Martin Gurri analyses brilliantly the peculiar character of the Trump candidacy phenomenon.

In American politics, Trump is a peacock among dull buzzards. That should be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded. The data above speaks to a world-class talent for self-promotion. The media noticed, and just kept the cameras aimed at the extravagant performance – allowing Trump to represent himself to the public, a rare commodity for a politician. And the public, in its mood of negation, its hostility to the established order, also noticed. Trump lacked a political past. He was glamorous and a winner – he looked different and acted different.

He also sounded different from other politicians. The most significant factor separating Trump from the pack, I believe, is rhetorical. Trump is a master of the nihilist style of the web. His competitors speak in political jargon and soaring generalities. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes. Everyone he dislikes is a liar, “a bimbo,” “bought and paid for.” Without batting an eyelash, he will compare an opponent to a child molester. Such rhetorical aggression is shocking in mainstream American politics but an everyday occurrence on the political web, where death threats and rape threats against a writer are a measure of the potency of the message.

The “angry voter” Trump supposedly has connected with is really an avatar of the mutinous public: and this is its language. It too speaks in rant, inchoate expression of a desire to remake the world by smashing at it, common parlance of the political war-bands that populate Tumblr, Gawker, reddit, and so many other online platforms. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the US electoral process.

I’m amazed by the rapidity with which this moment has arrived: that we have come to it, however, will surprise no one who has been paying attention. …

Put differently, the Trump candidacy is a test of democracy in America in 2016. The public is agitated and willing to vote for this strange and formless man. It is not directly engaged. The structures of democracy, on the flip side, appear to be near collapse. What should have been a brutal collision against unyielding institutions has turned into a strut over a landscape darkened by colossal ruins. The news business is dying and desperate. The primary elections are a crazy quilt of contradictory rules. The Republican Party, by all appearances, is more of a historical memory than a living organization.

Donald Trump, anti-establishment wrecker, has been fortunate in his moment. In 1960, 1980, even 2000, there would have been an establishment to oppose him. In 2015, the putative establishment champion was Jeb Bush. He had been away from elected office for nine years, “a longer downtime than any president elected since 1852 (and any candidate since 1924).” The Republican worthies who endorsed and promoted him had been out of office for an average of 11 years. If this once was the party’s establishment, it’s now a claque of political corpses. The Bush candidacy, in brief, was a dance of the dead, and the Republican Party, at the national level at least, stands revealed as a ruinous graveyard over which nearly anyone, fitting any description, can lay claim.

The Revolt of the Public has been accused, with uncertain justice, of advancing a bleak vision of our political reality. In that spirit, I want to conclude with a dismal observation. At present, the leading candidates for the presidency are Trump and Hillary Clinton. One is a reckless smasher of institutions. The other is a fossilized specimen of the remote and protected elites. Both are creatures of the society of distrust, divisive to an extreme degree.

So my observation is this: regardless of who wins, the 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be just another episode in the grinding social conflict and disintegration of industrial forms that have defined our age. Nothing much, I fear, will be decided.

Read the whole thing.

If Trump, instead of Lincoln, had given the Gettysburg Address (via Kevin M. Levin):

It was a long time ago – I don’t think anyone can even remember, but I can remember, I have a great memory, I’ve got the best memory ever. These guys, they made the most special thing, really, really special. Where everyone was free and everything was great, just the way I’ve made America, I really, really mean that.

Now we’ve got these people – I don’t like these people, let me tell you, they’re really awful, they said, “Hey Trump, you’ve got small hands,” and so I went after them, I really did, I sued them, and what did they do? They decided they wanted a fight and I said, “Okay, we’ll see who’s still here in a few years,” and see, we’re still here, on this battlefield. It’s a yuge battlefield, and it’s really, really, great, it’s so special. See, we’ve built this cemetery, so how big it is? It’s so special. And these guys – we’ve got the best guys – they tell me, “Hey Donald, give us someone who can lead us and we’ll beat these rebels,” and so I made things happen – it’s what I do – and boom, look, we’ve got this big, big win. These guys died winning, and I’m sure that makes their families just so, so happy, all this winning. It’s really great that we can be here to make this place special because of all the winning they did.

