How Will The Republican Establishment Get Rid Of Trump When They No Longer Need Him To Get People To Pay Attention To Their Primary Race?

If Trumpy falters, there's worse waiting in the wings

The GOP establishment is drooling over Jeb's tax plan to enrich the very rich,  and they are horrified by Trump's nod toward economic populism. Derailing Trump's campaign-- rather than waiting for him to self-destruct-- is becoming more and more of an establishment obsession. Third-rate GOP media consultant Liz Mair, recently fired by the flailing Scott Walker campaign, tries telling them how to do it. Her advise to the Deep Bench:

• Focus on moving an anti-Trump message to where low-information voters actually get their information (O'Reilly)
• Focus attacks on Trump’s support for single-payer and socialized medicine systems
• Focus attacks on his business record
• Raise the religion point with appropriate audiences
• Call a spade a spade, like he does
• Don’t replicate the policies, replicate the tone (provided that you plausibly can)
• Don’t be a politician. Be a human
• Do you have non-political experience? Talk about that
• Go after your other rivals, not just Trump
• Remember, what is a concern today probably won’t be in three months time

They're setting some of the congressional hounds on Trump, like Walker supporter Reid Ribble (R-WI) and Jeb supporter Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), but their critiques of Trump are like farting in the wind. Jeb's attacks on Trump-- based on reason-- have been ineffective. So now the GOP will deploy the bottom-of-the-barrel candidates, who have no chance to be president but could get an appointed position in a Republican administration, to try to muddy up Trump in the language low-info zombified Fox viewers can understand.

Can Bobby Jindal play a 12-year-old asshole as well as Trump? He said Trump "looks like he's got a squirrel sitting on his head." Thursday Jindal opened up on Trump, not necessarily because he was hoping Trump would attack back and give him some attention that could turn around his failed campaign-- that's just hopeless-- but to ingratiate himself with whomever emerges as the GOP candidate after Trump is hacked to bits by the GOP establishment. In his rant he tried using "carnival act," "insecure," "narcissist," "egomaniac," "substance-free," "weak," "shallow" and "unstable" to tar Trump. Did anything stick?

"Donald Trump," he raged to a tiny, nearly empty room at the National Press Club, "is for Donald Trump. He believes in nothing other than himself. He's not for anything, he's not against anything... everyone knows it to be true." And then, to show he's in touch with the zeitgeist, he added, "Just because a lot of people like watching Kim Kardashian, we wouldn't put her in the White House either." Jindal also hinted Texas fascist Ted Cruz, Trump's only ally among the contenders, is just as bad as Trump by enabling him.

Although almost no one was in the room when he unloaded, Fox-- which definitely had been tipped off in advance-- had a camera rolling and broadcast the diatribe live, including the crowning zinger:

"Donald Trump's never read the Bible. The reason we know he's never read the Bible, he's not in the Bible."

Even Glenn Beck got in on the action:

I’m telling you, dealing with Donald Trump is like dealing with a third grader. And I’m not dealing with a third grader anymore because the world is on fire. You want to come on the show, great. You don’t want to come on the show, great. I don’t really care… Enough of the third grade politics. Grow up, Donald Trump. Grow up.

And you can probably guess who Rick Perry's parting shot was aimed at as he ended his campaign yesterday: "We can secure the border and reform our immigration system without inflammatory rhetoric, without base appeals that divide us based on race, culture and creed… Demeaning people of Hispanic heritage is not just ignorant, it betrays the example of Christ. We can enforce our laws and our borders, and we can love all who live within our borders, without betraying our values."

Yesterday right-wing nut and former congressman David McIntosh, currently head of the Club for Growth, blamed the Trump phenomenon on Boehner and McConnell. It sounds like he and Jindal had been put up to it by the same political operatives out to get Trump.

The Donald Trump Show should be a wake-up call to establishment Republicans in Washington. Let’s face it-- at its core the Trump phenomenon is an expression of deep anger and frustration at Washington’s lack of leadership.

Less than a year ago, conservatives, libertarians, and independents gave Republicans a majority in the Senate and their largest House majority in more than 80 years. They trusted Republicans who campaigned on the promise that a Republican majority would at least put up roadblocks to the Obama agenda.

Voters fully expected this Congress to take real steps to rein in spending with a transparent appropriations process, and to preserve the modest spending caps established under sequestration. They believed Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) a year ago when he said tax reform was “in the realm of doable.”

