled Trumplican throngs are not the general electorate. And the general electorate - which (1) is center-left and (2) gets its news from the Obamedia, however much Trump's cultists claim to - and we surviving conservatives actually do - despise them. And they will read, and accept, and believe stories like this one and come to see, if they haven't already, the billionaire slumlord as a plutocratic bourgeois hypocrite and exploiter of the poor and downtrodden, which will actually fit hand-in-glove with the "racist" narrative with which the Left has already tarred him over his bombastic "deport all illegals/force Mexico to build a wall" fantasies.
And not just him, but the Republican Party he is hostiley taking over.
This is one more example of how nominating Donald Trump out of unchecked, uncontrollable rage, stoked by Tea Party mythology about the supposed "sins" of the "GOPe," will prove to be utter political suicide eight months and change from now:
For the last eight months or so, a significant portion of the Republican party’s voters have been in thrall to a bizarre, Occupy-esque conspiracy theory, which holds as its central thesis that sabotage and pusillanimity are the root causes of the Right’s recent woes. In this mistaken view, the conservative movement’s failure to counter all of the Obama era’s excesses is not the product of the crucial [constitutional] and structural factors that [are supposed to] prevent any one faction from ushering in substantial change, but of a lack of will or desire. Sure, the advocates of this view will concede, the shutdown of 2013 was doomed from the start, in large part because the public sided with Barack Obama. But if the GOP had just held out a little longer, they imagine, the “power of the purse” would have prevailed and the popular dynamics would magically have shifted. The same insistence obtains elsewhere: Sure, there is no precedent in which a second-term president willingly repeals his centerpiece legislative achievements simply because the legislature has elected to play hardball with its powers. But somehow, the critics believe, this time would have been different. Why, they ask repeatedly, didn’t the Republican party just “fight” harder?
Given how broadly this opinion is held, one would have expected the 2016 primary season to reveal a penchant for purity that redounded to the favor of a candidate such as Ted Cruz. And yet, oddly enough, quite the opposite has happened thus far. Led by Donald Trump, the most frustrated voters have instead put their efforts behind a well-telegraphed attempt to burn down the whole political edifice and reconstruct it from scratch. Because it has been imperfect, the GOP must be destroyed.
On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk. But it is also likely to be catastrophic for the very people who are cheering it along. Far from being at the bottom of its fortunes, the GOP is in fact coming to the end of a long, slow, tough effort to rebuild after the disaster of 2008 — an effort that would benefit everybody involved if it could be completed. At present, the party’s primary national problem is that it does not run the White House, and, therefore, cannot overcome the final constitutional hurdle to ushering in significant nationwide change despite its huge power in the House, its small advantage in the Senate, and its considerable presence in the States. If Donald Trump were to be the party’s nominee — and if his being so were to do to both the presidential and down-ballot races what polling suggests it would — this problem would not be solved so much as reset from scratch. As Avi Woolf pointed out yesterday, far from hastening the advent of real reform, the Trump movement is unconsciously channeling the strategy employed by Peter III in the Seven Years War: Namely, to give up just as there is a chance of a big breakthrough, and to hand full political control [back] to the enemy as a result. If the Trump contingent should succeed in this endeavor, the party would not emerge refreshed or improved; it would be summarily returned to where it was languishing back in early 2009.
And if that should happen? Well, suffice it to say that it would be an unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster. For the first time in years, the Right’s defenses would be completely destroyed, perhaps never to be rebuilt. Swiftly, the courts would be packed with ideologues; immediately, Congress would run through the remaining items on the Obama-[Sanders] laundry list; before the voters had a chance to stop them, the White House would usher in an irreversible amnesty; and, Trump having been turned into a pariah by a hostile press, his “anti-PC” attitude would be rendered toxic in perpetuity. The likely result of Trump’s selection as the Republican nominee, in other words, would be the entrenchment of all that his supporters claim vehemently to hate. That thrill that his acolytes would feel when they saw Trump named the winner of the primaries? It’d be gone in a matter of minutes. [bolded emphases mine]
Again.....
....and could nominating Ted Cruz, or even Marco Rubio, really be worse than this?
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