Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Defeating Trump?

The Trump Train

This essay by Helen Delich Bentley, Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1985 to 1995, asserts that blocking Trump from being the nominee would be unfair.

Excerpt:
..Trump is inspiring tens of millions of Americans of all ages, races, religions and ideologies. He is inspiring them with novel ideas such as requiring that immigrants and visitors come into this country legally with proper documentation and making sure that we can properly vet everyone who wants to come to this country. He is inspiring them with novel ideas such as not rewarding corporations for taking jobs out of the country to parts of the world that have no minimum wage, environmental or child labor laws so that they can turn around and sell cheap goods to the Americans whose jobs they exported. He is inspiring them with novel ideas such as not expanding benefits to illegal immigrants while veterans — American heroes — are dying because we cannot treat them quickly enough.

If the Republican establishment does not like Trump’s ideas, it should try to beat him fair and square, by capturing the hearts and imaginations of the voters, as Trump has done over the past six months. If it can beat him fair and square, with a majority of votes and a majority of delegates, then the party — including those of us who support Trump — will come together behind the eventual nominee. But if the nomination is stolen from Trump through shadowy billionaire super-PAC money and “brokered convention” chicanery, I sadly predict that the party that I love and have helped to build for more than half a century will suffer a massive schism that may send it the way of the Whigs....
Read the rest HERE.

There is the very real possibility that Trump cannot be stopped from traveling further along the road to the nomination. From This essay, "The 25-Year Tide That Gave Us Trump,":
Trump’s popularity is a direct result of a tsunami of economic and cultural globalism that has flooded the shores of America over the last 25 years. The overwhelming pace of this change has upended both the country and the relationship that working-class voters have with both political parties, but especially the GOP....
Important factors according to that essay: economic globalism, cultural globalism (including concerns about Islamic terrorism), and the Great Recession with the 2008 Wall Street bailout. In sum:
They [the middle class] want an outsider — someone strong enough to take on the system, someone who will not fix it or reform it but break it. Someone who will drop an anvil on the system’s head the way one was dropped on theirs [the heads of the middle class].
Read the entire essay HERE.

Of note: Marco Rubio, perceived as a GOP-establishment candidate, didn't pick up a single delegate yesterday.

Neoconservatism (the tenets of the establishment GOP and often referred to as "modern conservatism") is struggling to survive. Should it survive?  And does neoconservativism really protect American interests?