MIAMI—In what political observers characterized as the organization’s highest-level staff shakeup to date, the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio announced Monday it would be bringing on a new candidate for the remainder of the 2016 election.
via The Onion por supuesto.
Time to salute Robert Kagan. I do not share his ideology but I can recognize a patriot writing in Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein Monster. Read it all, savor the historical allusions, but here’s the takeaway:
We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the revolution.
There has been much second-guessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted — at Trump? No, at Rubio. (And now, as his final service to party and nation, he has endorsed Trump.) Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
We need more like this.
PS. Has the GOP rehabilitated David Frum yet?
I keep thinking there’s got to be a large number of Republicans who are appalled by Trump and will never vote for him. He is, after all, a neofascist megalomaniac. But maybe I’m wrong.
God, I hope I’m not wrong.
Update: I’m wrong
Look at this graph of national GOP voters gradual, growing acceptance of Trump as nominee pic.twitter.com/3bINR9TQgb
— Martin Gelin (@M_Gelin) February 21, 2016
Visual poetry in this case.
This Donald Trump Theme Song Is the Most Upsetting Thing You’ll Ever Hear
I only lasted 16 seconds before turning it off. Feel free to post your stamina score below.
Kevin Drum’s latest rumination on Donald Trump reveals “an odd quirk in Trump’s personality”:
He seems to have an ironclad rule against ever attacking someone first. Even Vladimir Putin. Putin says nice things about Trump, so Trump has to say nice things back. Opposing candidates who don’t attack him are “great guys.” But if you attack first, then he has to fire off a nuclear retaliation. There’s an odd kind of chivalry at work here, and I suppose it also provides people with a motivation to leave him alone.
Actually, this is one of the few things that isn’t odd about Trump. Social scientist and game theorists will recognize this ‘quirk’ immediately as the ‘tit for tat’ strategy that Robert Axelrod famously showed was the winning strategy for multiple iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in his book The Evolution of Cooperation.
It seems sensible to think of most political mud-slinging as being suitable to modeling as a Prisoner’s Dilemma game: both sides sling dirt, both sides lose. (There are rare exceptions, such as when Nixon got Johnston to attack him, thus cementing Nixon’s role as the front runner for the 1968 GOP nomination, but those are rare.)
So at least when it comes to invective, Trump appears to be a natural game theorist.
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