Is Mitt Romney on a suicide mission to sabotage The Donald?
AFTER property tycoon Donald Trump’s victories in six of the nine Republican Party primaries on Super Tuesday, the US is being forced to start imagining a Trump presidency. With much alarm and despondency.
This week the political team of New York Magazine did that visualisation exercise. It was both very funny and very scary.
The funny bits were mostly about how Trump would struggle to fit his supersize ego into the humble White House. The scarier part was wondering how he might wield the terrible sword of the world’s only superpower abroad.
He would probably be drawn to foreign policy once he realised the American president’s hands were tied quite tightly by Congress on domestic policy, but much less so abroad.
So he would probably keep his wilder campaign promises to build a wall along the border with Mexico, deport illegal immigrants and register all Muslims.
But would he “get America into crazy wars via bellicosity?” Some thought not, as he is not a neo-con and strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq. He would probably not pick a fight with big countries, but he might “invade some tiny little country to boost his ratings.”
And his “scary temperament” could also turn a small snafu – like Iran’s recent arrest of US sailors who strayed into its waters – into a crisis “through belligerent posturing.”
They also imagined the narcissistic Trump being carried away by the drama of the Oval Office and declaring war to be “like presidents in the movies”.
That sort of scenario, plus serious misgivings about his aggressively protectionist trade policies, are also giving the Republican establishment sleepless nights.
They are now contemplating desperate measures. The sharp attack on Trump this week by the 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney – who branded Trump “not very smart, a fraud and a phony” – was apparently the opening salvo.
The gist of the punditry is the Grand Old Party establishment is going to throw someone in front of the Trump Express – probably Romney – to try to stop him winning the party’s nomination at its convention in August.
Their scenario is that Romney would jump into the Republican primary race late in California and New York, to deny Trump the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination. Then, at a brokered convention, Romney would emerge the party’s choice on a second ballot.
“There’s no real hope Romney would be able to beat Clinton – it would essentially be a suicide mission,” writes New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman. But bumping out Trump would be better for the party’s reputation in the long run.
It’s also no secret that moderate, bipartisan and multibillionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg, a successful former New York mayor, has been seething at Trump’s crassness and xenophobia and is itching to jump into the race as an independent.
But that made more sense when socialist Bernie Sanders was still a serious contender for the Democratic Party nomination. Trump vs Sanders would pit one extreme against another, allowing Bloomberg to pick up enough centrist, sensible votes in the middle.
After the Democratic Party’s establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, clinched seven of the 11 states this week, that scenario is fading fast.
Of course there are other views in the Republican Party. Some believe the party simply has to come to terms with Trump and back him all the way to win the general election, then try to moderate him once he is in office.
There is still a general belief that if Trump is the Republican candidate, Clinton will beat him. But many optimistic hopes about Trump have had to be jettisoned as he has kept growing from strength to strength.