Why the GOP Establishment's Race Card Can't Stop Trump

Daniel McCarthy

Politics,

Rubio is an implausible nominee, but the political gurus have a plan, and it's stolen from the left.

Marco Rubio came out of Super Tuesday looking a lot like Walter Mondale. The 1984 Democratic nominee won only a single state, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia in his campaign against Ronald Reagan. In this year’s contest for the Republican nomination, Rubio likewise can only boast of winning in Minnesota and the D.C. area—not in the District itself, which has yet to vote, but in the Northern Virginia suburbs, which on Tuesday brought Rubio within three points of Virginia’s actual winner, Donald Trump.

Trump fended off a close challenge from John Kasich to win Vermont as well. His successes in Georgia, Massachusetts, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas weren’t close—and in all but Georgia, Rubio finished third behind Ted Cruz or Kasich. Cruz, as expected, won Texas, plus Oklahoma and Alaska. Rubio placed third in all three, and with less than 20 percent of the vote in Texas he missed the threshold for receiving any delegates from the Lone Star State.

Cruz has now beaten Trump four times and has the second largest number of delegates heading into the winner-take-all battles of March 15. But a Twitter campaign to stop the front-runner—#NeverTrump—hasn’t rallied support to Cruz. Instead, the movement conservatives who live in those Northern Virginia suburbs that gave Rubio his strongest show of support have directed their media firepower and donor connections to making the Florida senator the party’s nominee. To hell with what voters—whether Trump’s or Cruz’s—say about it.

Rubio’s record of failure makes him an implausible nominee at this point, but not an impossible one. And the gurus of the professional right have a plan. It happens to be the same plan routinely employed by the left against conservatives of all stripes: branding the enemy as extreme, fascistic and racist. That Donald Trump is indeed given to authoritarian pronouncements—about everything from Muslims’ religious liberties to Americans’ freedom of the press—and is shamelessly politically incorrect makes the "enlightened" right’s task easier.

Attacks once used against Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are now deployed by Beltway consultants and neoconservative publicists against Trump. When, oh when, will Goldwater denounce the John Birch Society? What does Reagan say about the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsing him? Why won’t Trump “disavow” David Duke—and when did he stop beating his wife?