An “Intervention” Is Highly Unlikely
Published at 08:13 on 4 August 2016
The Guardian is arguing that the GOP leadership might intervene against Donald Trump. Wishful thinking.
First, history argues against it. Trump causes conservatives to be jittery because he’s not a conservative. He’s a fascist. This observation is not my own leftist hyperbole at play; a number of conservatives have observed this. However, that’s happened before. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and so on caused conservatives to be jittery in their respective countries, and some prominent conservatives militantly opposed fascism (Hitler’s attempted assassin was a conservative), but the key word is some. The overall pattern was one of uneasy alliance, under the (inevitably incorrect) assumption that the fascist would be controllable once he got power and thus a useful vehicle for the Right to get power.
Second, everything indicates this is the present pattern. He’s won the primary and been coronated at his party’s convention. Far more Republicans have lined up behind Trump in uneasy support than have come out against him. The number of conservative voices raised against Trump will probably increase as the weeks pass, but a wholesale reversal of the general trend is unlikely.
Trump’s gaffes are irrelevant to his base. In regards to that base, Trump was spot-on when he quipped last January:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
Trump’s base isn’t enough to elect him. Look at the primary results: The number of Republican votes against Trump is greater than the number for him. Trump’s negatives are enormous; he will manage to get the support of his base plus a slowly dwindling number of jittery traditional conservatives, but that’s nowhere near enough to win in November.
These trends all could theoretically reverse themselves, but I doubt it. At this stage, Trump really seems doomed. Michael Moore’s fear probably won’t come to pass.