The Republicans’ unloved leader

Can Donald Trump be stopped—not in November, but sooner, by being denied the nomination by opponents within his own party? The idea seemed delusional in early June, after Trump won 75 per cent of the vote in the California primary. But his detractors haven’t disappeared. His vanquished rivals Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Jeb Bush have yet to endorse him, and Beltway chieftains, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, continue to imply, or let others think, Trump lacks the fitness to serve.

“What is this?” Trump snarled in his best imitation of another Queens (New York) native John McEnroe, after House Speaker Paul Ryan, the top-ranking national Republican, indicated Trump needed to brush up on “Republican principles and ideas.” The “presumptive nominee” had a point. Ryan, a flop as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, was now lording it over an everyman hero who had excited the grassroots base in every region of the country, capturing 37 of 50 states.

But that was before Trump lurched off on a two-month binge of say-whatever-I-please Trumpism. First came his speculation that the distinguished federal judge now hearing a suit brought against Trump University was biased because of his Mexican ancestry. The accusation was “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, who went on to unendorse Trump and said others should too. Next came Trump’s beyond tasteless reaction to the horrific mass murder at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Even as the nation grieved—49 dead and 53 injured, the worst mass shooting in US history—Trump applauded himself on Twitter. “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” And then, on the morning after the Brexit vote, with much of the west still reeling, Trump cheerfully allowed that the weakened pound would be good for business on his new Trump Turnberry golf resort—the observation made while he was inspecting the renovated fairways and greens, his “Make America Great Again” baseball cap pulled low over his eyes.

There are, perhaps, no true gaffes in Trumpworld—verbal outrages are his natural coin. But beneath these blurtings is the loudening rumble of a mismanaged campaign. Trump’s campaign war chest is nearly empty (in June he had $1.3m on hand, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $43m); and his staff is ludicrously small (70 employees to Clinton’s 730.)

All this has Democrats crowing and Republicans panicking. They could be facing the worst defeat since Barry Goldwater’s thrashing in 1964—a loss not just for him but for Congressional Republicans. Back then, Democrats emerged with an ironclad majority and room to erect the scaffolding of the entitlement-rich Great Society which Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have tried, and failed, to tear down.

This history is propelling the suddenly-revived “Never Trump” push. As many as 1,000 Republicans participated in a conference call to plot an uprising of “rogue delegates” in Cleveland, where the Republican party will hold its national convention in mid-July. The odds of success are small—much as they were for the Cavaliers, Cleveland’s professional basketball team led by the heroic LeBron James. In mid-June the Cavaliers completed one of the most improbable and stirring upsets in the history of US sport by storming back from 3-1 down in the 7-game NBA finals series to beat defending champions Golden State Warriors—the first time a team had overcome such a deficit in the finals.

But the Republican Party doesn’t have a LeBron. The inescapable fact of the 2016 campaign season is that the ill-prepared, ideologically suspect Trump obliterated the brightest Republican names. “This year’s Republican field is the most impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856,” the respected columnist George Will wrote a year ago, when Trump seemed more irritant than serious contender.

Will, like so many others, was captivated by the promise of Marco Rubio and Cruz and ignored the potency of Trump’s appeal to white middle- and working-class Americans still feeling the bite of the Great Recession and the forward march of globalisation. Trump’s promise to remake America in the image of the left-behind overwhelmed the stale ideological talking points Rubio and Cruz recited like overeager competitors in an undergraduate debate.

The convention is a four-day spectacle—just the kind of event Trump, so bored by campaign routine, will throw himself into. As one of his staff unapologetically explained in May: “This is a massive television production, and he is a television star.” Once again, the forces mustered against him may well be overmatched, and this says as much about the Republican Party as it does about the interloper who is now its leader.