At the core of Donald Trump’s political success this year are the grievances of a sizable and now vocal block of disaffected voters, many of them white and working-class, and a Republican Party that has sought and benefited from their support while giving them almost nothing tangible in return.
The New York businessman’s position as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has plunged the party into a contentious debate and raised some of the most troubling questions about its future since the Watergate scandal in 1974 or Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat a decade earlier.
Campaigning on Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who is seeking to deny Trump the nomination, put the threat in apocalyptic terms. If Trump becomes the nominee, he said, “He will split the Republican Party and it will be the end of the modern conservative movement.”
Trump and so-called Trumpism represent an amalgam of long-festering economic, cultural and racial dissatisfaction among a swath of left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological pigeonholes of red and blue, right and left.
Obama and Ryan, Long at Odds, Said to Meet as Soon as Next Week
Margaret Talev
Angela Greiling Keane
January 22, 2016 — 3:02 PM EST
President Barack Obama and House Speaker Paul Ryan may sit down together at the White House for a long-anticipated meeting as soon as next week, a person familiar with their plans said.
The blizzard bearing down on Washington may force them to postpone if the capital remains shut down at the start of next week.
The two men haven’t spent significant time together since Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, was sworn in as speaker in October. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said last week that the president hoped that they would have a chance to talk face-to-face “relatively soon.” The person who said the meeting may happen next week asked for anonymity because the timing hasn’t been settled.
It wasn’t clear whether other congressional leaders would take part. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Doug Andres, a spokesman for Ryan, said that “nothing is currently scheduled.” Jen Friedman, deputy White House press secretary, declined to comment.
Obama, 54, and Ryan, 45, have enough in common personally and in some policy areas for the foundation of a relationship, if either of them desired one. They also have enough accrued tension to dissuade either from bothering in Obama’s final year in office.
This weekend was an inflection point in the Republican presidential race — a moment in which some significant part of the GOP establishment came out of denial and realized Donald Trump might well become their party’s nominee.
“The Republican establishment, for the first time, is saying, off the record, this guy can win,” noted Joe Scarborough on MSNBC Monday morning. “I’ve heard that from everybody. I don’t hear anybody saying he can’t win the nomination anymore.”
That doesn’t mean Republicans have made their peace with a Trump victory. On the contrary — some are preparing to do whatever it takes to bring him down. Which could lead to an extraordinary scenario in which GOP stalwarts go to war to destroy their own party’s likely nominee.
Poll: Trump Hits Highest Mark Yet, But Carson Is Close Behind
by CARRIE DANN
Real estate mogul Donald Trump remains the front-runner in the Republican presidential field, while former neurosurgeon Ben Carson holds a close second place, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows.
With the backing of 25 percent of Republican primary voters, Trump is at his highest level of support in the poll since entering the 2016 race. Carson now gets the support of 22 percent of Republican voters, remaining within the margin of error of his first-place rival. Last month, 21 percent of GOP primary voters said Trump was their first choice for the party’s nomination, while 20 percent picked Carson.
“Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably,” the great Homer Simpson once observed. “The lesson is: never try.”
That’s probably how the so-called “smart set” within the Republican Party feels these days. Ever since Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat—a loss that caught everyone off guard except for people who followed public opinion polls or read a newspaper—we Republicans were promised a tough, new approach to the presidential primary process.
No longer would the “non-serious candidates”—a term the bigwigs applied to people like Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain—be permitted to dominate the news cycles. This time the GOP would be a well-oiled machine, with a handful of candidates who quickly and quietly made way for the coronation of King Bush the Third.
And yet here we are.
The first GOP debate, televised on August 6 on Fox News, is already a total backfire for the establishment. Based on the latest polls, it will likely include every single one of the candidates the Republican elite despises: Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz—and banish to the losers’ consolation round exactly the types of candidates the establishment presumably wants to showcase: a female business leader, an Indian-American son of immigrants and the consensus-building governor of the crucial electoral state of Ohio.
The controlled, somber and oh-so-civilized process that the GOP promised its donors is now the biggest free-for-all in American political history. The blame for this, of course, is all being thrown in one direction.
