Sometime between Thursday, June 1, and Sunday, June 5, the political winds appeared to shift drastically, owing to three major things. First, Hillary Clinton hit her stride for the first time since she started, making her debut as Iron Lady 2.0, presenting herself as a world leader, as a commander-in-chief and as a Trump basher of the very first magnitude. She’s been lighting into the lad with what one might call relish, and outing our grandiose home-grown Il Duce as the truculent gas bag he is.
Second, said gas bag unloaded (again) on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is trying the case of Trump University, the con game Trump ran for gullible people, saying that since Curiel was ‘Mexican’ (he was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants) he could not judge him fairly at all.
And third, the realization started to dawn on Republicans for the first time that Trump is a loser, and not at all the tornado he seemed when he swept the Acela corridor five weeks ago, killed off Ted Cruz in Indiana, sailed to the magical number of 1,237, and seemed to have the party and world at his feet.
Since then, he’s been busy depleting resources, insulting allies, and beating off people who might be trying to come to his aid. “He’s wasted time, proved to be a sore winner, and veered sharply off-message,” Dan Balz wrote on Sunday, noting his spate of attacks on other Republicans, and the fact that he spends time in California, which he is not going to carry, instead of in states where he might have a chance. Overnight, Republicans seem to have switched from a half-hearted attempt to get Trump elected to an attempt to try to survive him, to do what they could to limit the damage, and try to regroup later on.
Ever since Thursday, signs of this shifting seem to be sited both thick and fast on the ground. “Those backers might … be what I like to call SINOs, Supporters In Name Only,” Chuck Todd said on “Meet the Press” Sunday. On “Face the Nation,” Susan Page said it differently, and at a little more length: “One thing we’re seeing is a battle for the post-Trump GOP … you see them come out and say … ‘I’m going to vote for him. … But I have a totally different vision of all these issues: … immigration … the Mexican judge … the Muslim ban,’ presenting an ‘alternative vision of the Republican Party to offer once the election is over … on the assumption that Trump is going to lose.” Trump may well lose, but whether the party can sustain this approach is a whole other matter. Experience seems to say not.
So what do you do if voters select a candidate who in the campaign had seemed somewhat eccentric, but who after winning starts acting peculiar, and gets more and more odd every day?
The end to the primary race was supposed to help Trump, who would then settle down and become presidential, reach out to old foes and make allies of them, in the time-honored manner of Kennedy and Johnson, Reagan and the elder George Bush. But these people were sane, which tends to help matters, while Trump found it more diverting to hit Cruz again, and make an enemy out of Susana Martinez, whose help he might need one day. If this continues, it would not hurt Republicans to look up the rules for unbinding delegates before going to Cleveland. This isn’t routine, but this year isn’t, either. Who knows what the next days may bring?
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.”
