Say what you will about Trump and his friends, his weird Twitter fans and his fan-base of racists. They have finally done what every one else had seemed to consider the next to impossible: They have made the establishment, the favorite whipping boy even of some of its members, manage to look pretty good.
Never in its wildest dreams (assuming an “establishment” has them) could it have inflicted in 10 or more decades the amount of damage to the party, the country and what was once seem as a normative code of public civility what Trump has managed to create in 10 months.
If the case that the “outsiders” make against the establishment is that its members aren’t competent, are frequently hypocrites and that they deliver the opposite of what they had promised, Trump and his allies surpass them easily.
He and his friends have made Hillary Clinton an acceptable option to people who hate her, turned an election that Republicans were favored to win into one they seem likely to lose in a blowout and caused fissures and ruptures inside the Republican Party that may take a great many seasons to heal.
On the hypocrisy level, backers of Trump have truly outdone themselves, breaking the rules that they once set for others with never a rueful look back. Civility czars who built their careers as legions of decency, blasting the Left for each breech of decorum, watched without saying one word against him as Trump dragged the national discourse down to historic new lows.
Were they appalled by celebrities’ lapses of judgment? Trump’s breeches of etiquette were his signature feature. Did they shriek when the Starr Report made Bill Clinton’s genitals a pertinent part of the national dialogue? Trump praised the condition of his in a presidential debate on national television, with nary a peep from his fans.
And then there are the most ideologically pure of the movement conservatives, on the guard always for lapses from dogma, scourging John McCain and Mitt Romney for their short-comings, ready to primary RINOs at the drop of a hat.
If only, they wailed, they could find their ideal, with conservative cred and an Ivy League lustre, they would … drop him in the blink of an eye (as they did to Ted Cruz) for an utter vulgarian who supported the Clintons, supported abortion, didn’t like tax cuts, was more than OK with expansions of government and thought national healthcare was fine.
Was it in spite of, or because of, the utter vulgarity? Sometimes it’s better not to know.
And then there’s the case for the can-do outsider —someone who, as opposed to establishment blunderers, knows how to get something done. Trump did plow his way through the Republican primaries, with the help of a fractured and fratricidal collection of candidates. But since, then his campaign has been an accident waiting to happen, which in some ways it already has.
His campaign doesn’t exist on the organizing or fundraising levels, he’s been losing support among putative backers (one senator actually withdrew his endorsement) and he talks of winning Pennsylvania, New York and California while his polling in Utah and Kansas deflates.
“In the dozen or so states most likely to determine the election, Trump has done little to build a campaign operation,” the AP has reported. “At the same time, he’s created new problems in Florida, Colorado and Nevada, with comments Republican leaders decry.”
If you want a chauffeur to drive your car backwards, you can’t look for more than this common-sense genius, breaking new ground in destructive creation, while making the Bushes and Clintons look good.
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.”
