Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

As the carnage of World War I widened, Barbara Tuchman recounts in “The Guns of August,” a German leader asked a colleague, “How did it all happen?”

“Ah,” replied the other, “if only one knew.”


A century later, there is no mystery to the carnage that President Donald Trump has wrought. Everything we have seen in these first 140 days—the splintering of the Western alliance, the grifter’s ethics he and his family embody, the breathtaking ignorance of history, geopolitics and government, the jaw-dropping egomania, the sheer incompetence and contempt for democratic norms—was on full display from the moment his campaign began. And that’s not just what Democrats think—it’s what many prominent Republicans have said all along.

Once Trump was elected, his foes began to indulge in a series of fantasies about how to prevent his ascendancy or how to remove him from power. The electors should refuse to vote for him (which would have thrown the election into the House, which would have chosen Trump); the Cabinet and the vice president should use the 25th Amendment to declare him unable to exercise his duties (a scenario, as I have written here earlier, that works just fine on TV melodramas like “24” and “Scandal”); Congress should impeach him (which would require 20 GOP House members and 19 Republican senators to join every Democratic lawmaker).

So this may be a good time to remember that in a key sense, Trump happened because a well-established, real-life mechanism that was in the best position to prevent a Trump presidency failed. That institution was the Republican Party.

It is not entirely true that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover” of the GOP, provided that the party is defined more broadly than elected officials and party insiders. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote last year in the Atlantic: “the elements of the party that sent pro-Trump cues or 'Trump is at least acceptable’ signals to primary voters—Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, The New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Rick Scott, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio—are simply more powerful, relative to National Review, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and other ‘Trump is unacceptable’ forces, than previously thought.”

What is true, however, is that the governing wing of the party was fully aware that Trump was not to be trusted with the levers of power. In January of last year, National Review devoted an entire issue to a symposium where 22 prominent Republicans and conservatives detailed their militant opposition to the candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry—who is now Trump’s energy secretary—called “a cancer” on the American political system. Until his nomination was all but assured, Trump had the backing of a lone Republican senator, Sessions (who is now his embattled attorney general).

More broadly, the whole idea of a disparate party coming together at a convention was, for decades, rooted in the “vetting” process; those experienced in the mechanics of politics and governments would decide which of the candidates were best equipped to win an election and carry out the party’s agenda in Washington. It’s beyond obvious that in the decades since primaries replaced power brokers as the delegate-selecting process, this role has attenuated. But it survives today as an “In-Case-Of-Emergency-Break-Glass” tool. And the question is: Why didn’t the Republican Party employ it?

Explanations have ranged from the fragmented nature of the opposition—no early consensus choice as with George W. Bush in 2000—to the underestimation of Trump’s appeal (the establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Christie spent their time and money attacking each other, while Ted Cruz was constantly praising Trump, hoping to ride in his wake when he collapsed).

But one often overlooked reason—and one for parties to remember if they hope to avoid future Trumps—is that the rules of the GOP greatly benefited Trump. The party allows winner-take-all primaries by congressional district or statewide— which, in many states, hugely magnified Trump’s delegate totals. Trump won 32 percent of the South Carolina vote but all 50 delegates. He won 46 percent of the Florida vote but all 99 delegates. He won 39 percent of the Illinois vote, but 80 percent of the 69 delegates. By contrast, Democrats—who abolished winner-take-all primaries more than 40 years ago, insist on a proportional system, much like parents cut the cake at a children’s birthday party. The result is that an intensely motivated minority cannot seize the lion’s share of delegates.

Another rule may well have stayed the hand of Republicans who saw in Trump an unacceptable nominee. The Democratic Party gives more than 700 people seats as “superdelegates.” Every senator, every House member, every governor and a regiment of party officials are, by rule, unbound. They make up 15 percent of the total votes at the convention. Republicans only have some 150 “automatic” delegates—7 percent of the total—and they must vote the way their state’s primary voters did. Thus, the whole idea of an emergency brake is almost nonexistent in the GOP.

Whether such tools should exist is a matter of debate. Many Democrats on their party’s left disdain the idea of such backroom politics (although toward the end of the 2016 primary season, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ backers were urging superdelegates to vote for him on the grounds that he was the more electable candidate in November). If a candidate comes to the convention with more votes than anyone else, but with more voters having chosen a different candidate, what’s the “right” thing for an unbound delegate to do? The famous assertion by Edmund Burke that “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion” is very much out of fashion among the populist movements on left and right.

But either by cluelessness or willful design, the Republican Party had put itself in a position where one of the most significant functions of a party—the “vetting” of its prospective nominee—was rendered impotent.

And we are living with that institutional failure every day.