But really, we can’t make this place any more special than they did by winning so hard, unless it’s to build a brand new Trump Towers – Gettysburg – that’s right ladies and gentlemen, that’s right, right here, right where you’re standing, we’re going to build this yuge tower, and oh my goodness, it will be so special, so big. You’ll just get sick from how big it is. You say to yourself, “Hey, I wonder if anyone will remember this place.” And now you don’t have to wonder anymore because you’ll be able to see it from miles and miles away, that’s how yuge it will be. We’ll make those rebels remember this place where they lost, where they became losers. I really hate losers. I hate them so much that we’re going to keep on winning, just to show them how much of losers they really are, that’s what we’re going to do. What these guys did – and they’re just the best, so special – well, we’re going to make sure that what they won for is going to be kept alive forever. Know what I’m going to do? I’m going to build a wall, a yuge wall, really, really yuge, all along the Mason-Dixon Line, and know what? I’m gonna make Jeff Davis pay for it, I really am. That guy’s such a loser, it’s why I hate him so much, and I think it’s what the guys that won here would really want. I’m just going to keep this great country really great, and yuge, just like me. We’re going to keep winning until we’re so tired of winning that you’ll have to thank me for making everything so great. My government is going to be around for a while, so get used to that winning.

Oh hey, look, we’ve got someone yelling about issues over there. What’s that? Slavery? Throw that guy outta here, get him out, this is about winning, and he’s a loser.

Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos recently discovered that their political idol is “mental”. Stephanie Cegielski worked for his nomination, but concluded that the truth of the matter is: “Trump only cares about Trump.”

Jim Geraghty has some unkind words for them and all the other little Trumpkins out there.

Trump supporters, no one should let you off of that bandwagon now. You should be handcuffed to that Titanic you volunteered to crew.

Donald Trump didn’t suddenly change in the past few days, weeks or months. He’s the same guy he always was, the same guy that most of us in the conservative movement and GOP have been staunchly opposing for the past year. He didn’t abruptly become reckless, obnoxious, ill-informed, erratic, hot-tempered, pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, crude and catastrophically unqualified for the presidency overnight. He’s always been that guy, and you denied it and ignored it and hand-waved it away and made excuses every step of the way because you were convinced that you were so much smarter than the rest of us. You were so certain that you had received some superior wavelength giving you special insight into the Donald; only you could tell that it was all an act. Only you could grasp that his constant courting of controversy was just to get attention from the media. Only you could instinctively sense that his style would play brilliantly in the general election and win over working-class Democrats. (SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t.) You insisted that you could “coach him.”

You came to those conclusions not because you’re smarter than the rest of us, but because you’re actually more foolish than the rest of us. You insisted Occam’s Razor couldn’t possibly be true– that Trump acts the way he does because this is who he is, this is the way he is all the time, and he will always be like this. You fooled yourself into believing that Trump was playing this nine-level chess that only you and a few others could perceive and understand. Only you could see the long game.

There is no long game. He’s winging it. There is no grand strategy. There is no master plan. Trump doesn’t look ahead to the next sentence, much less the next step in getting elected.

“Our candidate is mental?” No Shinola, Sherlock, some conservatives said this from day one and all we got for it was the alt-Right vomiting forth endless vitriol and profanity and threats.

Oh, what’s that? Trump’s Twitter behavior is “utterly stupid”, Newt? Thanks for noticing; six days ago you were telling the media there was absolutely nothing about Trump that worries you. Maybe your previous comparison of Trump to Reagan was frankly, fundamentally, profoundly wrong from A to Z.

“Trump only cares about Trump”? Gee, thank you, turncoat former insider, for this shocking bit of secret intelligence. News flash, some of us didn’t need to work for Trump for several months to figure that out. We saw it, we said it, and you called us liars for saying it.

Technically we’re supposed to welcome previous Trump fans-turned-foes with open arms. But barring some miraculous comeback by Ted Cruz, the Trump campaign will have cost the Republican Party the presidency after eight years of Obama, and perhaps the Senate and even the House – and Scalia’s replacement on the Court as well. Years of effort spent attempting to dispel the accusations of inherent Republican misogyny, xenophobia, hypocrisy, ignorance and blind rage have been undone by Trump’s campaign. And every Trump advocate in front of a camera had a hand in this.

