Class war erupts in the GOP

[...] they reinforce each other.

The first is the CNN/ORC Poll released on Friday that showed Donald Trump as the overwhelming leader for the Republican presidential nomination.

Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their presidential contest has taken on all the characteristics of a class war.

(My use of the weasel word “near” reflects the reality that political predictions can run afoul of unknowns.) But Trump’s enduring strength among the most disheartened members of his party — and the divided loyalties of upscale Republicans — suggests that it is wishful thinking for the Republican powers-that-be to say they are sure he will never be nominated.

[...] the most striking aspect of Ryan’s speech is that for all its emphasis on progressives relying on old ideas and conservatives supposedly being more in tune with changing times, his arguments were rooted in the nostrums Washington Republicans have been offering for decades.

The angry Republican working class rallying to Trump to express its disillusionment with the status quo will find little in Ryan’s homily to make them reconsider.

[...] since President Obama’s election, the Republican leadership has been happily complicit with a brand of politics that the prophet Hosea warned against roughly 2,800 years ago: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

How long does Trump have to stay at No. 1 in the Republican polls before establishmentarians in both parties recognize that the underlying economic causes of his supporters’ discontent are real, legitimate and deserve a response?