'Oh Shit,' Mutters GOP, As Donald Trump Hurtles Closer to Becoming Nominee

By Anna Merlan  |  March 1, 2016 | 4:25pm
Politics

Today is Super Tuesday, in which a bunch of states have their primaries, and where traditionally, whoever wins big tends to take their party’s nomination. Hahahaha. Remember when we all said Trump was definitely not going to be nominee? Remember those sweet and innocent times?

Trump is polling at 49 fucking percent, his highest poll numbers ever. He has 82 delegates right now, while Cruz has 17 and Rubio has 16. The GOP is, as The Hill puts it, “panicked.” They are on a “desperate mission,” as the New York Times put it a couple days ago, to stop Trump, and the Clinton campaign is starting to talk about how to beat him in a general election. Holy shit.

That panic is playing out in interesting ways on the Republican side: the Koch brothers are trying to figure out whether they love Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio more, even as much of the rest of the Tea Party is swaying Trump-wards. The “conservative, free market” American Future Fund, whose financial backers are, er, unclear, released a statement saying they planned to air ads attacking Trump University, the ridiculous fake real estate school now being sued in a class-action by people who want their money back.

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is outlining plans to take their distaste of Trump public, the NYT reported:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

There’s also the fact that the Conservative Political Action Conference— Republican prom, basically—has scheduled Trump to speak at an awful time slot, 8:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. You can believe if anyone else was the likely nominee, they’d be taking a triumphant turn around the ballroom at 5 p.m. on Friday.

The despair is also playing out on Twitter, where big ol’ Republicans like Red State’s Erick Erickson are publicly lamenting their inability to get people to not like Trump:

Simple math might make Trump the victor no matter what: if they can’t stop him from winning more delegates, this is a done deal. Anyway, guess who’s not upset at all and having a wonderful time while merrily kicking black students out of his rallies?

Jesus Christ.

Contact the author at [email protected].
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6

Photo via AP Images

 
Join the discussion...