Trump and Cruz at the GOP debate in Detroit, Mich. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Republican leaders seeking an alternative to Cruz or Trump are living in a dangerous fantasyland.

In an insightful recent column on the GOP primaries, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza accused much of the GOP establishment of engaging in “magical realism” as they searched for a non-Trump non-Cruz nominee whom GOP voters would view as legitimate.

Despite Ted Cruz’s overwhelming win in Wisconsin on Tuesday, it continues to be clear that one of the only things uniting much of the GOP establishment Dorothys in their Wizard of Oz fantasy world is their shared belief that they can simply go to the convention floor, close their eyes, click their fabulous ruby-red slippers together and say, “There’s no place like home,” and then a candidate will magically appear to replace Trump or Cruz as the GOP nominee. These “leaders” need to leave their electoral fantasyland and stop plotting a coup against the vast majority of their own voters.


While Trump would be a disappointing GOP nominee (something I don’t believe will happen, because of Cruz’s superior organization and momentum), there is something worse than a Trump nomination, and that is a coup by D.C. insiders to install one of their own as the nominee, flatly defying the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the GOP electorate. When push comes to shove, I am not #NeverTrump – I am #NeverCoup.

Unfortunately, given the reluctance of many in the establishment to endorse a Cruz alternative to Trump (full disclosure: Like the National Review editors, I have endorsed Cruz in the GOP race, and I believe he would be an excellent nominee), it appears that many GOP insiders are still engaging in magical realism, whether it’s Karl Rove’s call for a “fresh face” or John Boehner’s recent plug for Paul Ryan, switching the allegiance he recently gave his fellow Ohioan, the delusional Trump tool John Kasich, who, as the campaign goes on, looks like a man more in need of an intervention than a nomination.


In retort to these dithering Dorothy’s of do-nothingism in the GOP establishment, Cilizza gets to the heart of the matter: “In an election wholly defined by the Republican base’s dislike and distrust for the party’s leaders, how can you realistically expect that same base to capitulate to an establishment-favorite candidate who may have not even competed in the primary and caucus process?” The simple answer: You can’t.


It is not clear who the establishment’s magical realists have in mind as a candidate – Paul Ryan’s name gets thrown about quite a lot, and Scott Walker (who, to his credit, endorsed Cruz and campaigned on his behalf) is also getting increasing mentions, but even if this were somehow practically possible (and given the dominance of Cruz and Trump supporters among convention delegates, that seems very unlikely) it would be politically and ethically disastrous.


I believe a Trump nomination could lead to a very poor result for the GOP in the fall. I’d urge GOP voters and leaders in the strongest possible terms to select Cruz instead. But a nominee other than Trump or Cruz would be something worse. It would mean the GOP would deserve to be obliterated, having become nothing more than an insiders’ clique that will stop at nothing to flout the will of its voters in order to monopolize power for itself. It would suggest that the GOP is beyond reform and that the establishment has so rigged the game that the entire process of having a GOP primary season is useless. We’d be better off simply polling the GOP’s major donors, political consultants, and lobbyists and having them pick our nominee without bothering with the charade of a popular vote.

#share#Let’s be direct: There is no possible situation in which Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, for whom a war upon the party establishment was their defining feature, can combine to take 70 percent of GOP votes only to have that same party establishment whom its voters have overwhelmingly rejected choose the GOP’s nominee. The GOP has not had a brokered convention won by a non-leading candidate in the modern political era. More important, there is no plausible candidate who represents a “compromise” between Cruz and Trump who could be embraced by the establishment and grassroots. This isn’t a question of a party split between supporters of a conservative candidate and those of a moderate candidate but ultimately compromising on a moderately conservative candidate. What the establishment coup plotters demand is that we “compromise” between our two dominant candidates, who were defined primarily by their hostility to the Washington cartel, by selecting as our nominee someone blessed by it.



For those Republicans who find either Trump or Cruz politically unacceptable, they do have a choice. They can either not vote, write in a candidate, or run an independent third-party candidate and support that candidate, without insulting us by implying that they do so with the imprimatur of the Republican party or its voters. Faced with Trump as the nominee, such an approach might well be justified. If Cruz is the nominee, I believe such tactics would backfire disastrously. But it would at least be intellectually honest and fair to the process as a whole. The establishment dissidents could play the third-party John Anderson role to Cruz’s Ronald Reagan. But they should remember what happened to the GOP’s John Anderson faction in the 1980 election and afterward.

#related#Sorry, GOP establishment, it’s not us, it’s you. After six years of relentlessly stonewalling a tea-party and grassroots movement that handed you victory after victory, the consequences of your intransigence have become clear. Despite all of the super-PAC money and a campaign structure that favored them, insiders were absolutely crushed by Trump, Cruz, and the other outsider candidates. So while I think that Trump would be a poor nominee for the GOP, my ultimate bottom line as a conservative is not #NeverTrump but #NeverCoup. The most obvious way to avoid this entire conundrum would be for the establishment to do what it should have done at least a month ago and unite around Cruz as a Trump alternative. This is finally happening to some degree, but far too many are sitting on the sidelines.

The GOP establishment plotters, who doubtless pride themselves on their lack of sentimentalism and willingness to use any means to achieve their ends, need to go back and study Talleyrand, the great 18th- and 19th-century French diplomat whose name is synonymous with amoral and ruthless — but often successful — realpolitik. Commenting on Napoleon’s decision to kidnap and execute someone he felt was a threat to his throne, Talleyrand claimed that Napoleon’s action was “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” In attempting to stage a coup against their own voters by rejecting their choice of Trump or Cruz as the GOP nominee, the establishment plotters are probably aware at some level that they are committing a political crime. But what they do not seem to know, and what is far worse, is that they are committing a blunder.