We’re not just gonna hug it out.

Jonathan V. Last, of the the Weekly Standard, (via email) observes that we are in a no-win situation here. Whatever happens, Donald Trump is going to split the GOP vote.

With Easter break behind us and a pause before the vote in Wisconsin next week, let’s have a deep breath and take stock of where we stand now in the GOP primary.

It’s now abundantly clear that the Republican party is broken. There’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again this cycle-whether the nominee is Trump, Cruz, or [insert White Knight]. The idea that Republicans could rally to Trump in a meaningful way-even if party elites cave in-has basically been invalidated by the exit polling coming out of Florida, Ohio, Utah, and pretty much everywhere else. A giant chunk of Republican voters isn’t going to come to him.

Now maybe it’s not the 40 percent or so who tell pollsters they won’t vote Trump if he’s the nominee. I’m sure some of those people feel that way because they’re in the heat of a primary fight and will reconsider when facing the prospect of a Clinton administration. But some won’t, because Trump isn’t just distasteful. You could argue that the potential downside of Trump (expansive authoritarianism unmoored from ideological commitments) is worse than the potential of downside of Clinton (lawless progressivism run amok) [Good summations –JDZ]. For some GOP voters, Clinton could be the lesser of two evils.

But even if half the Republicans who now say they won’t vote for Trump stay that way, there are a bunch of knife’s-edge states that come off the board. So long Florida. So long Ohio. So long North Carolina and Colorado. My colleague Jay Cost thinks that in a Trump vs. Clinton matchup, Clinton starts with a floor of 400 Electoral votes. He may be right. (By the by, Trump supporters generally place a great deal of faith in poll numbers when they show their guy doing well against Bush, Rubio, Cruz, et al. Yet somehow they totally discount the mountain of polls showing Trump being the weakest Republican-by far- against Clinton. Weird.)

On the other hand, Trump can honestly claim to have brought a bunch of new voters into the primary process. And where are these people going to go if Trump isn’t the nominee? Who knows. But it probably won’t be pretty. Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, so they clearly needed a revamped coalition. Last summer, it looked like Trumpism might be an answer to this problem. Now that Trumpism has devolved from being a semi-coherent nationalist worldview into an ad hoc series of contradictory positions held together by an authoritarian cult of personality … not so much.

Which leaves us where, exactly?

Either Trump gets to 1,237 delegates and wins the nomination outright, or he doesn’t and someone else gets nominated after a floor fight at the Republican national convention.

But let’s be clear: Neither or these options is ‘good’ and neither is likely to result in a Republican victory in November. So when someone says, Yeah, but if you don’t do X, you’re giving aid and comfort to Hillary Clinton, just remember: There’s a good chance that ship has already sailed. The priorities for picking the Republican nominee are a lot more near-term right now.”

Ann Coulter on the back porch of a certain house in Woodstock

Nobody can possibly maintain that Ann Coulter is anything less than keen, but even Ann (who flung herself happily in true berserker fashion into the Trump camp) is apparently having second thoughts, watching The Donald act up.

Washington Examiner:

Defending billionaire businessman Donald Trump is like constantly having to bail a teenage son from prison, author and political commentator Ann Coulter groused in a recent radio interview.

“I’m a little testy with our man right now. Our candidate is mental! Do you realize our candidate is mental?” Coulter said jokingly during a taping of an episode of the “Milo Yiannopoulos Show,” which is scheduled to air in full this weekend. “It’s like constantly having to bail out your 16-year-old son from prison.”

Yiannopoulos and Coulter have spent most of the 2016 GOP primary enthusiastically defending Trump, and making the case for why he is the most qualified candidate to take on the Democratic front-runner in the fall.

However, Coulter is now unhappy with Trump over his late-night Twitter shenanigans, which have included attacks on journalists, businesses, television networks, heads of state and Heidi Cruz, the wife of Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Sigh. And I’d been hoping that, were Trump to be elected, at least, he would make Ann Coulter Secretary of State.

Politico reports that Donald Trump, recognizing that he may well fail to win a majority in the first ballot at the GOP Convention, is welshing on his pledge to support the eventual nominee.

