Donald Trump will have another chance Tuesday to show that his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination is anything but a fluke.
Voters in 12 states — including some of the largest, such as Texas and Georgia — will have their say in the presidential nominating contests, giving Trump a chance to widen his lead and giving his rivals one more chance to show they have a shot at stopping him.
As Trump’s march to the GOP nomination has accelerated and shown no signs of losing momentum, forces within the Republican Party have tried to accelerate their own quiet efforts — with little success — to put the brakes on his candidacy and unify behind a rival. They’re also contemplating how the GOP can contend with a Trump candidacy that potentially puts down-ballot GOP candidates at risk.
The political calculus is tricky for Republicans. Any attempts to undermine Trump’s candidacy or disavow it in the general election risk alienating a key constituency the GOP needs in order to win — the people, including many new voters, who are coalescing around the billionaire businessman and reality TV show star. On the other hand, the concern runs deep that Trump risks irreparable damage to the Republican brand among general election voters. Party establishment forces, undoubtedly, want to make the case that Trump doesn’t represent the GOP.
But the emergence of Trump is a direct outgrowth of the Republican politics of recent years: an absolute refusal to compromise on a pathway to citizenship for those living in the country illegally, a growing disdain for political correctness, a willingness to let government simply shut down rather than productively engage in politics, and a nearly universal rejection of any policy championed by President Barack Obama. Some have labeled that last tendency “Obama derangement syndrome.”
“How surprising was it that a man who began his recent political career by questioning Obama’s eligibility for office could leap to the front of the pack, willing and able to communicate with his followers by means of the dog-whistle disdain for ‘ political correctness?’” Robert Kagan, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former Republican, wrote last week in a Washington Post OpEd.
This is the politics that, in large part, gave way to the rise of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. Paul LePage here in Maine. Much of their appeal to voters is based on anger with the existing system and those who they say control it. Of late, LePage has used that anger to blame outsiders and others — black drug dealers, asylum seekers, people receiving public assistance — for many of Maine’s problems.
But LePage and Christie are unlike Trump in at least one regard: The two governors have championed an agenda in office that adheres to the Republican Party line. Trump has no such allegiance to the Republican ideology.
While his campaign has been incoherent and embarrassingly short on policy specifics, Trump has indicated a willingness to break with his party in key ways. He’s come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement and championed a protectionist agenda. He has railed against a tax code under which hedge fund managers are “ getting away with murder,” even though the tax proposal he later released isn’t so unfavorable to those fund managers. And he’s said he likes the individual health insurance mandate, a key provision of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He’s even acknowledged that many women are “ helped greatly” by Planned Parenthood.
Perhaps most disappointing to GOP establishment forces, then, is that Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP’s nominating contest has everything to do with the angry attitude underlying Republican politics of late and nothing to do with support for key Republican policies.
