Time: “Priebus was on vacation when he learned that Trump had declined to endorse Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and a close friend. The chairman had a frank message for the nominee, according to two Republican officials briefed on the call. Priebus told Trump that internal GOP polling suggested he was on track to lose the election. And if Trump didn’t turn around his campaign over the coming weeks, the Republican National Committee would consider redirecting party resources and machinery to House and Senate races.”
GOP’s Problems Will Only Get Worse After Election
Josh Kraushaar: “Republican leaders are choosing to pretend that these differences don’t exist, preferring to naively proclaim that Trump will embrace Paul Ryan’s conservative agenda if he’s elected president. That’s not what his voters signed up for. It’s why Trump’s rote espousal of more-traditional GOP positions, such as his economic speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Monday, will fall flat.”
“More likely, he will continue to use his outsize public platform to settle old scores. He might even try and launch his own television network to broadcast the populism that propelled his candidacy. He’s not going away, and neither are his core voters. The only question is whether more traditional GOP leaders have the charisma and credibility to bring Trump partisans into a new-look GOP, or whether his supporters will continue to stir up trouble within the party.”
Why Trump’s Floor Should Worry GOP Leaders
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What Really Holds Republicans Together
Jonathan Chait: “As careful studies of the tea-party movement revealed, what animated Republican voters was a fear of cultural change. Their anti-statism was confined to programs that seemed to benefit people other than themselves. Racial resentment and ethnocentrism, not passion for limited government, drove the conservative base.”
“Almost alone within the party, Trump understood this. That is why his comically long list of ideological deviations never hurt him. Trump’s racism demonstrated to most Republican voters that he stood with them on the essential divide that ordered their political world — one defined by identity more than ideology.”
“In the conservative elite’s imagination, the romanticized history of the tea-party revolt — a story of liberty-loving Americans rising up against Big Government excess — still prevails. It is a story that attributes the party’s extraordinary opposition to the president’s policies, not to the primal fears he aroused. Trump has not only disproven the conservative movement’s theory of its own base. He’s disproven its history of the Obama presidency.”
GOP Officials Exploring Options If Trump Quits
ABC News has learned “that senior party officials are so frustrated — and confused by Donald Trump’s erratic behavior — that they are exploring how to replace him on the ballot if he were to drop out.”
“First, Trump would have to voluntarily exit the race. Officials say there is no mechanism for forcing him to withdraw his nomination. (Trump has not given any indications that he no longer wants to be his party’s nominee). Then, it would be up to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee to choose a successor, though the process is complicated.”
“One Republican legal expert has advised party officials that, for practical reasons, Trump would have to drop out by early September to give the party enough time to choose his replacement and get the next nominee’s name on the ballot in enough states to win.”
The Go-Along Republicans
Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Ryan is doing his personal reputation and his party’s fortunes no favors with these evasions. The central issue in this election isn’t Mr. Trump’s ideas, such as they are. It’s his character, such as it is. The sin, in this case, is the sinner…. Mr. Ryan and other Go-Along Republicans should treat the Khan episode as their last best hope to preserve political reputations they have worked so hard to build.”
The GOP Convention Bombs
A new Gallup poll finds more Americans are less likely to vote for Donald Trump as a result of the Republican convention, 51% to 36%.
“Gallup has asked this question about Democratic and Republican national conventions since 1984…The 2016 Republican convention is the first after which a greater percentage of Americans have said they are ‘less likely’ rather than ‘more likely’ to vote for the party’s presidential nominee.”
The ‘Stupid Party’ Is Now Actually Stupid
Max Boot: “In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the ‘stupid party,’ that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.”
“Even if we can avoid the calamity of a Trump presidency, however, the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites. Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.”
Washington Post: Trump is first modern Republican to win nomination based on racial predjudice.
No Going Back to the Old Republican Party
New York Times: “It is almost as hard to imagine establishment Republicans, waiting in the wings in hopes that Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a fever waiting to break, finding a welcome among the delegates who made the party theirs in Cleveland, with cheers for Mr. Trump and other speakers who positioned themselves as opponents of the party’s status quo.”
“Whatever still exists of the moderate Republican wing — people like Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor; Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee; and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio — had virtually no presence at the convention this week. Their absence suggests that the convention was something of a breaking point: There may be no easy return to the Republican Party of the 1990s.”
North Carolina GOP Chair Leaves Delegates Behind
North Carolina Republican Chairman Robin Hayes, who flew a private plane to the Republican National Convention, told two fellow delegates who had supported Sen. Ted Cruz’s defiant speech that he wasn’t giving them a ride home, the McClatchy Tribune reports.
Said Hayes: “I think you need to ride the bus home.”
“The episode underscores the fact that after four days of drama — and one memorable speech — unity remains elusive for North Carolina Republicans.”
The GOP’s Descent Into Darkness
Brent Larkin: “History will recoil in horror over the Donald Trump freak show, a descent into darkness that represented a seminal moment in the breakup of a once-great political party.”
