Jon Dean: Trump is what the Republicans deserve

AFTER winning a majority of the state primaries on Super Tuesday, it looks like Donald Trump’s path to the Republican nomination for President is pretty clear.

Unless his rivals, the junior Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz decide to collaborate and take him on, the business mogul and reality TV star seems overwhelmingly likely to be one of the two main candidates for election in November. He will almost certainly be against Hillary Clinton for the Democrats.

More accurately, Trump will be the defeated Republican Party nominee, because while his fans love him and his message, most of America sees him for what he is: a celebrity candidate with little idea about how government, social policy or basic decency work.

His personal ratings show a majority of the US population view him unfavourably. While he is popular with a certain subset of voters – the white working-class who feel disillusioned and shocked by rapid social change under globalisation – this base is limited in its ability to translate into the coalition of voters required to win the White House.

We have seen in the past few days ‘mainstream’ Republicans come out and repudiate Trump. Mitt Romney, the party’s Presidential candidate in 2012, hit him hard on Thursday, referring in intense detail to Trump’s failed business dealings, his policy positions towards Muslims and Mexicans, and his volatile temperament which Romney argued makes him unsuitable to hold the Oval Office.

Without a doubt, it is the most interesting intervention in US politics of Romney’s career, and one which does him some credit. Yet Romney’s past conduct, and that of most Republican members of Congress, is why Donald Trump is currently riding so high.

Over the last eight years, the Republican Party has committed a great fraud against the American people. Central to this are two lies: firstly that Barack Obama is an un-American (and occasionally Muslim) imposter, a disastrous President seeking to undermine the foundations of US society; and secondly that he is being aided in doing so by a liberal ‘lame-stream’ media, obsessed with praising the multicultural Obamas, banning Christmas, and supporting a craven ‘establishment’.

“America is under attack!” they’ve wailed. “The end is nigh!” This nihilistic politics has served to wither away the grand tradition of conservative philosophy and Trump is taking advantage.

Rather than doing the positive job of opposition in a liberal democracy, which is to recognise the legitimacy of the governing party while proposing a detailed counter-argument and set of principles and policies for governing instead, the Republicans have done little but question the right of Obama and his appointees to exercise power.

This has been most recently demonstrated in Mitch McConnell’s immediate refusal to consider granting a nomination hearing to any potential Obama Supreme Court nominee, rather than fulfilling the Senate’s constitutional role of hearing the nominee.

And now what do we hear from Cruz and Rubio, the Tea Party darlings voted in during the initial post-Obama backlash of 2010 who are losing to Trump? “It’s not fair!” they cry. “The media isn’t holding Trump to account!”

Well, tough. This is what happens to democracy when you hate it and when you chip away at the very foundations of what makes your country great, and of what made your party great. If you cry wolf over again, eventually the villagers stop coming running. And you get eaten.

Donald Trump is eating Cruz and Rubio, he’s eating the Republican Party who have no idea what to do with him, and he’s eating at the foundations of American democracy.

Thankfully he will lose. You may not love or even like Hillary Clinton, but she is an experienced politician, who has worked hard to make things a little better.

The Democrats still exist in a rational political universe: they are not going to miss the chance to elect the first female President, and it is likely that under the glare of a Presidential campaign, when average voters start paying attention, Clinton will dominate against Trump in the swing states in November.

The Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. While one may disagree with the individual policy positions and tactics of all of these men, they were negotiators under whom the party inhabited reality.

But no more. Trump could destroy the Republican Party for a generation. And it will be no more than it warrants.

Jon Dean is Lecturer in Politics and Sociology at Sheffield Hallam University.