In all the talk about Trump battling the Republican Establishment, a major source of confusion is the failure to understand that there are actually two Republican Establishments that hate Donald Trump but can’t quite agree on a strategy to stop him. I wrote about this topic at New York earlier this week:

The day after Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney (as the immediate past nominee of a nongoverning party, he would have once been called the “titular head” of the GOP) laid out the Republican Establishment’s game plan for stopping Donald Trump.

If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

Everybody outside TrumpWorld was onboard, right? Wrong. Especially following the March 5 caucuses and primaries, when he solidified his second-place position in delegates, Ted Cruz and his backers made it clear they believe the most efficient method of stopping Trump is for Republicans to unite behind his own candidacy. It’s Marco Rubio’s “anti-Trump consolidation” theory adopted by another candidate now that Rubio is struggling to survive. And thus with most of the Republican Establishment digging under the sofa cushions for funds to help Rubio beat Trump in Florida, Team Cruz was up in the air in the Sunshine State running anti-Rubio ads.
Was this a rogue action by a candidate not exactly known in the Senate as a team player? Perhaps. But more fundamentally, the strategic rift in the anti-Trump coalition is the product of two very different Republican Establishments: that of self-conscious movement conservatives, who find a Cruz nomination either congenial or acceptable, and the non-movement-party Establishment, which is as hostile to Cruz as it is to Trump.
The conservative-movement Establishment can be found in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and opinion vehicles like National Review magazine. Their basic mark of distinction is that they view the GOP as a vehicle for the promotion and implementation of conservative ideology and policy position rather than as an end in itself. They are virulently anti-Trump (as evidenced by National Review’s recent special issue attacking the mogul) for all the reasons most Republicans (and for that matter, Democrats) evince, but with the additional and decisive consideration that Trump has violated conservative orthodoxy on a host of issues from trade policy to “entitlement reform” to the Middle East. Members of this Establishment do not uniformly support Ted Cruz; some are fine with the equally conservative (if far less disruptive) Marco Rubio, and others have electability concerns about the Texan even if they like his issue positions and his combative attitude toward the Republican congressional leadership. But suffice it to say they are not horrified by the idea of a Cruz presidency, and many have concluded his nomination is an easier bet than some panicky Anybody But Trump movement that at best will produce the unpredictable nightmare of a contested convention even as Democrats (more than likely) unite behind their nominee. RedState’s Leon Wolf neatly expressed their point of view yesterday:

Maybe you preferred someone who is a better communicator than Cruz or who stood a better chance of beating Hillary in the general. Sorry, but for whatever reason, your fellow voters have ruled each of those candidates out, and Rubio’s collapse this weekend pretty much put that nail in the coffin. It’s now a choice between guaranteed loser Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who might actually win.

From the movement-conservative perspective, it’s not Cruz who’s going rogue but instead elements of the party Establishment (including the members of Congress who conspicuously hate Ted Cruz) that cannot accept that it has lost control of the GOP this year and is insisting on a contested convention as a way to reassert its control behind closed doors in Cleveland. Party Establishmentarians are often conservative ideologically, too, but are dedicated to pragmatic strategies and tactics at sharp odds with Cruz’s philosophy of systematic partisan confrontation and maximalist rhetoric. And they are highly allergic to risky general-election candidates.
But there’s a fresh crisis in the party Establishment after the March 8 contests in four states, wherein Trump won Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, Cruz won Idaho, and Marco Rubio won — maybe, it hasn’t been totally resolved yet — one delegate in Hawaii and absolutely nothing else. And new polls of Florida are beginning to come in that don’t look promising for Rubio. Even as party Establishment and even some conservative-movement Establishment folk pound Trump with negative ads, there are signs of panic. Most shocking, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, normally the most reliable of party Establishment mouthpieces and a big-time neoconservative booster of Rubio’s foreign-policy positions, publicly called on the Floridian to drop out of the race and endorse Cruz in order to stop Trump.
We’ll soon see if the divisions between the two Republican Establishments will quickly be resolved by the surrender of party types like Rubin. Some may instead try to reanimate Rubin or switch horses to Kasich, who has a better chance than Rubio to win his own home state next week. Still others may make their peace with Trump, or resolve to spend the rest of the cycle focused on down-ballot races.

In any event, time’s running out for the anti-Trump coalition.

The 11th Republican candidates’ debate of the cycle was another gift to Democrats for its gutter tone and substantive emptiness. It was also remarkable from a strategic point of view since it showed a new anti-Trump cabal in action, and then at the end displayed its members promising to support Trump as the nominee. I wrote about the event’s significance at New York:

