Republicans consider Clinton

Republicans consider Clinton over Trump

‘If this is who my party is, I don’t really identify with it anymore,’ one Republican says.

By Eli Stokols

No longer do establishment Republicans harbor any fantasies of blocking Donald Trump from their presidential nomination. But a new kind of magical thinking is taking hold: that a splintered conservative coalition will somehow unite behind the GOP’s newly-minted presumptive nominee.

Ted Cruz’s sudden suspension of his campaign following his double-digit loss to Trump in Indiana Tuesday night is forcing anti-Trump Republicans to finally confront the Hobson’s Choice of a general election matchup between Hillary Clinton and a demagogic conspiracy theorist untethered to conservative principles.

While many conservative stalwarts are conflicted and stuck in a state of paralysis, some are considering the ultimate betrayal.

Hours before Indiana polls closed Tuesday evening when it was becoming clear that Trump was headed for a decisive win, some prominent Republicans were moving away from him. Mark Salter, John McCain’s former campaign speechwriter, signaled his support for Clinton via Twitter. Conservative pundit Ben Howe did the same.

It may just be the beginning.

“The hour of reckoning for the Never Trump movement is now before us,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP strategist who ran McCain’s 2008 campaign. “There are scores of these people who say they’ll still support the GOP nominee. That has been an incongruent position for some time, but never more so than it is now.”

Schmidt predicted that “a substantial amount of Republican officials who have worked in Republican administrations, especially on issues of defense and national security, will endorse Hillary Clinton in the campaign.”

Trump is eager to unify the Republican Party, recognizing Cruz as a “great competitor” with a “brilliant future” just hours after suggesting that the Texas senator’s father was involved in the assassination of JFK and promising to “win big in November.” Just before Trump claimed victory, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted Tuesday night that it’s time to rally behind Trump and “focus on Hillary Clinton.”

But party unity won’t be achieved with a tonal shift toward humility or a tweet. It may not be achieved at all.

Cruz, in his farewell speech, didn’t mention Trump. Some Republican senators —Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse — signaled Tuesday night that they remain opposed to a Trump candidacy. And Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who backed Cruz just last week, "hasn't made a decision" about backing Trump, according to a staffer. Like many in the #NeverTrump brigade, they’re thinking beyond November 2016 and about the very survival of the Republican Party.

"If we nominate Trump, [the party] is lost beyond this cycle. I think we lose women for a generation, in big numbers,” said Katie Packer, who served as Romney’s deputy campaign manager and now leads the Our Principles super PAC that spent $10 million in an effort to stop Trump.

“There’s a feeling among Republican women that I talk to that the people who would nominate this guy don’t have any real respect for us as women—especially professional women. They would rather see us in a Mad Men era, where women knew their place and catered to their husband, cooked dinner and met their sexual obligations and didn’t have any other role in society. And there are other people who are supporting him because the guy’s a blatant racist and they identify with that.

“So there’s a sense that if this is who my party is, I don’t really identify with it anymore.”

But the most absolutist opposition to Trump is largely held by the GOP’s donor class and Washington-based establishment—the very people Trump and his supporters have delighted in offending from the start. And while columnists like George F. Will and syndicated radio hosts from Steve Deace in Iowa to Charlie Sykes in Milwaukee remain adamantly anti-Trump, others are starting to hedge slightly. Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, acknowledged Monday that he remains “a ‘Never Trump’ [person]” but that “on the other hand, I’ll…never say never.”

In recent weeks as Trump has moved closer to securing the necessary delegates to clinch the nomination, several notable Republicans have broken ranks and joined his team. Ed Rollins, the former Ronald Reagan campaign manager who later helped steer Ross Perot's campaign, became the latest Washington consultant to sign on, announcing Tuesday that he’s leading a new pro-Trump super PAC.

Many donors and party activists, unlike intellectuals who are more devoted to the free market ideas and social conservatism that have long unified most conservatives, recognize the popularity of Trump’s unique mix of unapologetic nationalism, protectionist position on trade and more moderate stances on social issues and the role of government.

“There’s a general consensus among people like me to get on board with the Trump Train or get left behind,” said one RNC official, who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity. “Not everyone believes the sky is falling, and most of us believe it’s better to unite behind Trump and possibly lose in November than to risk blowing up the party by trying to take it from him at the convention.”

“The party will still be the party. We will have the same platform and the delegates and committee members will be conservatives,” said Bruce Haynes, the CEO of Purple Strategies. “The party will still be the party of freedom and Trump won't change that. Trump may run and govern beyond their views but the party itself is a conservative party committed to freedom and it will stay that way.”

For the last several months, the increasingly panicked GOP establishment looked at the first mainstream Republicans to line up behind Trump—first, endorsements from Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions, later former RNC staffer Rick Wiley taking a job with Trump’s campaign—as “Vichy Republicans,” likening their appeasement of an outsider who, in their view, was hijacking their party to the appeasers of Adolph Hitler during his takeover of France.

"It’s like everything that I was taught to believe about conservative philosophy is totally out the window,” Packer said. “When Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett are defending Trump and making excuses for him—these are people I used to look to as real pillars of conservatism—it’s like bizarro world. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore."

But now that Trump’s takeover is nearly complete, Republicans are at odds over who that label applies to more—the conservative appeasers of Trump or those willing to back a Democratic nominee.
“I think everybody’s got to make their own choices; and I wouldn’t fall into the Donald Trump pattern of accusing those who disagree with me of being bad people, but it’s very difficult for me to come up with any principle by which Donald Trump is aligned with the Republican Party,” said Stuart Stevens, the strategist who guided Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

“That’s the same argument the Communist Party used for years—you have to do it for the party. I’m not going to go along with the Brezhnev logic. If the party stands for nothing but election, it stands for nothing.”

Many long-time conservatives find themselves in a state of paralysis, unable to decide which side of that line they’re going to be on.

“The goal is to defeat the Democratic candidate,” said Fred Zeidman, a prominent The goal is to defeat the Democratic candidate,” said Fred Zeidman, a prominent Republican in Houston who was been a bundler for Jeb Bush and eventually opted to support Cruz.

But asked if he would support Trump, he hedged. “I’m just not ready to answer that question.”