Bloomberg (Opinion)
By Albert Hunt
August 31, 2015
Every
major Republican presidential campaign, and every allied super-PAC,
confronts the same question at their morning strategy meetings: What do
you do with a problem
like Donald Trump?
For
weeks the businessman/impresario has been running first in every
national poll of Republicans. He dominates the race and consumes vast
amounts of media oxygen, forcing
other candidates to alter their tactics and strategies and leaving
Republican strategists increasingly unsure of how to manage the threat.
The
Republican establishment -- major office holders, donors, business
supporters and advisers -- now realize that Trump won't disappear
anytime soon, and that he is likely
hurting the party's prospects in 2016. With the establishment
increasingly eager for Trump's demise, four potential routes to
achieving it have emerged:
PATIENCE.
This is the path advised by those convinced that Trump will eventually
do himself in. They believe that the accumulation of controversial and
offensive comments,
along with Trump's lack of a coherent agenda, will gradually sink in
with voters. In this view, Trump is like a boxer who absorbs body blows
in the early rounds, seemingly to no effect, only to reveal later how
devastating the toll has been.
However,
Trump has so far proved stubbornly resistant to this script. He has
suggested that Republican Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war,
wasn't a war hero.
He repeatedly attacked Fox News host Megyn Kelly after she asked him
tough questions at the first Republican debate. For any other candidate,
that probably would've been curtains. So far, Trump's populist,
blatantly racist appeal to an angry, scared constituency
appears immune to backlash.
STACK
THE DECK. Republicans in South Carolina are requiring that, for
candidates to qualify for the state's important early primary, they must
pledge to support the eventual
party nominee and not run as an independent. Other state Republican
parties are considering a similar move. This is aimed squarely at making
the primaries difficult for Trump.
It's
also a likely loser. First, if challenged in court, the requirement may
not stand. Further, the increasingly confident Trump is now signaling
that he might agree
to such terms. Yet he could always change his mind after the fact. As
the fabled governor of Louisiana, Earl Long, replied when asked what he
would tell people after abandoning a campaign pledge: "Tell them I
lied."
MASSIVE
ASSAULT. Only one campaign has the resources to bury Trump under a
barrage of negative advertising: The super-PAC Right to Rise, allied
with Jeb Bush, which reported
having raised more than $100 million by the end of June. Veteran
strategist Mike Murphy, a Bush confidant who runs the super-PAC, has
said he won't spend resources on Trump. A better option, which
reportedly has been discussed among party elites, is for a
Republican billionaire to fund an independent expenditure campaign
against Trump.
Trouble
is, a sustained attack on Trump might cost a small fortune. Independent
groups are charged much higher rates for television ads than candidate
campaigns, which
receive the lowest going rate. Moreover, an independent attack on Trump
could be seen for exactly what it would be: an effort by the party
establishment to destroy the outsider. It risks intensifying Trump's
support.
CONTAIN
THE THREAT. Conservative journalist Ramesh Ponnuru, an insightful
political analyst, wrote in Bloomberg View last week that Trump is
basically a high-octane nuisance.
"Trump," Ponnuru wrote, "is an existential threat to the weakest
candidates -- but not to anybody else."
As
long as establishment Republicans and thoughtful analysts such as
Ponnuru refuse to treat Trump seriously, he presumably can be relegated
to the path that fringe candidates
Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain trod in 2012. Both led the polls for a
time in the 2011 run-up to the Iowa caucuses.
Trump
is still unlikely to win the nomination. Yet, unlike Bachmann or Cain,
his impact on other candidates has been powerful. Trump raised
immigration-bashing to a piercing
cry, and now his call echoes. In recent days, Wisconsin Governor Scott
Walker mentioned the possibility of building a wall along the 5,000-mile
Canadian border. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suggested tracking
immigrants like FedEx packages. And Bush
was flummoxed in trying to explain an awkward reference to "anchor
babies."
If
Trump's disruptions continue, it's unclear which, if any, of the above
paths will prevail. Trump is a far more potent phenomenon than most
establishment Republicans
or pundits deemed possible just a few months ago. And he remains an
unpredictable force. Republican ad maker Fred Davis, a strategist for a
super-PAC supporting Ohio Governor John Kasich, said, "At this stage we
really don't know what the hell is going to
happen with Trump."
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