Well that was fast.
Perhaps it was just my sensitivity (oversensitivity?) to "media narrative" herding. Immediately after Trump's Indiana primary victory and Cruz's Great Skedaddle, it seemed as though political journalists — especially in the cable-news arm — had broadly landed on the theme of inevitable Republican unity. One by one, once- anti-Trump Republican pols were falling in line, looking down sourly and brushing the rubble with their $500 Italian-leather shoes, murmuring that they had seen the light — and its name was, after all, Donald Trump.
But the narrative — if indeed it was a narrative, rather than my paranoia — didn't last. Because it couldn't last, because reality was kicking it all to hell. Those
whom George Will has called "Republican quislings" continued, here and there, to sign up. Yet wholesale Trump rejectionism soon resumed — from past Republican presidents and past Republican nominees to the House Republican speaker.
If a smug, all-knowing, proleptic "unity" narrative there was, it collapsed overnight. The revised theme is now everywhere in the media, as summarized by the NY Times: "Mr. Trump [faces] a shunning from party leaders that is unprecedented in modern politics."
That most efficient of summaries has not, however, deterred many a political commentator from warning that Mr. Trump — that most efficient of demagogues — could surprise us in November. He's "connecting!" they say; he's speaking to the monstrously aggrieved who now constitute a "mass movement." That's true, although Bernie is in the same "mass movement" boat, which, when juxtaposed with the titanic American electorate, is but a dinghy.
These premonitory, hair-on-fire commentators (see, for instance, Andrew Sullivan's NY Magazine essay) rarely grapple with the unastounding fact of the far greater mass of unpersuadable anti-Trumpism: that The Donald's negatives are astronomic; that (electoral majority) women despise him, that minorities detest him, that the young abhor him, that the educated loathe him, that moderates scorn him — and now, evidence that the Republican Party's breach is irreparable.
Why irreparable? The Times assesses Paul Ryan's position — for one, but representative in attitude nonetheless — as likely unchangeable: He "sees the value in protecting Republican House members up for re-election in swing districts where Mr. Trump may well be a drag on the rest of the ticket." By virtue of his job's highest responsibility, the speaker is simply writing off the White House. Ryan "will probably just keep doing what he is doing: raising money for Republicans, talking — both amorphously and perhaps later more substantively — about policy ideas, and looking, with hope and some desperation, for that change in tone from the presumptive nominee."
Which will never come. Because Trump is Trump — which further means that Trump is screwed.
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