Leading Conservative Strategists and Big-Money Backers Plot to Defeat Donald Trump
Seething with bigotry, Donald Trump’s campaign has been mired in racism from the very beginning, when he lashed out at Mexicans during his June 16, 2015 campaign announcement speech.
His immigration plan calls for the deportation of the approximately 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., the erection of a substantial wall on the Mexico – United States border, and has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, citing links between Muslims and terrorism. On Monday of this week Trump had a group of about 30 black students removed from a campaign rally in Georgia, and that same day he had a woman thrown out of a rally after he repeatedly accused her of being a Mexican.
Trump has been described by his political opponents as “divisive,” “unserious” and a “bully,” and in an article aptly titled: “As violence erupts at Super Tuesday Trump rally, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed at .future events.” New York Daily News reporter Shaun King writes of the deadly danger that is brewing in the Trump campaign. “While we have already widely reported that white supremacists are openly proclaiming that they are fully emboldened and energized by Trump, the natural progression of their romance with Trump is now on full display,” he writes.
The damage to the Republican Party is immeasurable at this point, and most media portals and pundits on all sides of the political spectrum are predicting the GOP will lose control of the Senate as a result of Trump’s campaign along with numerous seats in the House as a direct result of Trump’s campaign rhetoric and theatrics.
As The New York Times reports, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.”
Many high-profile conservative leaders and financiers are reportedly considering breaking with the Republican Party in the event Trump wins the nomination, and The Hill reported in February that the Koch brothers want to stop the bigoted billionaire. There is also talk of conservatives running a third-party candidate against Trump to insure his defeat in November if it comes to that. According to The Hill, the Koch’s network “has resources and technology rivaling the Republican Party’s infrastructure and spent close to $400 million in 2015 on its goals to minimize the role of government in people’s lives. But it also intervenes in electoral politics and will play a multimillion-dollar role in the 2016 presidential and Senate races.”
The Hill goes on to note that “given the Koch group’s libertarian philosophy, many donors are appalled by what they see as Trump’s vision of himself as a king-like figure who believes that he alone can rescue America.”
Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) summed up the mood at the Koch network’s winter retreat when he stated at a dinner speech that: “The way to make America great again is not by abandoning the Constitutional limits and saying to some guy, ‘Would you be our king?’ ”
“We can’t give Trump a pass when we don’t know what he stands for.”
The Atlantic reports that “the threat of a third-party challenge may be the conservative movement’s strongest piece of leverage over a man who seems to be thwarting them at every turn. […] If and when Trump has the nomination clinched, I expect, at the very least, that movement conservatives will make a lot of noise about a third-party challenge. It may be their last best chance to wrest concessions from the billionaire.”
The Atlantic goes on to list 5 reasons why mounting a third-party challenge to Trump might be the best strategy for Republicans:
- “In some states, a right-of-center electorate divided between Trump and a conservative challenger could turn out more total voters who’d support down-ballot Republicans than a Trump vs. Clinton race where conservatives stayed home.”
- “If Trump wins, there will be a lot of establishment campaign professionals who’d benefit financially from a third-party challenge by a movement conservative (and who wouldn’t fear being branded disloyal for staffing one).”
- “Many neoconservatives would prefer an Israel-loving, interventionist hawk like Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, but also value their place in the conservative movement. Supporting a third-party challenge by a hawkish conservative would be much less disruptive to their network of alliances than openly supporting a hawkish Democrat, even if the likely outcome is the same.”
- Trump is “already breaking with party orthodoxy on health care, entitlements, Planned Parenthood, and foreign policy,” … and “at some point, the faction of the GOP that’s spent 8 years obsessed with ideological purity will rebel. Like Erickson, they’ll argue that it’s better to go down fighting as conservatives than to compromise their values. Intransigence is consistent enough with their preexisting beliefs and past behavior to make me believe they’d abandon the GOP for the right candidate.”
- “There would appear to be ample money for an anti-Trump third-party challenge.” As noted above, the Koch brothers and others are willing to spend whatever it takes to stop Trump.
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