Fred Barnes writes: “The message to Republican leaders from New Hampshire is this: you’d better start figuring out how to help Donald Trump win the general election because he’s probably going to be your presidential nominee.” This strikes me as premature and fatalistic. The field still has plenty of winnowing left to go through. But it’s the prescription I want to focus on here. How exactly would party leaders help Trump win the general election, and why would he accept their help? They could, of course, endorse him, defend him from criticism, and help him raise money. Beyond that?
Republican strategist Charles Black had a thought in this direction a few weeks ago. “You can coach Donald,” he told the New York Times. “If he got nominated, he’d be scared to death. That’s the point he would call people in the party and say, ‘I just want to talk to you.’” This does not seem like Trump’s psychology at all, as far as I can tell from afar. But leave that aside. In this scenario, Trump would have just won the nomination in part by expressing contempt for Republican leaders. Those leaders, having guided their party to five popular-vote losses in the last six presidential elections, would have been shown first to have vastly underestimated Trump and then to have exercised no meaningful influence on their own party’s nomination process. Why exactly would Trump feel compelled to turn to them? And what great advice would they give him?
The notion that the Republican establishment could deal with Trump to mutual advantage seems to me like a fantasy in the guise of hard-headed calculation.