Ding-dong, the GOPe is dead

Though they’re probably not bright enough to know it yet. Over the past six months, we’ve witnessed them flopping around like fish out of water, unable to flop back into the warm embrace of the water that so metaphorically keeps rejecting them. They stand before us, naked and exposed as what they are and have been for the better part of the last half-century: the party of the donor class, no more, no less. The party that couldn’t give a rip about the American citizens it purports to represent. This is what their benefactors have come to expect – Wall Street, the National Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the rest of our era’s globalist robber barons who I can only imagine feel “we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours!”

Well, congratulations, brainiacs – it is yours! I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it occurs to me that a party without voters is about as useful as a gun without bullets (we call that a hammer down here in Texas). And that this didn’t occur to these geniuses – the donors and the party hacks – is an amusing irony. I don’t have a clue as to what’s going to happen in Cleveland this summer, but this I feel pretty confident about: it is guaranteed to be a lose-lose proposition for the GOPe. A Trump victory would represent what they have been screaming from the rooftops over the past six months: their absolute worst nightmare (and, comically, the death of the “conservative movement,” as if they haven’t been largely responsible for this going back even before the Reagan era). A Trump win may be the only chance to truly reform the party, at least the parts of it worth salvaging. Any other outcome will drive, to borrow a phrase, a huge number of voters from the party permanently. This will be the last straw for the vast majority of the 80 percent of the Republican primary voters who supported Trump or Ted Cruz. We don’t know how many other ways to tell you this. Is isn’t us – it’s you!