Rarely has a presidential candidates’ debate so closely reflected the overall state of the race as the 11th Republican gabfest held in Detroit tonight. After Super Tuesday, Marco Rubio called for emergency collective action by the remaining contenders to stop the “con man” Trump without adjudicating for the present which of them would win the prize. Mitt Romney confirmed the cabal and its everyone-take-their-best-shot strategy in a big speech today. It’s beginning to sink in that this strategy almost certainly depends on a “contested convention,” the first for Republicans in forty years.
The candidate most blessed by this development was John Kasich, who almost overnight has gone from being an annoying impediment to the consolidation of anti-Trump and anti-Cruz votes behind Marco Rubio to a valued collaborator who might knock off the Donald in winner-take-all Ohio. And tonight, as Rubio and Cruz (and the Fox moderators) focused the most extended fire of the entire campaign on Trump, Kasich was left alone to devote his entire debate performance to the recitation of his record and message to Michiganders — a state where he needs to do reasonably well on Tuesday as a springboard to Ohio on March 15.
As a starting point for the anti-Trump collective-action cabal, tonight’s debate was probably about as good as it gets. For long, long minutes Rubio beat up on the Donald as a con man and Cruz savaged him as a crypto-Democrat, the two lines of attack regularly reinforced by the moderators and converging in the impression that Trump’s a terrible gamble, even for the people who are most attracted to him. From long experience during this campaign, it would be foolish to assume the debate damaged Trump’s standing significantly. But if it didn’t, perhaps the man is indeed bulletproof. He did seem uncharacteristically flustered at times.
It’s unlikely Rubio — who for the second debate in a row got into long insult-laden cross-talk exchanges with Trump — or Cruz helped themselves that much. But again, in the collective-action scenario, they’re like crime bosses who’ve agreed to rub out a common opponent while recognizing that they will have their own reckoning down the line. Meanwhile, Kasich was either smart or lucky enough to ignore the carnage and speak for himself, though if he loses Ohio, he will be dumped from the convention cabal unceremoniously for failure to bring delegates to the table.
One very important moment occurred at the very end of the debate, when the candidates were asked if they’d reaffirm the “loyalty pledge” they all took late last summer, promising to support the ultimate Republican nominee. It was framed initially as a specific challenge to Rubio, who has been promoting the #NeverTrump meme and treating the mogul’s potential nomination as an unendurable violation of Republican principles. Indeed, Trump has noticed that and has openly suggested he might not feel so inclined to observe the loyalty pledge and forswear an independent candidacy if the other candidates drop their own pledges. But all the candidates backed away from loyalty-pledge brinkmanship tonight and promised the ultimate collective action to prevent the horror of another Democratic president. For Rubio, “never” apparently doesn’t mean what it says.
Trump may have missed a strategic opportunity to make his own renewal of the loyalty-pledge contingent on not having the nomination “stolen” from him by some Establishment skullduggery in Cleveland. But as the front-runner — for now — he may have figured he could afford to be magnanimous.

He’s a “con man,” conventional Republicans are saying of Trump.. But they are also making it clear he is their con man.

At some point between last week’s Republican presidential candidate debate and the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, something profound and not very-well-understood happened to the GOP contest: Marco Rubio replaced Donald Trump as the rebel breaking all the rules. I wrote about this today at New York:

After yesterday’s Super Tuesday contests confirmed the pecking order of Republican presidential candidates, the third-place finisher, Marco Rubio, continued his recent pattern of threats to do everything within his power to stop first-place finisher Donald Trump. Having already crossed the Rubicon (Rubio-con?) by associating himself with the meme #NeverTrump, thereby abrogating his “loyalty pledge” to support the Republican nominee, Rubio’s posturing as a GOP “unity candidate” is more bizarre than ever. Yet he shows no signs of changing course and is now hinting at some sort of monstrous convention cabal to stop Trump if voters refuse to do so. If he fails, then presumably he will take a walk or support an independent or third-party bid, unless the word never has changed its meaning.
Such is the passion for this freshman senator in Republican Establishment and mainstream-media circles that it is taking a long time for the commentariat to realize it’s Rubio, not Trump, who is at present undertaking a hostile takeover bid for control of the GOP. David Graham of The Atlantic registered the surreal nature of Rubio’s Super Tuesday speech in Miami last night:

[W]hen Rubio came out to speak, early in the night, he once again struck the same triumphant pose he has employed time and again, as his campaign finished second or third in contest after contest. “When I am president of the United States, we will not just save the American dream, we will expand it to more people than ever!” he said.
The most telling moment in his speech, however, came a few moments later. “Five days ago, we began to explain to the American people that Donald Trump is a con artist,” Rubio said, alluding to the onslaught of opposition research, insults, and barnyard jokes he has directed at the GOP frontrunner, starting with Thursday’s debate. Why did that take so long, though? It may have been too late to save the Republican Party from Trump, and if it wasn’t, it may have been too late to save Rubio. His case as the Trump alternative depends not on beating Trump outright, but on depriving him of an outright victory with delegates ahead of the Republican convention, then wresting the nomination from him there.

One of the subthemes of this odd presidential cycle has been the oversold idea that party elites can impose their will on sheeplike primary voters whenever they choose. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Rubio began benefiting from a cascade of elected-official endorsements, and many observers concluded that the party was “deciding” on him as its choice. But unless voters rather than elites quickly consolidate behind a non-Trump candidate, all this talk of fighting the winner of many primaries up to and including the convention could expose the ugly reality that the Establishment is trying to revoke the franchise because they don’t like the results….
If Rubio and his friends decide that either bossing a convention to the “right” result or bailing (as the #NeverTrump meme clearly threatens) on the GOP altogether are where their current efforts are heading, then the rest of us should stop treating Trump as the guy who is elevating his ego and ambition above his party’s prospects for ultimate victory. In what may be turning into a fight between elites and voters, in November the voters will have the final word.

