“Drift Toward Trump” ran a RealClearPolitics headline in the hours after the unusually calm debate Thursday, during which Donald Trump failed to reference his genitals for a record two hours, and hopes held by some that he could be “normalized” as an acceptable, plausible, national figure held sway.
Twenty-four hours later, these were all in the dumpster that Trump has made of this primary season, due to the following things: Numerous instances of violence committed by Trump people against numerous bystanders and journalists; violence committed by organized leftists at a Trump rally that forced its cancellation; and threats made by Trump of even more violence on the Sunday talk shows on March 13. In the short term — the March 15 primaries — this may work to his benefit, as the attacks on him will allow him to say he’s a victim. And it grants him even more non-stop, round-the-clock coverage, putting a damper on all other issues, and drowning out anything that his opponents might find themselves trying to say.
But in the long term it has ended the talk that he will ever be normalized, and the chance he can run with a unified party behind him. He can go to a brokered convention, which will give him little, and then run with a third party; or he can eke out a plurality win before the convention, and have a third party rise up against him. Chaos will always thrill some on the fringe, but it’s always a loser in national politics, and the recent events that were heavy on anger — the l964 Goldwater convention, the 1968 Democratic convention, and the George Wallace run in 1972 — all came to some fairly bad ends.
On Thursday night, Trump had the chance to transition to “normal,” but in the days after he showed he had no idea whatsoever as to what the word “normal” might mean. “Meet The Press” put together a loop of his comments endorsing the mayhem recently wreaked by his fans: “He was swinging, he was hitting people, and the audience hit back … I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you … if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Just knock the hell.” Things overheard at recent Trump rallies include” “Go back to Africa,” “Go back to Auschwitz,” “Kill him!” and “Die.” Picture yourself trying to sell this to your usual group of Republican voters, and you get some sense of the problem facing the drifters. Don’t worry about how this might break the party. The party is broken as is.
“Will the stop Trump movement ever fizzle?'”Chuck Todd asked Hugh Hewitt on Sunday. “I don’t think so,” Hewitt told him. “I think the party would split. Sen. Ben Sasse has pretty much committed. I turn to Professor Kearns [Doris Kearns Goodwin] to talk about 1912,” citing the last year the Republicans splintered. Goodwin concurred that the stories were similar. “‘We want a third party … we have to create this new Republican party,”‘ she said, to express what she thinks we are thinking.
We need a new party to protect the best of the old, the people elected in 2010 and later — Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, Kelly Ayotte and the others — who could not manage to live through a Trump-like contagion, and will need to rebuild when this war is over. As Hewitt said, “It’s a divorce, and it’s final.” Now let the battle begin.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
