Nuclear Option

Stopping Trump: The Nuclear Option

Here's what Republicans would need to do to stop their own front-runner—and what they'd destroy if they failed.

By Jeff Greenfield

It wasn't so long ago that the political universe was licking its collective chops over the prospect of a contested Republican convention, a delegate fight that went all the way to July without a nominee. Now, with Donald Trump notching his most decisive primary win yet—and looking to pick off several more on Super Tuesday—we’re hearing that the contest will be over by the Ides of March. That means Trump could walk away with a nomination that almost no traditional Republicans ever wanted to see happen.

What could stop him? So far, his opponents have barely made a dent in The Donald. There’s a good chance the race will be over unless the Republican Party establishment and its conservative core do something that neither party has ever done: gather the forces, pool their money, and train all their collective firepower against their own front-runner.

Think of it as the nuclear option: deploying the most powerful and dangerous weapon available, the one you use when conventional warfare has failed. Just as with real nuclear weapons, that option carries clear risks, starting with losing the presidency in November, and ultimately threatening the party itself. But If a critical mass of Republicans and their conservative allies believe—as many have argued publicly, and more have privately whispered—that Trump could irrevocably undermine what the party says it stands for, and would pose a clear and present danger to the country if he ever attained the White House, it may now be their only chance.

What would the nuclear option look like? Even America’s nastiest political fights don’t offer much of a guide. Once the front-runner has accumulated a big enough delegate lead, resistance has been futile. Liberal and moderate Republicans turned to Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton just before the 1964 convention hoping to avert Barry Goldwater’s nomination; they didn’t. In 1972, moderate and conservative Democrats mounted a rules challenge at the convention to strip liberal George McGovern of his slate of California delegates, but couldn’t pull that off either. Jimmy Carter faced an “anybody but Carter” challenge from some in his own party, and lost seven late primaries to California Gov. Jerry Brown and Idaho Sen. Frank Church in 1976, but his lead by then was simply too big to overcome.

Today, the response would have to be at a whole other order of magnitude—an unprecedented shock to the system that would force those all but most Trump’s impassioned supporters to rethink the consequences of his nomination. It would involve a clear declaration by as many voices as possible that Trump would be unacceptable as a president, accompanied by a massive media campaign designed to undermine the core of his appeal. It would mean a frontal attack on his character and temperament—and a willingness to absorb all the blows he is brilliantly capable of launching. It’s not clear that they could even pull it off at this late date—and if you look at what the options really are, it’s not clear the party would avoid serious long-term damage if they did. But at this point, this implausible nuclear option is the only remotely plausible approach.

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What comes first? The most obvious step is that the party needs to settle on an alternative candidate. There’s no point fighting a war unless you’re fighting for something—or someone. This was supposed to be Jeb Bush, until it wasn’t. Now, the task for Trump’s foes is to clear the field.

What’s not clear is how this is supposed to happen. For instance, is there anything in Ted Cruz’s public life that suggests he’d subordinate self-interest to the needs of a Republican Party he has spent years attacking? Indeed, one of Trump’s strengths has been the feeling among just about the whole mainstream Republican universe that Cruz is like an earlier GOP Texas senator, Phil Gramm, of whom it was said: “Even his best friends can’t stand him.” And with Governor John Kasich waiting for redemption in Michigan and his home state of Ohio, he’s unlikely to leave the field soon enough to be helpful.

The emerging likeliest alternative to Trump, of course, is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has picked up endorsements from a spate of elected officials and onetime Bush supporters. But even apart from the fact that he has not won a single primary yet, and that polling does not show him as a superior choice to Kasich, he seems unwilling or unable to lead a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Calling some of Trump’s views “worrisome,” as he did last Sunday, is not exactly a call to arms. And until Thursday night—very late in the game—Rubio’s performance in debate did not inspire confidence in his ability to turn to Trump, as Mitt Romney did to Newt Gingrich four years ago, and effectively skewer him face to face.

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Beyond the choice of an alternative lies a more fundamental question: What is the case against Trump? The strategy needs to start with an understanding of just what makes him so much less acceptable than other candidates who have engendered serious opposition within a party.