“From an organizational and logistical standpoint, Cleveland threw a perfect event. As host of the Republican National Convention, it was a city prepared to handle any problem. The list of people who deserve credit for that is a long one – with those involved with making downtown Cleveland the planet’s safest place worthy of special mention.”
“But while Cleveland’s preparation and execution earned rave reviews, the GOP’s part of the program was an utter failure, something that seemed drawn up by the faculty at Trump University.”
“Then, on Thursday night, things turned scary.”
The End of the Republican Party
David Brooks: “On the surface, this seems like a normal Republican convention. There are balloon drops, banal but peppy music from the mid-1970s and polite white people not dancing in their seats.”
“But this is not a normal convention. Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution.”
Matthew Continetti: “There are two Republican parties for the moment: the party led by Trump and the Republican Party in exile, the party of Kasich and Larry Hogan and Nikki Haley and Charlie Baker and Brian Sandoval and Mark Kirk and Ted Cruz. Election Day won’t just determine who will succeed President Obama. It will also determine the fate of Donald J. Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP.”
Which Path Will the GOP Take?
Rick Klein: “The central, huge personality of the 2016 campaign has set up a larger-than-life contest for the future of the Republican Party, with battle lines etched long before Donald Trump’s fate is decided. Wednesday night laid out the future paths of the GOP in dramatic, boisterous fashion. If Trump wins, Trumpism, along with its angry populism and strains of nativism, prevails. If he doesn’t, the party will have Mike Pence, whose answer to Trump was to join him, while offering a twist of earnestness and conservative commitment. On the opposite side, there’s John Kasich, rejecting it all by not even showing up at the Trump convention in his home state. There’s Paul Ryan, seeking a middle path though leaning in enough to speak twice – and even wield the gavel – at the convention.”
“And then there’s Ted Cruz, who laid down unmistakable markers with three words: ‘vote your conscience.’ Cruz anticipated a backlash, but he couldn’t have anticipated angry delegates yelling ‘Goldman Sachs’ at his wife. However this breaks, Cruz’s gambit figures to have the longest tail. He will have either sounded conservative alarms about Trump – so much so that his wife and father were threatened with physical harm – or he will have rained on a parade that’s marching to a drummer that’s very much not like him. Cruz’s play may prove to be the boldest, since it’s predicated on the assumption that the Trump phenomenon hasn’t changed the Republican Party in any fundamental way.”
An Unhinged Republican Party
Joe Klein: “I’m not sure I know how to write about this election anymore without seeming imprudent. I came into this year believing that our government was desperately in need of conservative reform and restraint. I came to those views watching the corroded incompetence of the Department of Veterans Affairs and also in the belief that Democrats had been too unwilling to look at and think clearly about the failures of the welfare state. I had some problems with Hillary Clinton too—from her support for the invasion of Libya to her foolish personal behavior, accepting big-money speeches from Goldman Sachs because, she said, she ‘wasn’t sure’ she was going to run for President. But I would never question her essential decency; indeed, she is one of the most thoughtful politicians I know. And the Democratic Party, for all its politically correct smugness and silliness, has never surrendered its soul to the extremists lurking on its left.”
“The Republican Party, by contrast, has become a national embarrassment. Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. This election will be the greatest test, in my lifetime, of the wisdom of our people and the strength of the democratic project.”
The GOP Establishment Is Now with Trump
New York Times: “They didn’t want him. They fought against him. Privately, they still resent him. But in the early minutes of the evening, as the party’s senior leadership executed a final quashing of lingering anti-Trump efforts on the convention floor, they presided over Mr. Trump’s installation as the duly chosen Republican Party presidential nominee. They did it because the rules obligated them to, but also because it was politically necessary. If Trump loses the White House, it is imperative to the party’s establishment that he do so convincingly, undeniably, without sabotage, so that they cannot be blamed for the defeat.”
The Demise of Roger Ailes and the Republican Party
Richard Wolffe: “We are witnessing the Great Unravelling of the Republican party. Its ideological intellectuals openly disdain and plot against the party’s nominee. Its elected officials are too busy to show up to their own party’s convention.”
“And now the conservative echo chamber itself is collapsing across the mainstream media it surely dominates.”
“The rapid demise of Roger Ailes at Fox News Channel is as seismic an event as Trump’s nomination. For Ailes ruled over a conservative media and political empire that stretched far beyond cable television.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.”
— George W. Bush, quoted by Politico, talking to Bush administration alumni about the state of the Republican party.
Lee Expresses Outrage Over GOP Rules Fight
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) declared that he had never seen anything like what transpired on the floor after Republican leaders bypassed a call for a full floor vote on the convention rules, Politico reports.
Said Lee: “I have never in all my life, certainly in six years in the United States Senate, prior to that as a lifelong Republican, never seen anything like this. There is no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure. There is no precedent for this in the rules of the Republican National Convention. We are now in uncharted territory. Somebody owes us an explanation. I have never seen the chair abandoned like that. They vacated the stage entirely.”
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