Daily Times

Establishment Republicans are not sniggering at Donald Trump’s antics anymore as he keeps notching primaries and threatens to go solo in November if party insiders scheme to deny him the nomination. Echoes of similarly irate conservative Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” party sinking the Republican (GOP) national campaign in 1912 get louder every time Trump cruises to victory. After the real estate mogul announced his candidacy in June last year, party leaders contentedly sat back in the peanut gallery ridiculing his naked attempts at demagoguery. Later, they dismissed Trump’s surging poll numbers as an electoral blip sparked by fringe sections of the party base that loathed the GOP’s handling of Congress.

Moreover, they believed Trump’s novelty act as the ‘outsider’ would soon wear out and GOP voters en masse would come to their senses and coalesce behind either Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, the party’s blue-eyed boys. This cocksure feeling has now given way to one of dread. A new Rasmussen national poll puts Trump 15 points clear of closest rival Ted Cruz. More alarmingly, 24 percent of Trump’s base will ‘very likely’ vote for him if he runs as an independent, effectively torching GOP hopes of preventing a Democratic three-peat in the White House.

Republican rivals have tried ganging up on Trump in debates, running attack ads to discredit him, but nothing really stuck so the establishment is changing tack. Influential leaders of the conservative movement reportedly met in Washington on March 17 to cook up ways to stop Trump, or failing that roadmap a ‘true conservative’ third-party challenge that manipulates the country’s Byzantine electoral college system. If Trump fails to grab the majority delegates required for nomination as forecast, Republicans will end up with a contested convention in July thus allowing party leaders to rally behind an establishment candidate for president.

Some GOP leaders have already unsheathed their claws, with Mitt Romney urging Americans that Trump’s “imagination must not be married to real power.” If they cannot stop him from scoring the party ticket and seeing his weak numbers against Hillary Clinton in the national head-to-head, a third-party challenge will aim to trip up Clinton’s sprint towards an electoral college majority by poaching a vote-rich state like Texas. If that happens, the 12th amendment mandates that voting in the House of Representatives, which the GOP hopes to hold, will elect the next president from the top three finishers.

Trump, however, wary of GOP leaders using delegate math to thwart his nomination, warned on March 16: “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing many, many millions of people.” He has a point. From the beginning, Trump’s penchant for crass hyperbole has obscured his core appeal among blue-collar Americans still hurting from outsourced jobs and the 2008 financial crisis courtesy of greedy Wall Street bankers. It is hard to pin down exactly what Trumps stands for, but his anti-free trade agenda and tirades against corporate America’s revolving door with Washington have, for the most part, stayed consistent.

The irony of Trump seeking to scupper the very system that sired him has not diluted his message either. A recent study of white, working-class voters by political-action group, Working America, uncovered a deep well of support for Trump even among self-identified Democrats, who admired his no-nonsense ‘attitude’ to addressing their towering concern: “good jobs/the economy.” When he blames the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for levelling the Rust Belt or promises to order American CEO’s running plants abroad to double-back home or face steep tariffs, these voters whoop in agreement.

Some Republicans also blame President Barack Obama for Trump’s rise, a charge he dismisses as “novel”, but it is hard to ignore the political schism born of Obama and Congress constantly locking horns. From universal healthcare to the national debt ceiling to gun control, both branches of government have long traded barbs over what ordinary Americans want. David Farber, a history professor at Temple University, suggests, “We’re in a situation like the 1960s, a period of great polarisation and there just isn’t much common ground.” This, then, allowed a firebrand like Trump to sharpen contradictions without broad, electoral backlash.

Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, an avowed Trump critic, also begrudgingly gives the devil his due while at the same time fearing for the GOP’s future: “I think the party is in deep, deep trouble regardless of what happens next. Trump was only able to wage a hostile takeover because the Republican Party was so terribly vacuous.” Nevertheless, there are signs that national candidate Trump, should he get there, will be far less cartoon-like than one duelling Republican rivals for the party nomination and coherent statements crafted by expert advisors will replace the impromptu ramblings of today. Given Trump’s gift for personal reinvention, that would not surprise one bit.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad