Yes, the stupidest thing ever done by a really smart person was Ted Cruz’s strategy for 2013, when he really believed he could become president in 2016 by trying on purpose to shatter his party, pitting the far-right against the somewhat-right center, threatening the career prospects of his colleagues in Congress by making them vote on things against their own interests, and driving them into frenzies of rage. Yes, those colleagues were right to despise him. “Republican regulars, you see, actually hate Ted,” as Carl Cannon informs us. “They have much more antipathy for him than for Hillary. They don’t want to hear Cruz’s voice again when this campaign is over,” much less to see him as president. Or as John Boehner put it, “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
But no, they should have sucked it up and gone in with him anyhow, because a) he’s shown signs of seeming to have understood he was wrong, and of trying to build a diverse coalition, and b) he is all that stands between them and an electoral failure of massive proportions that could destroy almost all of the undercard ticket, and tilt the Supreme Court to the left for the next generation.
Cruz’s non-friends and colleagues can console themselves with the probability that he will most likely lose (though not quite as badly as Trump would) and perhaps in the aftermath be a little more humble, while saving the Senate and House and sparing them the embarrassment of a Trump nomination. Holding a grudge can be fun for a while, but there does come a time to grow up.
Yes, George Will is right when he says that should Trump be nominated, the job of conservatives will be to keep him from office (though making him lose 50 states may seem melodramatic) and then to work to make certain that Hillary Clinton serves no more than one single term. Yes, “quislings” (Will’s word) is the proper description of the Republican stalwarts engaged in an act of preemptive surrender before a need appeared evident. And “feeble” is the word for the reasons they gave to the Washington Post for this quiescent behavior: “Fatigue is probably the perfect description of what people are feeling,” “They do not want to see a convention that explodes into … chaos,” “People just want this to be over with.” “They want the fighting to stop … There’s an anxiety setting in about the process, and that’s what people are tired of. They just want it done.”
And will this “just do it?” It doesn’t seem that it will. On May 1, the Hill described the angst sweeping the Pat Toomey campaign in Pennsylvania, as the proto-conservative battles to hang on to his Senate seat. “Having Trump at the top of the ticket … opens a whole new set of problems. Trump has high disapproval ratings with the national electorate, and with women in particular. Toomey will have to figure out how to deal with that reality on the campaign trail.” It doesn’t seem Toomey, along with Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Mark Kirk, who also have to navigate the shoals of purple state politics, will feel the serenity the GOP turncoats appear to be hoping for. Days earlier, the site listed 65 GOP stalwarts who vowed to fight on.
The chaos rises from Trump, not the process, and by embracing him they insure it continues. The fighting won’t stop. It will not be over. The anxiety, far from abating, will only continue to grow.
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.”