Yet today, we’ve not only seen none of the above-- it’s actually gotten worse. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said recently that tax reform will have to wait until at least 2017. Rather than cut spending, this Republican Congress has cut deals with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to try to create $9 billion in new mandatory spending, and voted for a Medicare bill that adds more than $100 billion to the deficit over the coming years. Boehner still wants to resuscitate the Export-Import Bank, an example of the worst of government cronyism and the first federal agency to be put out of business in years. And, both McConnell’s Senate and Boehner’s House are expected to bust through established spending limits this fall with a massive spending bill that will likely be passed with a lot of Democrat votes, over the objections of many fiscal conservatives in both chambers.

Is it any wonder that the conservatives, libertarians, and independents who elected this Republican Congress are rallying behind the angry voice of Donald Trump? They’re even willing to overlook Trump’s far left positions: single-payer universal health care, a massive tax increase, anti-trade policies, and eminent domain to allow developers to seize private property. None of those are conservative, pro-growth positions.

Trump has made it clear that he’d be happy to use the massive power of government to force U.S. businesses to do what he believes is best for the country. That’s not economic freedom and it’s not a path to opportunity. He’s even recently rejected a flat tax in favor of the progressive tax rates that liberals applaud as part of their class warfare rhetoric.

Trump is not a conservative. He’s a showman who loves to talk about himself and who knows how to attract a crowd. And he’s tapped into the frustration of average Americans who have been saying for years that the country’s on the wrong track. They elected Republican majorities to change that course, or to at least begin bending its trajectory back toward less spending and smaller government. But now it’s clear that Boehner and McConnell have failed to even take up the fight with Democrats to do this. So millions of Americans are rejecting Washington wholesale and turning to the loudest anti-Washington voice they can find.

The irony, of course, is that, as Trump says, he’s been in the business of buying and selling politicians for years, and he boasts of how he’s manipulated the laws to ensure his own financial success. Trump is all about making himself great, but he’s now cloaked that scheme in pro-American, anti-Washington rhetoric. His so-called policies will not fix health care, lower taxes, or shrink government. But many Americans, who are completely and rightfully disillusioned by Washington Republicans, are willing to take a risky gamble on the unknown, rather than settle for the ongoing frustration of the known.

Boehner, McConnell, and the rest of establishment Republicans now own this mess. The 2016 presidential cycle started out, and still has, some of the best, pro-growth, conservative candidates that we’ve seen in many years; candidates with actual plans to end Obamacare, cut spending, and do real tax reform.

Unfortunately, those good candidates and their good proposals are getting drowned out by the Donald Trump Show. And, unless Republican leaders in Congress use the next four months to do the people’s business, to finally put up a strong fight against Obama, and to vote on a clear fiscally conservative agenda, they will be totally abandoned by the people who gave them the gavel, and they will be overwhelmed by more of the Trump tidal wave.

Before running away with his tail between his legs, Ben Carson tried taking on Trump as well-- also based on his lies about faith. Watch:



In case you think that Carson's "the reasonable one" among all the clowns and freaks, think again. Being soft-spoken doesn't make him reasonable, or even sane. He told GOP voters, as Right Wing Watch's Brian Tashman put it,

that the science of evolution is a sign of humankind’s arrogance and belief "that they are so smart that if they can’t explain how God did something, then it didn’t happen, which of course means that they’re God. You don’t need a God if you consider yourself capable of explaining everything." He claimed that "no one has the knowledge" of the age of the earth "based on the Bible," adding that "carbon dating and all of these things really don’t mean anything to a God who has the ability to create anything at any point in time."

Carson also claims Christians in America are facing widespread persecution and are "being bludgeoned into silence," and argued that Obamacare will lead people to lose their health coverage-- even though the opposite is happening. He said he has "prayed to God that he will expose even to people of low information what is going on. Sometimes things have to be so blatant, it’s like hitting them over the head with a two-by-four, before people wake up." Well, that would be his and Trump's (and Huckabee's and Cruz's) audience, all right.

The new Quinnipiac poll for Iowa released early yesterday morning shows Carson creeping up on Trump, and already beating him among GOP women-- and, ironically, among college-educated Republicans. College-educated Republicans should get beyond the misleading soft-spokenness. Quinnipiac reported:

Carson gets a 79 - 6 percent favorability rating and likely Republican Caucus-goers say 88 - 4 percent that he is honest and trustworthy, and 85 - 5 percent that he cares about their needs and problems. Voters say 76 - 11 percent that he has strong leadership qualities and 72 - 14 percent that he has the right temperament and personality to handle an international crisis.