As we all wonder exactly how far Donald Trump will go to offend Establishment Republicans, and how far Establishment Republicans will go to stop him, a disreputable voice from the past is suddenly heard. I wrote about it this week at New York:

Twenty-five years before Donald Trump’s hostile-takeover bid for the Republican Party, an outlandish figure in Louisiana exploited racial tensions, hard economic times, and the estrangement of blue-collar whites to throw a huge scare into the political and civic leadership of his state and his country. In the first round of Louisiana’s 1991 all-parties “jungle primary,” former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke trounced the chosen gubernatorial candidate of his Republican Party and an incumbent governor who had recently joined the GOP. At one point he seemed about to win a runoff against the ethically tarnished three-term former governor Ed Edwards. It was being called “the Race From Hell.”
Louisiana’s business community, fearful of an economic boycott and global opprobrium, decided to say “no” to Duke. At the same time, opposition researchers figured out that while white Louisianans were willing to overlook the white sheets in the candidate’s closet, they weren’t so forgiving when confronted with photos showing him in full Nazi regalia while he was a grad student at LSU (an image Edwards shrewdly brought up during a debate, saying he had been working on welfare reform “back when you were still goose-stepping around Baton Rouge”). And finally, the national Republican Party, led by President George H. W. Bush, decided to disavow Duke, who lost decisively in the runoff thanks to heavy minority voting, a massive Edwards financial advantage, and a broad coalition that found its emblem in that greatest of all bumper-sticker slogans: VOTE FOR THE CROOK. IT’S IMPORTANT.
So when Duke came out of the woodwork this week (after doing some federal prison time, around the same time Ed Edwards did, in fact) to encourage what’s left of his fan-base to support Trump, he was just another white supremacist excited by Trump’s willingness to “tell it like it is” when it comes to the dusky threat of immigration. At his very worst, Trump is not much like Duke at his very best. But Duke’s example should serve as a reminder to Trump that there are limits to what the people running and financing his party will endure. Maybe they’ll finally find Trump’s Achilles heel, just as their predecessors finally found Duke’s.

Or maybe they’ll instead swallow their concerns and come to terms with Trump just as Chris Christie did today.

I was reading a BuzzFeed post by Ben Smith on how Hillary Clinton just had to run a nasty general election campaign because she had nothing positive to build on when I just snapped at the idiocy of it all. I made an effort to contextualize “negative campaigning” at New York:

Smith is suggesting that going negative (or “comparative”) is the ugly person’s ugly alternative to the positive, inspiring kind of campaign Americans want and deserve.
But this year, at least, campaigning on the unicorns you will ride to Happyland on the cheers of millions of previously unheard Americans is, arguably, offering an illusion, if not a lie. That is indeed what Hillary Clinton keeps saying about Bernie Sanders’s message that he is uniquely capable of overcoming gridlock by conjuring up a mass movement that we’ve never seen before. Whether you agree with Clinton on that or you don’t, there is far less doubt about what Republicans will be able to accomplish if they win the White House while hanging on to control of Congress (and if the former happens, the odds of the latter are very high). A single executive order and a single (if big and very fat) budget-reconciliation bill could wipe out much of the Obama legacy in a matter of weeks. And that’s before you even get to executive-branch and judicial appointments — including perhaps multiple SCOTUS nominations — and the GOP’s own “positive” agenda of high-end tax cuts, tight money, “deregulated” fossil-fuel use, harassment of abortion and contraception providers, restricted voting rights, and (depending on the nominee) global unilateralism and adventurism.
This year’s Republican nomination contest is creating a vast storehouse of ripe targets for Democrats in a general election. Should they reject it all because it’s “negative?”…. I don’t think so.
Truth is, Bernie Sanders is just as likely as Hillary Clinton to “go negative” in a general election, and with good reason: His entire agenda depends on arousing so much popular anger at conservative perfidy that a “political revolution” — currently a complete nonstarter — becomes feasible. Even if Team Sanders has little but disdain for “centrism,” it will realize that even in this era of polarization, there are enough swing voters out there to justify a major effort to make sure Republicans can’t “occupy the center” themselves. And that means painting a lurid picture of what the country will look like if President Trump or Rubio or Cruz is allowed to stride into the White House at the head of an angry mob of activists who are infuriated they haven’t been allowed to turn the policy clock back to 1933.
No matter how much both parties talk about Barack Obama this year, he won’t be on the ballot in November and thus this cannot entirely be a referendum on his tenure in office. That makes it a “comparative” election almost by definition. If your opponent looks like a ravening wolf at the door, saying so early and often might be the best way in the current environment to make yourself look pretty.

As the saying goes, it has the added advantage of being true.