Donald Trump has rescinded his pledge to support the Republican nominee for president.

Asked during a CNN town hall whether he stood by the earlier pledge — which he signed in September after meeting with party chairman Reince Priebus — Trump said: “No, I don’t.”

“We’ll see who it is,” he told moderator Anderson Cooper.

Trump said he had been treated “unfairly” by the Republican National Committee and the GOP establishment. He said he was unsure whether the Republican establishment was plotting to take the nomination away from him during the convention in Cleveland.

They have the wrong guy heading the Republican National Committee. If it were I, instead of Reince Priebus, I’d be holding a press conference this morning, announcing that Donald Trump, having repudiated his own affiliation to the Republican Party, is now ineligible to compete in any subsequent GOP primaries. And I would then just sit back and watch how Trump would like that!

Daily Caller reports that Donald Trump is just a little shaky on the meaning and significance of the Easter holiday.

Donald Trump says Easter “represents family and get-together and — and something.”

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” on Easter Sunday, Trump was asked what Easter means to him and if he had an Easter tradition. The real estate mogul replied, “Well, it really means something very special. I’m going to church in an hour from now and it’s going to be — it’s a beautiful church. I’m in Florida.”

“And it’s just a very special time for me. And it really represents family and get-together and — and something, you know, if you’re a — a Christian, it’s just a very important day,” Trump said.

Gerard van der Leun of American Digest (who is normally our most kindred spirit blogger) disagrees with NYM on Trump. Yesterday, he responded indignantly in a comment to our quoting John Hawkins‘s negative opinion of Trump:

The enemy of my enemy is always my friend until he helps me to destroy my enemy. After that he becomes my enemy again.

That or adios supreme court for one or two generations.

I think myself that Mr. van der Leun is not looking properly at the big picture. He ought to consider the historical perspective proposed by National Review’s Avi Snyder, to begin with.

With the GOP looking at the possibility of an open convention — complete with floor fights, riots, and the threat that the party will tear itself in two — the best historical analogue seems clear: Donald Trump is Teddy Roosevelt, and this is 1912 all over again.

The 1912 Republican National Convention was a battle for the soul of the party.

Though President William Howard Taft had been Theodore Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, by 1912, the increasingly radical Roosevelt was dissatisfied with Taft’s relative conservatism in office. In violation of an earlier pledge not to run for a second full term, Roosevelt chose to challenge the president for the Republican nomination.

Much like Donald Trump, the progressive Roosevelt was a post-constitutional candidate. There are parallels between Trump’s defense of eminent domain abuse and Roosevelt’s contempt for property rights, and Trump’s strongman tendencies have antecedents in TR’s impatience with the machinery of constitutional government.

In the early 20th century, only a handful of states held popular primaries to choose presidential nominees, and the results weren’t even binding. But Roosevelt was a popular figure, and he took advantage of these contests, carrying nine out of twelve primaries. President Taft, however, still controlled the machinery of the party, and in states where convention delegates were chosen by party regulars, Taft’s forces dominated.

This didn’t stop Roosevelt from crying foul. “I believe in pure democracy,” he had proclaimed at the Ohio Constitutional Convention in February of that year. As the forces of his era’s Republican establishment stood arrayed against him, Roosevelt, in the words of historian Lewis Gould, remained “firm in his conviction that the nomination was being stolen from him.” One can almost imagine the outrage of Trump boosters, such as Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and others, at the notion that the “will of the people” could be so successfully thwarted by the party apparatus. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt didn’t promise riots if he failed to secure the nomination, but the convention organizers were prepared for them. A thousand policemen patrolled the aisles of the convention, and barbed wire was hidden beneath the bunting of the speaker’s platform in order to prevent assaults. For Roosevelt had cast his battle for the nomination in apocalyptic language, proclaiming to his followers that: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

None of these protests stopped the conservative forces of President Taft from denying Roosevelt the nomination. Taft’s ally Elihu Root defeated Roosevelt’s chosen candidate for convention chairman. Roosevelt’s forces lost important votes on the floor, and the convention awarded contested delegates to Taft. Roosevelt had won more primaries and had entered the convention with a plurality of delegates, but Taft easily wrapped up the nomination on the first ballot.

