For a long time, the story Republicans told themselves about Donald Trump was that he could “normalize,” that once he had won the nomination he would calm down and be rational, stabilize his own team, organize his own structure and start to run against Democrats, instead of those in his own party. Wrong. He launched endless tirades against other Republicans, rallied in states that were not in contention, fired one aide accused of shoving a female reporter, hired a new one with ties to corrupt foreign powers; and dropped him for the head of a race-baiting website, once accused of abusing his wife.
They said the main thing was to get through the convention without much dissension, and after that things would settle. But the Trump Exposition was less than successful, and a week later their new and self-disciplined candidate had launched his assault on the Khans. Now they say they should run against Hillary Clinton and the Court she’d appoint as the way to lift themselves out of the hole into which Trump has dumped them. But there’s every sign that this will fail, too.
People have known Hillary Clinton for twenty-four years now, and have come to appraise her quite well. They know she is paranoid on Nixonian levels, avaricious and grasping, given to bouts of preventive protection that she often bends truth to conceal. Running against a Bush, Cruz or Rubio, this would be more than enough to deep-six her, but running against the Magnificent Mogul, it is barely a blip on the screen.
Against his excesses, her pressing of limits comes off as restraint and discretion: If she is corrupt, but within legal limits, then Trump knows no limits at all. He is, if not quite a thief, a wholesale exploiter of innocent people, a liar on a scale that she never thought possible, a sadist, a sociopath, a profound ignoramus on a number of issues, a thug who likes thugs, a dictator who likes other dictators, and someone into whose small, stubby fingers the nuclear football should never be placed. People perceive this, which has seeped into their assessments, which now appear graven in stone: Her favorability/unfavorability numbers are 42/53; his 33/62; a fairly large difference. As Matt Continetti has put it, “To say that both Trump and Hillary Clinton are unpopular masks the extent to which Donald Trump is despised.”
Conservatives seem to be in denial about this, and also the extent to which the Court issue resonates, outside of each party’s own core. Social issues are usually fought for far more intensely than others, but they are important to only a small group of people, that is outside of the public’s mainstream. Those who care are usually among each party’s most loyal voters, and swing voters are most often moved by different concerns.
In elections in which results seem to swing wildly — 1992-94, 2004-2006, and the Obama elections of 2008-2010 and 2012-2014 — people were moved by economic and war-and-peace issues, and seemed wholly indifferent to the fact that they were moving large parts of the government from pro-choice to pro-life (or vice-versa) hands. On social issues, the public seems to reject the extremes — the abortion planks of both parties are extremely unpopular — and ideological appeals to the cause of the progressive approach or small-government theory cut little ice with the general public, which cares more for results than the theories behind them. About Hillary and the Court, some Republicans seem to be in a bubble, influenced by thoughts of the people around them, but not of the public at large.
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.”
