“This is a long process and we have a saying in our team that if you’re hot when it’s hot, you’ll be cold when it’s cold. In other words, the candidates who are really on fire in the summer leading up before the contest actually begins, usually have gone cold by then,” Huckabee told Steve Malzberg.
“You can go back to the fact that this time in 2007 it was Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain and I was an asterisk. I ended up coming in second, McCain won, Giuliani and Thompson had dropped out.
Does this mean Jeb isn’t telling himself how great a Trump candidacy is anymore now that he is in single digits?
So the new talking point is, don’t buy into Trump’s popularity, he is just Rudy Guiliani all over again. The problem is that Rudy had a long history of openly opposing gun rights and supporting statism. At the time, conservatives felt there were other options more amenable to their interests. For the record I was ardently opposed to Rudy’s candidacy. Nice guy, but no conservative.
Trump on the other hand has no such history. His son’s are big game hunters who support the NRA, and who once referenced how Ivanka’s family in Europe saw to it they were raised right by making them hunt and fish on summer vacations. Trump himself has supported veteran’s groups and even individual veterans. At the least he is a blind slate, and as a capitalistic businessman he is very likely opposed to government interference in the economy. He could be an establishment plant, but on the other side, we know Jeb is.
Moreover, we face an enemy who is corrupting our party, even as they own the opposition totally. Nothing can bring people together as much as a reviled enemy.
I believe Trump knows the roadmap. Now I believe Trump knows the construct of the GOPe McDonnell/Donohue scheme…
When Trump speaks of the GOP and Citizens United he is putting sunlight upon something almost NO-ONE was, or is, paying attention to…
In essence the construct of the Citizens United decision was used to pump political gladiators with Wall Street steroids. This approach would be how the professional class would defend their seats, their place at the trough.
This would be how Mitt Romney would be nominated despite the will of the electorate…
As a consequence this became the construct for the 2015 GOPe roadmap to elect Jeb Bush as the Republican nomination…
Increasingly this election is do or die. Before, it was elect the most conservative of the establishment politicians, and hope their conservatism would minimize the grassroot’s powerlessness in the party. Now the question becomes, if Trump is an outsider and were elected, how much damage would he do to the establishment, simply to protect himself and his reelection prospects. Might he even do something to render the establishment unable to shut real conservatives out of the party.
So Trump’s nationalism is great. His real talk is refreshing. His brilliance in playing the game is amazing. But more and more it would be enough simply to elect the enemy of our enemy.
Things are very different from the days when Rudy ran.
Apocalypse cometh™, even for the establishment.
