The main argument against the death of the Republican Party is that
Republicans keep polling well and winning elections, despite a track
record of unmitigated horror. While some pundits argue that Trump is
so repugnant and reviled that he may drag the whole party down to a
calamitous defeat this fall, I don't see how adding palpable energy
(and a soupçon of deniability) hurts the GOP. Taibbi's article is more
nuanced than his headline, partly because it's more about Ted Cruz's
failures than Trump's successes:
This led to the hilarious irony of Ted Cruz. Here was a quintessentially
insipid GOP con man culled straight from the halls of Princeton, Harvard,
the Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Republican
Senatorial Committee to smooth-talk the yokels. But through a freak accident
of history, he came along just when the newest models of his type were
selling "the Republican establishment sucks" as an electoral strategy.
Cruz was like an android that should have self-destructed in a cloud
of sparks and black smoke the moment the switch flipped on. He instead
stayed on just long enough to win 564 delegates, a stunning testament to
just how much Republican voters, in the end, hated the Republican
kingmakers Cruz robotically denounced.
All of these crazy contradictions came to a head in Indiana, where
Cruz succumbed in an explosion of hate and scorn. The cascade started
the Sunday night before the primary, with a Cruz stump speech in La
Porte that couldn't have gone worse.
Things went sideways as Cruz was working his way into a "simple flat
tax" spiel, a standard Republican snake-oil proposal in which all
corporate, estate and gift taxes would be eliminated, and replaced
with a 10 percent flat tax and a 16 percent consumption tax. Not
because the rich would pay less and the poor would pay more, but
because America and fairness, etc. He was just getting to his beloved
money line, claiming, "We can fill out our taxes on a postcard," when
a 12-year-old boy interrupted with cries of "You suck!" and "I don't
care!"
Cruz couldn't quite handle the pressure and stepped straight into
the man-trap the moment presented. He lectured the kid about respecting
his elders, then suggested the world might be a better place if someone
had taught a young Donald Trump that lesson. It was a not-half-bad line
of the type that the Harvard lawyer is occasionally capable. But Cruz
couldn't help himself and added, "You know, in my household, when a
child behaves that way, they get a spanking."
Boom! Within hours the Internet was filled with headlines
about how Ted Cruz had suggested spanking someone else's 12-year-old
for telling him he sucked.
This was on top of the ignominy of having already called a basketball
hoop a "ring" while giving a speech on the gym floor in Knightstown, the
home of the fictional Hickory team from Hoosiers. No American male
would call a basketball hoop a ring, and even a French immigrant would
know better than to do so in Indiana, but this was the kind of run he
was on.
The rest of the race was a slapstick blowout. Carly Fiorina fell off
a stage, and Cruz's wife, Heidi, actually had to answer a question from
a Yahoo! reporter about her husband being called the Zodiac Killer.
Heidi Cruz calmly responded that she'd been married to Ted for 15 years
and "I know pretty well who he is." This, of course, was exactly what
the wife of the actual Zodiac Killer would say, making for a perfectly
absurd ending to a doomed campaign. [ . . . ]
Finally, on the morning of the Indiana primary, Cruz woke up to hear
opponent Trump babbling that Cruz's own father had been hanging out with
Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a bizarre
take on a ridiculous National Enquirer story that Trump, of course,
believed instantly. Trump brought this up on Fox and Friends, which let
him run the ball all the way to the end zone. "I mean, what was he doing
with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death -- before the shooting?"
Trump asked. "It's horrible."
American politics had never seen anything like this: a presidential
candidate derided as a haggardly masturbating incarnation of Satan, the
son of a presidential assassin's accomplice, and himself an infamous
uncaptured serial killer.
Despite the media humiliations, Cruz talked passionately of his
supporters' resolve. "Just a few days ago, two young kids, ages four
and six, handed me two envelopes full of change," he said. "All of
their earnings from their lemonade stand. They wanted the campaign
to have it."
The crowd cooed: Awwww! There was no way he could quit now
and let those kids down. Except that moments later, Cruz did just
that, announcing he was suspending his campaign because "the path
to victory has been foreclosed." Then he fled the stage like he was
double-parked.
Didn't initially plan to quote all of that, but it kept coming, and
helps explain why Cruz, who had long been favored to win Indiana, and
who supposedly cinched the win with a deal to get Kasich to skip the
state and not split the anti-Trump vote, imploded so suddenly. But the
key word there was "foreclosed": precisely the sort of word a Harvard
lawyer would choose to indicate that he was quitting not because he
had lost face with the voters or had decided that the principled
differences he claimed against Trump had ceased to matter; rather,
the moneyed interests behind his campaign decided to cut their
losses and live with the consequences. Then, less than a week later,
Kasich -- who after his deal with Cruz had nothing riding on the
Indiana results -- dropped out as well, conceding the nomination
and obviating the rest of the primary schedule. Clearly, the folks
with the money decided that whatever uncertainty Trump posed wasn't
enough of a threat to keep fighting against.
