John Feehery is a Washington lobbyist and former spokesman for the disgraced ex-speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. Last week, Feehery explained to the Atlantic’s Molly Ball why he’s reconciled to accepting Donald Trump as the nominee of his party:
Idiotic and racist comments, a buffoon and opportunist—those are the words of a Trump supporter. But not to worry. Trump is not “a strategic threat to the future of the republic.”
Needless to say, there’s no reason to believe most D.C. lobbyists would recognize such a threat if it strolled into their well-appointed offices and plopped itself down on one of their well-upholstered settees. In this respect, the Republican establishment is like most establishments. They were built once upon a time by hardy and capable souls. But the successors have gone soft, and now the establishment is staffed by more pliable types, living off the political capital of their forebears, with a deeply ingrained instinct to accommodate those who threaten from without and to collaborate with the buffoons and opportunists who have established beachheads within.
Donald Trump has established such a beachhead, an impressive and even intimidating one. Donald Trump has exposed the decadence of a Republican party that many of us had thought, or at least hoped, was renewing and reinvigorating itself. Donald Trump has brought to light the rot of an ideological movement that many of us had thought was alive and reasonably well. Donald Trump has revealed, to some degree, the degradation of a public for whom many of us had higher hopes and expectations.
Trump is a master at sensing and exploiting decay. His showmanship impresses, his bullying intimidates, his bravado seems bracing. But while decadence may explain a demagogue’s success, it is no excuse for yielding.
We at The Weekly Standard are certainly not immune to its appeal. But at key moments, the votaries of freedom must be able to resist the temptations of decadence. They must gather their forces and fight.
For now, that means fighting to deny a “buffoon and opportunist” who makes “idiotic and racist” comments the nomination of the Republican party. Trump has so far won about 38 percent of the votes cast in Republican primaries and caucuses, winning 47.5 percent of the delegates chosen thus far. He’s clearly in the lead. He’s the likely nominee. But bowing to the likely as if it were inevitable is surely a marker of decadence. The thing to do instead is to contest the more than 20 states and territories yet to cast their ballots, and to rally behind Ted Cruz—an intelligent constitutional conservative who would have a steady hand as commander in chief—as the remaining viable alternative.
If it comes to it, there is also a Track Two, and serious people are preparing for that as well, as they should. That preparation involves finding a respectable and respected figure who might run as an Independent Republican and helping him or her get on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Such a candidate would follow in the footsteps of Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut in 2006 and Lisa Murkowski in Alaska in 2010, both of whom ran as independents, won, and then rejoined the parties from which they had spent a few months apart.
We believe there are persuasive answers to the arguments against such an independent effort. Those arguments range from earnest concern that such an effort would simply be futile (it would be difficult but not impossible), to worry that it would simply help Hillary Clinton (what would most help Hillary Clinton is Donald Trump as the GOP nominee), to the suggestion that it would hurt the Republican party (to the contrary, it would help both down-ballot in this election and for the future).
But we are not at this juncture yet. With 40 percent of the delegates yet to be selected, there is time to save the Republican party from within. Only if that effort fails would extraordinary measures be required.
The Republican party has its flaws and the conservative movement its limitations. The nation could go on without them. It went on before them. But it’s not as if the moment calls for extraordinary sacrifices in this battle to save a decent party and a worthwhile movement. It requires no great courage to stand up to the accusation from faux populists that we are being insufficiently attentive to the alleged will of the people and from faux realists that we are stubbornly refusing to adapt to the apparent mood of the day. We cheerfully reject their admonitions. We wear their scorn as a badge of honor.
