Why, Exactly, Is Trump Driving Conservatives So Crazy?
By Jonathan Chait
People get worked up during presidential campaigns. But the rise of Donald Trump has provoked conservative intellectuals to express their dismay in existential tones. Conservative writers have used terms like unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster to describe a Trump nomination and have declared that they are “fighting for our movement’s existence.” Marco Rubio has made this kind of talk the lingua franca of his once relentlessly chummy campaign, warning that the Republican Party “would split apart” were Trump to prevail. Trump’s opponents have planned for the kinds of dire, schismatic responses not seen in generations of American presidential politics: using the party’s summer convention, normally a scripted infomercial, to wrest the nomination from him. Or even bolting the GOP to start a third party.
The fear inspired by Trump is not merely that he would blow the party’s chances of winning the presidency (though he probably would), or even that he would saddle it with long-term damage among the growing Latino bloc (though he would do that as well). It is that Trump would release the conservative movement’s policy hammerlock on the Republican Party.
The ideological stakes in a fight between conservatives and Trump can be difficult for outsiders to fathom. After all, Trump endorsed Mitt Romney, loathes President Obama, favors a gigantic tax cut, denies global warming, issues ritual praise for Ronald Reagan, and so on. But one place to start — a mystery that reveals a clue — is a recent report in the Times describing frantic efforts to organize an intraparty opposition to Trump. At one meeting, advisers to the Koch brothers, who control a political organization much larger than the actual Republican Party, “characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care.”
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