The first crucial issue is temperament. Anyone who has served or studied presidents in times of crises knows that the most serious danger in a president is an unjustified certainty in his or her own assumptions. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, for example, could well have ended with nuclear war, but for President John F. Kennedy’s repeated insistence on taking the most cautious of steps, always leaving him and his Soviet counterpart room to maneuver. The absolute refusal of Trump to admit error—ever; his insistence that something is true because he says it’s true; his dismissal of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary—is a recipe for disaster in the White House.

But to work on the Republican electorate, it is a case that has to be made well outside the op-ed pages of the New York Times. It would require men and women who’ve served Republicans in the Oval Office—especially those who were foot soldiers and generals in Ronald Reagan’s presidency—to argue that Trump is not the bearer of the Reagan legacy, but its betrayer. (Reagan’s last convention speech, in 1992, was a celebration of the immigrant experience). It would require retired military leaders to explain that Trump's ignorance about the world and the military would lead to disastrous decisions that would endanger the lives of countless men and women in uniform, and that his ludicrous proposal to ban Muslims threatens America’s strategic interests around the world. Their message must be: He says he will make America great; in fact, he will make America weaker. Then let him call the men and women who have spent their lives protecting America “dumb” and “losers.”

It would require some of the same candidates who pledged to support any nominee to announce that Trump's behavior over the course of the campaign has forced them to change their minds. It might even require the last two Republican standard-bearers, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, to weigh in. This isn’t unreasonable to expect: Bush’s views on reaching out to Muslims, and on immigration and the danger of nativist appeals do not exactly square with Trump’s views. And Romney may have already begun: In a recent TV interview, he raised questions about a potential “bombshell” in Trump’s tax filings, and he did it again via Twitter during Thursday's debate. Whoever the players, a concerted campaign along these lines would require putting JFK’s “sometimes party loyalty asks too much” observation to a stress test unlike any in history.

What this amounts to is the kind of total repudiation that is virtually nonexistent in American politics. The closest example is the decision of the Republican Party, at every level, to spurn the candidacy of former Klansman and Nazi David Duke when he made the 1991 runoff as a declared Republican. Obviously, Trump is no Nazi or Klansman—though Duke did tell his listeners voting against Trump “is really treason to your heritage”—but if there’s a broad enough belief that he would be a clear and present danger as president, that kind of rejection is the only response that would have a chance of changing the conversation.

A second line of attack is rooted in an observation of Karl Rove: You don’t attack an opponent’s weaknesses, you attack what he sees as his strength. (As in the Bush campaign’s 2004 sometimes spurious assault on John Kerry’s military and defense views, and his wartime service.) In the case of Trump, this means taking him on as the champion of the little guy who is at war with the political and financial elites. Putting on ads that “prove” he’s not a conservative is pointless; his core backers aren’t conservatives either, not in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, a campaign should become instantly, and relentlessly, personal to Trump’s own brand.

Famed ad man Jerry Della Femina, who created the Joe Isuzu “he’s lying” campaign, offered a couple of tips: “You would need a two-front war: First, establish a ‘Truth Squad” to follow Trump everywhere and take him on directly. He says he’ll bring back jobs? Then why does he have his clothing line made in China? He’s going to stop immigrants from taking jobs from Americans? Then why did he bring in foreign workers to work on his Florida club? When you do TV ads, put on the workers who lost their jobs when Trump’s Atlantic City resorts filed for bankruptcy protection. Call it the ‘Trump Screwed Me’ campaign.”

You do not want Chamber of Commerce or K Street types in these ads; you want for example, some of the people now suing ‘Trump University’ for allegedly bilking them out of and ended up losing thousands of dollars for a bogus ‘how to get rich in real estate” course. These are small business people, would-be entrepreneurs—the very people most inspired by Trump’s story of success and “winning.”

This is not exactly uncharted ground. It’s almost exactly what the Obama campaign and its surrogates did to Mitt Romney four years ago. Indeed, it’s one of the mysteries of this campaign that Trump’s opponents haven’t turned to that tactic. But it remains the one argument that might change minds.

