Prediction: Republicans are not going to crack up at their convention in Cleveland.
There’s enough time between now and the July 18–21, 2016 Republican National Convention for party leaders to realize that Donald Trump is their dream candidate.
The singular achievement of the Trump campaign is that he distilled decades of Republican agitprop–White Supremacy–into a potent brew that their usual audience, working class whites, cannot get enough of. What Trump has dispensed with–and this is brilliant–is the usual feints and pretenses that this is not about White Supremacy. If America gave the world anything, it is by codifying White Supremacy so that every white person knows that, if nothing else, they have at least that.
What the past several decades have wrought in America is to move us ever so slowly toward the idea of a society where the color of a person’s skin may not be the sole currency that determines whether a life of abject poverty awaits them.
The most visceral way in which this manifested itself was in the heretofore unthinkable election in 2008 of an African American man as president. Trying to cope, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and a cabal of other Republican leaders gathered in Washington on inauguration night in 2009 to plot ways to thwart the new president. Their preferred tactic has been to pretend Barack Obama is not actually president. When Mitch McConnell said he wants the American people to elect a new POTUS so that that (white) person could pick Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the SCOTUS it’s because, for people of his ilk (Republicans), the elections of 2008 and 2012 simply did not happen. Now, we’ll have a proper election in which a white person will be elected and that person can then choose an associate justice of the SCOTUS.
He should have consulted Trump before this gambit. Trump would not be turning himself inside out pretending he did not want the black guy picking his SCOTUS justice. With refreshing candor right out of the gate (“Mexicans are criminals and rapists”), Trump is embarking on making America great again by identifying all those people within and without who are standing in the way of America’s greatness.
And his audience has been responding with the mouth-foaming ardor you would expect from such potent message.
Trump, by running the kind of campaign he’s running, has done America a favor. We can now proudly wear our racism on our sleeves. No longer will meetings like McConnell’s have to be held behind closed doors. Those who don’t like it can take a fist to the face. Cops will be let loose again on troublemakers, including those very working class whites, if they should step out of line.
I can already glimpse the greatness of America again.
The question is what to do about the results of the Florida and Michigan primaries, which have at stake 366 delegates. Both states, in violation of Democratic Party rules, moved their primaries up in the calendar to increase their states’ influence in the presidential nomination contests. As consequence, the party punished them by taking away their delegates. All the candidates running at the time also agreed not to campaign in the states (although Sen. Hillary Clinton found ways to squeeze in appearances in Florida and even showed up to claim her almost Pyrrhic victory there). Mrs. Clinton wants the delegates from both states seated, which is understandable. She ‘won’ both states.