When we last checked in on Donald Trump’s campaign it was still a rolling embarrassment—a near-daily parade of pettiness, ignorance, and farce that was nonetheless en route to an ever-increasing delegate lead.
Trump had held an unusual QVC-style postelection press conference in which he displayed phony “Trump products” in order to pretend that his failed businesses hadn’t failed; he’d announced that he would serve as his own primary adviser on foreign policy “because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things”; and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was forcefully denying eyewitness claims that, after a Trump presser, he’d manhandled Michelle Fields, then a reporter for Breitbart News.
Trump’s media apologists, being apologists, had eagerly amplified the campaign’s deceptions, rationalized the absurdities, and downplayed the misconduct. They had abandoned their attempts to paint Trump as a conservative and begun instead to tout him as a transformational populist candidate who would defeat Hillary Clinton in a landslide.
There wasn’t much data to support these claims. But Trump boosters made up for that with enthusiasm and confidence. They disparaged as a de facto supporter of Hillary Clinton anyone who refused to support him.
Now those look like the good old days.
Over the last couple of weeks, Trump has crassly insulted the looks of Ted Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans” on her involvement in—well, we’re still not sure what. When Trump was pressed about his attacks on Cruz’s wife, he falsely claimed that the Cruz campaign had been behind an ad targeting his wife.
Trump sat for a lengthy editorial board meeting with the Washington Post that was a horrifying combination of ignorance and bravado. At one point, he dodged a question on ISIS and tactical nuclear weapons with a jarring change of subject, first to the brilliance of his campaign’s attacks on Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and moments later to the appearance of those interviewing him. Later in the interview, he reiterated his threats against the owners of the Chicago Cubs (for daring to criticize him) and suggested he might take out TV ads exposing their alleged mismanagement of the team.
He called for the United States to step back from its leadership role in NATO and suggested that it might be a good idea to encourage nuclear proliferation. Later, Trump called for punishing women who have abortions, only to reverse himself in the space of a few hours, complaining all the while that the media are treating him unfairly.
And then there’s Lewandowski, Trump’s top adviser, who was charged last week with misdemeanor battery. Lewandowski, who had previously insisted that he “never touched” Fields, turned himself into the Jupiter, Fla., police department after surveillance video of the incident made clear he had not only touched her but grabbed her by the arm and jerked her backwards. Trump defended Lewandowski, despite his having been caught in a lie, claiming at one point that the pen in Fields’s hand might have been a bomb.
This is the Republican frontrunner. Unless the trajectory of the race changes, this is the man who will be the Republican nominee. And perhaps not surprisingly, the latest numbers on his presidential prospects are even worse than the already-grim numbers from just a few weeks ago.
Trump “would start the general election campaign as the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times,” declared the Washington Post on March 31, detailing the results of the paper’s latest poll with ABC News. “Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.” Trump is “more disliked than any major-party nominee in the 32 years the survey has been tracking candidates.”
Last week, the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia put out its first general election projections for the presidential race. Hillary Clinton would win all eight crucial swing states—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. That portends a down-ballot disaster for Republicans. Seven of those eight states have Senate races this fall, five of them where Republicans currently hold the seat. The Cook Report last month changed its projections on ten House races, with each of the tweaks a reflection of better odds for the Democrats.
Could this change? As we’ve said before, anything is possible. This has been an extraordinarily volatile race in an extraordinarily volatile time. Hillary Clinton could be indicted. The economy could slide into recession. We could have more major terrorist attacks.
But absent some race-altering external event, Trump is likely to win the nomination and then lose disastrously to the Democratic nominee. The consequences for down-ballot Republicans could be dire and the damage to the conservative movement irreparable.
Given all this, we’d think more Republican officeholders and conservative leaders might be speaking out against Trump while he can still be stopped. But with a few notable exceptions—Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Representative Adam Kinziger of Illinois, and Maryland governor Larry Hogan chief among them—party leaders have held their fire.
It’s not too late to fight the good fight.