Taft and Root knew that denying Roosevelt the nomination would likely lead him and his supporters to bolt the convention and run on a third-party ticket, splitting the GOP vote and virtually guaranteeing a Democratic victory in November. Of course, this is precisely what happened. Combined, Roosevelt and Taft won over 50 percent of the popular vote, but Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election with just over 40 percent.

Why was the Republican establishment of the day so intent on denying Roosevelt the nomination? Didn’t they know that their dirty tricks would “hand the election to the Democrats?” Didn’t they know it was time to “come together as a party?” What Taft, Root, and their allies understood was that, as Root would later put it, “worse things can happen to a party than to be defeated.” In fact, as Root understood the situation before the party, “the result of the convention was more important than the question of the election.”

In 1912, America’s very system of constitutional government was under attack. Woodrow Wilson, the man who would become the Democratic candidate, had spent his prior academic career attacking the Constitution as outdated and dismissing the eternal truths of the Declaration of Independence as passé. Roosevelt’s progressivism led him to support a variety of radical measures — such as popular recall elections for judges and judicial decisions — that also threatened America’s constitutional order. Had Roosevelt captured the party in 1912, America would have been without a constitutionalist, conservative party.

Root and Taft insisted that the party of Lincoln should be maintained as “a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather.” And even though they lost the election, ushering in Wilson’s disastrous presidency, history has proven their wisdom. It is hard to imagine a President Coolidge, a candidate Goldwater, or a “Reagan Revolution” had the Republican party become the vehicle for promoting Roosevelt’s proto-welfare state. In the face of defeat, the losers of the election of 1912 could rest in the knowledge that they had ensured constitutionalism would continue to find a home in one of America’s major parties.

The relevance of 1912 to the 2016 GOP primary race should be obvious.

———————-

Of course, apart from such grand issues as preserving the alternative of a constitutionalist party, one needs to bear in mind that it likely to be better for the future of the country, and of the conservative cause, to see one’s adversaries elect a failed and disastrous presidency than to elect one of those supposedly representing your own party and your own principles.

I do not believe that Donald Trump shows any reasonable probability at all of winning, making America great, or making good decisions or appointments. I can easily picture Donald nominating his liberal sister and a few random poker buddies to the Supreme Court. I can picture Donald Trump taking a shot at reviving tariffs and Protectionism and instigating a world-wide trade war, dramatically deepening the economic bad times, and shaking the foundations of the world economic order.

I can picture Donald Trump bullying corporations, initiating his own series of New-Deal-style make-work federal programs, and adding some next larger entitlement to the Welfare State.

I think that four years of Donald Trump at the helm will produce results similar to Trump University’s or Trump steaks’, and that electing Donald Trump as a Republican will inevitably result in giving the radical democrat party a “One-Free-Presidency” coupon to be cashed for absolutely anyone.

Beyond these practical considerations, I think that we have a duty as citizens to respect our country and our institutions and to support for the chief magistracy only, in the words of John Adams’ prayer, “wise and honest men.”

It may be, this year, as in 2008 and other disastrous years, that Fate is against us. There is nothing we can do to win. We may not be able to command success, but we can, at least, conduct ourselves, and choose, in such a way as to deserve it.

John Hawkins will never vote for Donald Trump.

Donald J. Trump is like a grown up version of King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones.” He is like a mean-spirited parody of a Republican on “Saturday Night Live” come to life. Donald J. Trump is a walking, talking Internet meme who seems to be spouting off shallow slogans half the time and lying the other half. He’s also a creepy, thin skinned authoritarian who has made it clear he cares nothing about free speech for anyone but himself and has publicly encouraged political violence at his rallies. Moreover, aside from some tough talk about immigration, trade and unworkable, over-the-top attacks on Muslims, his entire campaign has been centered on mean tweets, third grade insults and campaign promises that sometimes change from day-to-day or even from hour-to-hour. It’s difficult to know what Trump would really do if he were in power. His real views could range anywhere from liberal to conservative to South American dictator on just about any issue. So, if you’re a conservative who believes in God, country and the Constitution, how do you fall in line behind someone like that?

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Robert Laird.

“Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”