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The way an anti-Trump campaign would unfold—a massive, scorched-earth media campaign — would be just as important as the message. And for Republicans, this might be the biggest challenge of all. Trump has rewritten the rules of this year’s campaign, using social media—especially his Twitter feed—like a master, keeping himself in the news and his opponents off-balance.

Even on the traditional media side, this has, so far, been perhaps the biggest unforced error of 2016: If Trump does end up as the nominee, the failure of his opponents to aim their media fire at him will be one of the key reasons. The other candidates and super PACS have been so busy trying to hit each other, they’ve more or less left Trump free and clear. (POLITICO has reported that less than one percent of the more than $300 million raised by Trump competitors has gone into ads aimed at him; that is political malfeasance of the first order).

If the GOP really did develop the stomach for going right at him, the nature of an anti-Trump media campaign will need to be qualitatively different from the normal pap that characterizes political ads. His supporters see him as a no-nonsense, tough, decisive leader—an image buttressed by his years on “The Apprentice”. Chipping away at that image is crucial, of course, with a campaign flogging the weak parts of his track record and putting those retired military leaders on TV—crucially—ads on talk radio military leaders to expose Trump’s notions of “strength.”

But another part of a media campaign would have to deploy the one weapon that aims squarely at Trump’s vulnerability: humor, even ridicule. For all of his willingness, even eagerness, to indulge in theatrical wars of words, Trump has one glaring Achilles Heel: He can’t admit any failing, any mistake, any weakness of any kind. He tells us he has the world’s greatest memory; the “The Art of the Deal” is the second best book ever written (the Bible comes first). Without plunging into dime-store psychology, there seems to be a profound sense of insecurity, most of all about being mocked, laughed at. It helps explain one of Trump’s worst public moments: at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2011, when he was bested by, of all people, President Barack Obama. As Obama mocked Trump’s obsession with the president’s birthplace, and skewered him for the trivial nature of his “decision making” on “The Apprentice," Trump sat, lips pursed, head frozen in uncharacteristic powerlessness. (You can see the video here: the Trump section begins about 3:00 in.)

Thursday’s debate again underscored the potency of this approach. When Marco Rubio gleefully noted that Trump was repeating himself—a criticism that Trump had previously leveled at Rubio—the audience showered Rubio with cheers, and Trump appeared uncharacteristically rattled. “No, I’m not—no, no no. I don’t repeat myself. I don’t repeat myself,” he responded.

It should also be possible to use many of Trump’s own words against him; his frequent appearances with radio shock jock Howard Stern, where he indulged in the kind of high-school locker room talk about sex and women, should provide plenty of grist for a blizzard of social-media videos that would pop up on normal Americans’ Facebook feeds and ask—with humor rather than indignation—if this is really what they would respect in a president.

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All of this is a huge gamble of course: expensive, uncharted, and risky for everyone involved. If this were to happen, and it failed to prevent Trump from getting the nomination primaries, then the first effect would likely be to hand the election to Hillary Clinton (or to Bernie Sanders, if he somehow manages to survive the next month’s hostile terrain and win the nomination). The GOP would be basically giving up this cycle, all in an effort to keep Trump from representing them—a possibly unacceptable cost to Republicans, particularly when the fate of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance.

In the longer run, it would at least temporarily split the Republican Party, and if the GOP mainstream sufficiently alienated Trump’s cadre of loyalists, it could pave the way for something we haven’t seen since the middle of the 19th century: The emergence of a new competitive political party.

I know I know: the odds of any of this happening are small. The flexibility with which office holders and political players adapt to their party’s likely presidential nominee would do credit to any Olympic gymnast. The GOP National Chairman Reince Priebus and House Speaker Paul Ryan have already begun to make conciliatory gestures in Trump’s direction.

You can make the case that it comes with ill grace for Republicans and conservatives to shun Trump at all, given the party’s embrace of a no-compromise, no-accommodation approach to governance. (Robert Kagan makes just such an argument in the Washington Post). What this approach does have going for it, however, is that it recognizes Sherlock Holmes’ admonition: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Given the course of the primaries so far, the nuclear option is a highly improbable approach to stopping Trump. Everything else is more or less impossible.