Think about this: You enter a contest with 16 other people, win by the rules, agree with the others to stand by the winner — and find out after the contest is over that others are trying to challenge your claim.
They don’t dispute that you won, or that the win was legal. They simply don’t like it that you are the winner, so they want to toy with the rules. That’s how the Trump people see the ongoing effort to unbind the delegates, and you can’t say that they don’t have a point.
But then on the other hand, you could see things like this: You go to a car lot, pick out a car that’s not great but that seems to be running, buy it, drive it home and find in the morning the darn thing won’t start. Or, if it starts, it slips into reverse. The steering’s not great, and the brakes don’t work either.
You bought a car; it’s defective. You can’t drive it. This, in effect, has been the experience of the Republican Party since it drove Donald Trump off the lot on that morning in May when he seemed on the road to 1,237-plus delegates, amid the expectation and promise that beginning right then he would settle down and start to behave like an actual candidate.
He would raise money, develop a ground game, tone down the insults, bring the party together and start to turn into a real politician, who could like, you know, win a campaign.
The problem is that this isn’t what happened. Instead, there were still more attacks on his fellow Republicans, more and more proof of political ignorance, “Mexican judges,” stars-that-aren’t-really-that-much-of-David, and an endless succession of unhinged rants.
In a “unity” session with members of Congress, he picked fights with Sens. Flake, Kirk and Sasse, among others, and even threatened that he might campaign against them.
The party is now more divided than ever, numerous people refuse to endorse him, he is trailing in polls against Hillary Clinton, trailing in states that have been red for decades, losing support among fellow Republicans.
He’s the one Republican in the entire country who makes Hillary Clinton look good. Last week, when she took a near-fatal blow from FBI head James Comey, Trump managed to bury the story beneath his own tirade, which went on for 44 minutes and left millions of viewers aghast.
The Constitution of the United States, as they say, isn’t a suicide pact. Nor are the by-rules of the Republican Party, which don’t have to be broken, just tweaked.
Let us remember that this process was set up for one purpose — to produce a nominee who could represent most of the party, who would work to build up the party on all of its levels, define the party in the right sort of way to the public in general, and had a fairly good chance to win, and then govern.
If Trump were your car, you’d take him back to the lot for an exchange or a refund. Do the same thing in Cleveland next week.
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.”
