What are the odds that Donald Trump uses the convention at Cleveland to dump the Republican Party? Not all that low. Since winning the magical number of 1237, his war with the party that (sort of) contains him has surpassed the contest each has with Hillary Clinton in drama, convulsions and angst. He has passed up no chance to embarrass, confound and appall it, and it has responded by gagging, grimacing and pulling away.
Govs. Baker, Hogan. and Haslam have refused to endorse him. Sen. Mark Kirk has withdrawn his endorsement. The governor of Michigan and four of nine congressmen have refused to endorse him. Sen. John Cornyn has refused to discuss him until the election is over, and numerous unhappy members of Congress have been reduced to repeating that while they endorse him, they deplore, despise and disagree with every last word he has said. If they seem more and more willing to cast him adrift, he has been busy returning the favor. “Be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don’t talk,” he told them on Wednesday. “We have to … stick together or let me just do it … I’m going to do very well. … A lot of people thought I should do that anyway, but I’ll just do it very nicely by myself.”
An added concern is the obvious factor that he’s not “doing nicely” at all. In the past month and the past weeks in particular, he’s gone into a tailspin, going from a virtual tie with the not-all-that-popular Hillary Clinton to between 6 to 12 points behind her, a remarkable feat considering that this came after he clinched his nomination, and before she clinched hers; and after a blood-curdling terror attack in this country, which everyone before had imagined was certain to play to his strength. “How often does a presumptive nominee become less popular after clinching?” the blog Hot Air posted on Friday, noting that the terror attack ought to have been a “gold mine” for him. Trump is at record lows for a nominee at this stage of the race, he hasn’t seen 40 percent in a month, he hit 32 percent in one recent survey, and was reduced to bragging that he was “only” four points behind in one poll. But what can he run on, if he isn’t “WINNING!” which he still thinks he’s doing. But by now, he looks a lot more like a ‘LOSER!’ the tag he once pinned on so many people. Any day now, he’s going to choke like a dog.
So much for the plans for a peaceful convention, the rationale given by so many people for voting to close down the contest in May. (That worked out well, didn’t it? Look how serene things are now.) If Trump contrives to slip into the high 20s, look for more people to throw in with the delegates who are now launching a movement to unbind their fellows, in an effort to keep him from dragging the House and the Senate down with him in the case of his likely defeat. In that case, a divorce court might be in the offing, touched off by reports as of late Monday morning that Team Trump is imploding of its own volition, without an assist from outside. In that case, could the marriage be over before we reach Cleveland? By the time we get there, the delegates, unbound and otherwise, might find themselves back at Square One.
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.”
