Republican Elites Don't Want Donald Trump Elected. But Millions of Voters Do

This is what I love about Donald Trump.

From Thomas Edsall, at the New York Times, "Can This Really Be Donald Trump’s Republican Party?":

John Feehery, a prominent Republican lobbyist with roots on the South Side of Chicago, understands that he embodies the Republican predicament.

He warns that while the party’s establishment used to be able to call the shots when it came to the selection of presidential nominees,

We are now living in a post-recession world where fundamental assumptions have changed. In this new reality, Republicans can’t just do the bidding of big donors. Our guys are too in tune with donors and not with the concerns of regular voters. Donald Trump has tapped into a new reality.

Raised in a middle-class Irish-Catholic family, Feehery graduated from Marquette in 1986 and rose quickly in the ranks of the party. His most prominent jobs were as communications director for the former House majority leader Tom DeLay and later for House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Since giving up work as a staffer in 2005, Feehery, 52, has done well. He is president of the public relations arm of QGA Public Affairs, a major Washington lobbying firm. QGA’s clients include AT&T, United States Steel, State Farm and Zurich Financial Services.

Feehery believes that as Democrats have made gains among well-educated and relatively affluent whites, Republicans “have to rely much more on the white working class than on white upper middle-class voters.”

When I asked Feehery what the party needed to do to get back on track, he paused and said, “I’m not sure it’s fixable.”

Despite what liberals might think, Trump’s success in capitalizing on voter animosity to immigration and to political correctness has shocked many conservative Republicans.

Matthew Continetti, the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, warned in a column on Dec. 11, “The Party Divides: A Trump nomination would be the end of the GOP”: Homegrown terrorism, demographic panic, racial tension, income stagnation, and Trump’s persona may catalyze a political realignment along the lines we have seen before in our politics and see currently in Europe’s. Continetti goes on to ask:

Have conservatives and Republicans thought through what would happen next? What choices we might have to make? Or are we too afraid to acknowledge the possibility that the movement and party to which we belong is no longer our own?

Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, told The New Yorker:

Trump is not someone I consider an ideal candidate — he does not represent my line of thinking. But he is proving that certain beliefs the professional political class had about who Republican primary voters are — what they respond to, what they care about — were just incorrect.

For those on the traditional right, one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump’s ascendance is the sense that a man described by Jeb Bush, according to Politico, as “a buffoon” and a “clown,” has wrested control of their party, an institution they have spent five decades turning into the home of principled ideologues.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, looks at Donald Trump and does not see a conservative. Together with Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor, Lowry wrote in the October 19 essay “Trump Wrongs the Right” that Trump:

basically never says “freedom” or “liberty.” He gives no indication of caring about the Constitution. He talks only sparingly about the federal debt. He has, in short, ignored central and longstanding conservative tenets that seemed to have become only more important in the tea-party era — and he has not only gotten away with it, but thrived.

Although “Trump is not a conservative and does not deserve conservatives’ support, Republicans can nonetheless learn from him,” Lowry and Ponnuru write. He

has exposed and widened the fissures on the American right. If conservatives are to thrive, they must figure out how to respond creatively, sensibly, and honorably to the public impulses he has so carelessly exploited.

Lowry and Ponnuru make a point similar to Feehery’s:

The fact that Trump’s polling did not suffer even a modest drop after his soak-the-rich comments should tell other Republicans that the priorities of the donors they meet at fundraisers are not the same as those of the voters whose support they need.

Trump, the survivor of many financial ups and downs — including four Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcies – has emerged as uniquely positioned to capitalize on the thwarted aspirations and economic vulnerability of much of the electorate...

Keep reading.

And flashback to September, "The Political Establishment's Terrified by Donald Trump's 'Tangible American Nationalism'."