OPINION:
Early this week a top Republican consultant whined: “Donald Trump is hijacking the Republican party.”
Really?
This is a common and almost comical complaint these days from the establishment wing of the GOP — i.e., the people who have hijacked the party pretty much since the end of the Reagan era. In his disgraceful and classless rant against Mr. Trump on Thursday, Mitt Romney even unveiled a new strategy by the establishment: keep Mr. Trump from getting a majority of the delegates (though he is very likely to win a plurality) and then steal the election from Mr. Trump at the convention. Ironically, these are the same people who were making fun of the Democrats for “rigging” their nomination process in favor Hillary.
What is clear is that the party’s brain trust, such as it is, is doing everything it can to disenfranchise millions of new Republican voters and deny Mr. Trump the nomination.
Even more disgraceful is the way Mr. Romney and others on the right are ridiculing Mr. Trump’s voters as “suckers,” “racists,” “bigots” and “uninformed.” So much for the GOP being a big tent.
Mr. Romney and the Republican elites keep scratching their heads after each election loss and wonder why the voters have concluded the GOP doesn’t “care about poeple like me.” After listening to the way the GOP brain trust disses Trump voters, maybe these working class folks are exactly right.
I am not going to endorse Mr. Trump, but how many of his enemies have been to a Trump rally? I’m not taking sides in this race (I like Gov. Kasich and Sen. Cruz very much), and I have policy disagreements with Mr. Trump. But I did say publicly this week to the consternation off many friends and colleagues that what impresses me greatly about Mr. Trump is that he is attracting millions of new blue collar working class Americans back to the GOP. They are abandoning the Democrats. Hallelujah, right?
But all I heard was from conservatives saying: why are you standing with these “low information voters” who don’t seem to understand what a fascist Mr. Trump is.
How many Trump haters have gotten out of Washington and attended a Trump rally? I have. You will meet truck drivers, and soccer moms, and veterans, and taxicab drivers, and immigrants, and construction workers, and young people, and not a lot of Wall Streeters or political consultants. They are patriotic. They are seething in anger at both parties.
Trumpism isn’t hard to explain. We’ve had eight years of a mostly failed Republican president followed by eight years of a completely failed Democrat in the White House. Over this whole period the middle class hasn’t seen a pay increase — while Republican political consultants rake in millions as a reward for losing. The fact that four of the wealthiest counties in America are inside or near the Washington Beltway says everything to voters about who is benefiting from a $4 trillion governement that Washington keeps saying is “here to help them.”
The Republicans have only themselves to blame for this working class revolt. These are voters who are horrified by what President Obama has done to our country and so in the midterm elections they naively put their faith in Republicans to fix things — or at least to try to.
The exit polls from Super Tuesday’s elections showed yet again an overwhelming anger by voters over the “betrayal” of the Republicans in Washington.
Why wouldn’t they feel betrayed? This has been simmering for years and years.
Republicans have promised these voters they will build a wall, solve illegal immigration, balance the budget, rein in the IRS, cut the waste and fraud, defund Mr. Obama’s illegal executive orders. But everytime they are handed the controls of government, they invent some new excuse for not delivering.
The fiscally catastrophic budget that the Republicans in the House and Senate passed did the opposite of everything the GOP had pledged to do when they were trying to get these peoples’ votes. The Republicans are now spending more than the Democrats. The RNC might as well have sent an email to every Republican voter: sorry, we lied. And the GOP wonders why voters are so angry and turning en masse to Mr. Trump?
Now we have the political establishment going to their billionaire check writers to fund their banal super pacs. Super pacs have become a way for the GOP to avoid talking to voters and steal the election from them. Luckily the super pacs have proven to be impotent and if donors are dumb enough to dump another $50 million into the corrupt political consultant sink hole, so be it.
The same party elites who have told us that we conservatives have to hold our noses and vote for Dole or Bush or Romney, now say they will bolt the party if Mr. Trump is the nominee. Who’s going to hand the election to Hillary in this spat? The party is cracking up. The establishment and the check writers versus the working class in America.
In this fight for the soul of the party, I will stand proudly with the workers who are the victims, not the beneficiaries of a $4 trillion government that everyone in Washington keeps saying is “here to help them.” I’m confident we will win because this is still a democracy and, sorry, the rules are still one person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
• Stephen Moore is a consultant with Freedom Works.
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