FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, but his stinging verbal indictment could have gifted Donald Trump an anti-Clinton news cycle that lasted at least a week and maybe until the Republican convention.
Naturally, instead of receiving this gift Trump touched off a news cycle about the virtues of Saddam Hussein. Things have only deteriorated from there.
The general election against Clinton is not the only front on which Trump may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He has reinvigorated “NeverTrump” as he has managed to do nearly every time his intraparty detractors appear to have run out of options.
A Wall Street Journal whip count estimated Wednesday that while more than 1,500 delegates are presumed bound to Trump on the first ballot (more than enough to win the nomination) fewer than 900 are “personally loyal” to him and 680 are opposed.
Trump’s campaign disputes these numbers. Paul Manafort is a veteran of Gerald Ford’s win at the 1976 contested Republican convention and their projection they would exceed 1,400 delegates was right while the anti-Trumpers saying this was impossible were spectacularly wrong.
Glancing at the Journal’s count and then looking at the Star of David/”Frozen“ headlines, it’s hard to blame anti-Trump Republicans for trying. Yet there is more at stake in a convention coup than whether the party nominates a flawed candidate even for an office as important as the presidency of the United States.
Trump isn’t the presumptive Republican nominee because Reince Priebus didn’t eat his Wheaties or party leaders in Washington were suddenly mesmerized by alt-right Internet memes. The party didn’t “acquiesce” to Trump like Jeb Bush being too polite to interrupt him at a debate. He is the presumptive nominee because enough voters chose him.
The reality TV star won the popular vote by a lot, not by a little. He won 38 states, not a handful. He exceeded the 1,237-delegate threshold his primary opponents insisted he absolutely must reach, correctly based on the rules everyone agreed were in effect, and all his primary opponents ended their presidential campaigns.
No, Trump didn’t win a supermajority. Neither did Mitt Romney or John McCain. Bill Clinton served two terms as president of the United States despite never winning more than a plurality of the popular vote.
Any other candidate Republicans could nominate would have either received a smaller percentage of the vote than Trump did or no votes at all. When it still looked possible that Ted Cruz would deny Trump a majority of delegates, we were dutifully reminded that the popular vote didn’t matter at all, only the rules for accumulating delegates.
GOP primary voters and caucus-goers represent only a small percentage of registered Republicans nationwide? Convention delegates represent an infinitesimal percentage. The Republican congressional majority was elected by a lower-turnout electorate than the Democratic president. We don’t have mandatory voting in this country.
For forty years, the general assumption has been that the role of delegates at the major party conventions was similar to the role of electors in the Electoral College. The rules are, of course, more complicated and easier to change. Still, unbound delegates were just marginally more likely to effect a complete reversal of the state-by-state votes than faithless electors and only then in extremely close races like Ford versus Ronald Reagan or Clinton versus Barack Obama.
Unlike the Electoral College, these rules can be changed comparatively easily at the conventions every four years. Should they be changed midstream, after millions of party members have participated in a process they were told mattered, especially when it is obvious they are being changed because the led to the wrong outcome?
I am deeply aware of all Trump’s specific flaws that make many Republicans say yes. Most any other presumptive nominee would likely be able to capitalize on Clinton’s travails. But would they be able to do so in climate where millions of Republicans believed the nomination had been stolen from their preferred candidate?
“One can disavow Trump,” writes The Atlantic’s David Frum. “But if one disavows Trump’s voters, one has effectively surrendered any hope of a center-right alternative in national politics.” For a political party that has won the presidential popular vote only once since 1988, such voters do not grow on trees.
Trump is himself a product of a crisis of legitimacy, of a party where a substantial minority and perhaps even a plurality of voters don’t trust their leaders or elites of any kind. Essentially overturning their primary votes the first time they successfully vote against those party leaders is more likely to further erode that legitimacy than restore it.
Why shouldn’t conservatives fear that the party establishment might one day take the nomination away from Ted Cruz? Or moderates worry that a future Mitt Romney will see his primary wins wiped out by Tea Party delegates capturing rules committee perches? Why not anti-Romney or anti-Cruz conscience clauses for delegates?
Nostalgia for the smoke-filled room in America’s small-d democratic political culture seems as misplaced as the Trump voter’s dream that we are just a 45 percent tariff away from the 1950s economy.
Republicans can hope no one will ever again have Trump’s fame or fortune, or that the presidential field will never again be fractured enough for someone to pull of what he has done, or that our non-parliamentary system will forever protect a vaguely center-right GOP from the far-right alternatives that have proliferated elsewhere in the Western world.
None of this seems like an especially good way to bet.
If Saddam Hussein is to be invoked at all, the lesson isn’t that we should mourn the good old days of his brutal regime. It is that political upheavals should be carefully thought through to anticipate unintended consequences, mindful that even very bad things can always get worse.
