Republican Party

Although I’ve developed something of a reputation as a Trump booster (I can’t imagine why), I’ve always been aware of the potential difficulties actually winning the nomination that Ross Douthat identifies. Because of his extraordinarily low level of support from party regulars, if Trump doesn’t actually get an outright majority of the delegates, enabling him to win on the first ballot, it’s difficult to see him winning additional support on a second, third or later ballot.

Building on the worst two week-period of his campaign, Donald Trump took to Twitter overnight to implore his Tennessean supporters to rise up, raging that the state’s Republican Party was "trying to steal" his delegates and urging them to crash a party meeting on Saturday morning to stop them - "We won the votes. They are trying to steal them. I can’t believe I am writing this.

I agree with Alan Jacobs and Michael Brendan Dougherty that the GOP will be remarkably unchanged by having Trump as its nominee. If there is one rule that seems to govern the modern Republican Party, it is that its leaders learn little or nothing from disaster and reliably draw the wrong conclusions from their defeats. We saw that in the wake of the 2012 election, when party leaders and donors concluded that the only significant fix needed for the party’s problems was to embrace immigration legislation opposed by most Republicans.

In a strong column, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “there are reasons to believe this moment is unsustainable and the basic status quo of the Republican Party will eventually emerge triumphant.”

A very angry reader writes (I’ve slightly edited for clarity and civility):

I haven’t made any secret about the fact that, at times, I’ve found your rhetoric concerning the “GOP elite” a bit over the top.

But then I read this piece on NRO’s The Corner by Jim Geraghty.Heaven knows I am not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form, but get a load of this: