RNC chairman Reince Preibus tried to get Donald Trump to tone it down. The party establishment is worried that the rest of America will figure out that the billionaire who never learned boundaries is saying what the base of the party is thinking.
The problem you have, people, is not that Donald Trump is out there waving his freak flag at every opportunity. (Did you watch that NBC interview? This man lost track of his hinges years ago.) The problem you have is that out there in your party there is a substantial audience for what he’s saying. That audience was built deliberately, memo by memo, since the days when Harry Dent was advising Richard Nixon until a big chunk of your party is composed of pure Id. Now, an actual party structure could obviate the worst consequences of this strategy but, thanks to the Supreme Court, in the new era of Citizens United and McCutcheon, there is no institutional Republican party. There is only independently financed conservatism without any apparent frontiers. Having Priebus tell Trump to cool it is like sending a toddler with a squirt gun to northern Alberta to put out the wildfires. It is, however, the funniest damn thing I’ve heard in months.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that the GOP has had one of these id-tappers get on stage; remember Pat Buchanan in 1992 and Barry Goldwater in 1964. But Mr. Trump makes them look like moderates, and even they knew that they had to tone it down at some point.
That’s not an issue with Donald Trump. He doesn’t care what happens to the Republican party, and the one thing the party had that controlled candidates that went too far — financial support — is not an issue for someone who says he’s worth $9 billion.
As Roseanne Barr once said, “We’re your worst nightmare: white trash with money.”
Trump’s virtue/vice is that he speaks the GOTea mind without resorting to dogwhistle. Everything the Teahad dances around with code words and phrases, he puts right out there. It’s tempting to think that the GOTea leadership is afraid, not that Trump is [cough] trumping the Very Serious Candidates, but that Trump is presenting the party’s platform in terms that the entire populace can understand – and it’s making all the fancy footwork people like Walker, JEB, Carson, Paul and the rest look thoroughly foolish by at once proposing such FSM-awful policies and by candy-coating the proposals in language that once made transparent only makes the proposals more offensive.