Imagine you have this incredibly valuable sports
car, and when you drive it up to a valet stand there are two guys anxiously
vying to take the keys. One of them looks wild-eyed and agitated, like he just
drank seven Red Bulls. The other is a guy you remember from high school, except
that you hated each other and he’s eyeing the hubcaps with contempt.
Now you have a rough idea of how Republican
insiders in Washington are feeling this week. With the season of choosing
passing its midpoint, governing Republicans are slowly resigning themselves to
what looks like a two-man race between the unpredictable Donald Trump and
Ted Cruz, a man so universally disliked that if you Google “hated senator,”
every single link that pops up is about him. (Try it yourself.)
It’s an agonizing thing for them to contemplate,
but in conversations with a half dozen of the leading Republican strategists
and lobbyists this week, it became clear that a solid consensus is forming as
to which guy they would rather see get the keys. When it comes to Trump versus
Cruz at the top of the ticket, most in the so-called establishment would prefer
the devil they know to the daredevil they don’t.
For the moment, of course, Trump looks very hard to
stop. And if you’ve been paying attention to his debates and election night
speeches lately, you may have noticed that — in between recitations of every
poll he’s ever read, and the rambling monologues on genitalia and civil
jurisprudence, and the brandishing of his personal steaks and
his own print magazine (who knew?) — he’s been consciously trying to reach some
kind of rapprochement with party insiders.
On Tuesday night, for instance, after winning in Michigan
and Mississippi, Trump used the opening minutes of his victory speech/news
conference/traveling revue to call for party unity. He managed to cough up some
kind words for Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham and even Mitt Romney, whom he said
he didn’t really know, despite having recently called him a “dope” and a “loser” and “one of
the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”
(And those insults came before Romney
essentially pleaded with all right-minded Republicans to banish any thought of
Trump as a nominee and bury the brief flirtation in some dark hole of repressed
memory.)
All of which may yet lead to some awkward photo ops
and panic-induced endorsements on the Capitol steps should Trump be nominated,
but make no mistake: Most Washington Republicans want about as much to do with
Trump as he does with them.
They see him as erratic and untrustworthy, an ideological
trespasser who would borrow the party but holds dear few of its conservative
convictions. And they’re profoundly troubled by an authoritarian streak — on
issues like immigration and the military’s treatment of civilians — that would seem to make George
W. Bush look like a lawyer for the ACLU.
Vin Weber, the congressman turned superlobbyist,
does a pretty tidy job of encapsulating these concerns. “I don’t think he’s a
‘big R’ Republican, and I don’t think he’s a ‘small D’ democrat,” Weber told
me, “and both of those are big problems for me.”
Most of the party’s governing class, of course, is
still hoping for a kind of triple bank-shot gambit to stop Trump’s march toward
the nomination. The latest plan goes like this:
Somehow hope that Marco Rubio —
who received exactly zero delegates from the four contests earlier this week —
can stage a comeback win in Florida Tuesday, while John Kasich manages
to eke out a win in Ohio (where he’s the governor, by the way). Then keep Trump
from amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to lock up the nomination before the
convention, by which time Republican leaders will have settled on a preferred
candidate (probably Kasich) whom they can try to ram through.
Which isn’t a terrible plan, except that it’s a
little like me saying I have a brilliant plan to become a billionaire, and all
I have to do is start by coming up with some kind of amazing app that everyone
in America wants to buy. Hope is not a strategy.
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