If there has been one big loser in the Republican primary season (aside from Jeb Bush) it has most certainly been the conventional wisdom, which, in its predictions about his extinction, has been wrong about Donald Trump every time. Time and time over, it has said he was sliding; and time after time it’s been wrong.
How strange is it that now, just as the conventional wisdom turns and declares him the winner (two weeks before any votes have been counted), it seems this Titanic may have hit its own iceberg, in the form of a force called Ted Cruz. Suddenly, the protest wing is at odds and divided, as the centermost wing has been from the beginning, leading to matched sets of knife fights and shifting affinities. “Will talk radio & the influential conservative outside groups join a campaign against Trump now that he’s turned on Cruz?” asked the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker last weekend. This is what remains to be seen.
No one backed both more than talk radio, which now seems especially torn. A hero to it since 2013 when he shut down the government, Ted Cruz is its genuine full-bore conservative, though Trump, who has never before been active in politics, has a special route of his own to its heart. This is his mouth, which he never stops running, and which never runs short of scathing invective to unload on their mutual foes. These are the Democrats, but even more the “establishment” wing of their party, a large and fast-shifting assortment of people which seems to include many old Tea Party members who have said or have done the wrong thing.
With his bombast, his rants and his media background, Trump seems more like a show host himself than your average candidate, and really resembles the shock-jock Don Imus, another odd-looking and orange-haired figure who specialized in trash-talking, spraying fire hose insults at numerous targets across party lines.
For this, Trump was adopted by much of talk radio despite his long record of liberal stances: It was only when he turned upon Cruz — as aggressive as he is in a literate manner — that they allowed themselves even to begin to notice that he was not a right winger at all. As Jim Geraghty noted, “a significant number of conservatives found Trump to be close to their pugnacious-style communicative ideal and Cruz to be close to their conservative policy ideal, and they don’t like watching the former beat up the latter on sketchy terms.” Or, as Mark Levin addressed Trump on Facebook: “‘Cut the crap … or you will lose lots and lots of conservatives … I am already hearing more and more people getting fed up with the low road you’re taking … you can leave that to Mitch McConnell and the New York Times.'”
At the debate on Thursday, Trump was booed for the first time by a conservative audience, and booed again Saturday at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention, and did not seem to enjoy the experience. There had always been questions surrounding Trump’s chances — most of them concerning the matter of how many Trump backers turn out to be voters — but this puts his campaign’s survival at risk. He had been attacked from the left and thrived on the experience, as it fed into his narrative as the teller-of-truths assailed by The System. But being attacked from the Right by a maverick and rebel cuts into his own base of fans and supporters, and is a trial he may not survive.
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.”
